Can't a Whiner Catch a Break Now and Then?

Can't a Whiner Catch a Break Now and Then
Poor Tom Daschle. The poor guy just can't win. He's suffering from the worst case of political blue balls since Hubert Humphrey and his opponent is a president with a well deserved 80% approval rating. It's an election year and he wants to firm up his party's majority in the Senate and to seize control of the House. All this in preparation for his own run against Bush for the presidency in 2004.
All this is contingent upon Daschle denting George W. Bush's sky high approval with the public. So, he starts a whining campaign against the United States' anti-terrorism war, just before the bloodiest day of the war for our side (but maybe not his side).
In what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, Robert Byrd and Earnest Hollings laid the groundwork for Daschle's criticism of the war. It's instructive that he had to rely upon a man who ran for the Senate as a Democrat after his career with the Ku Klux Klan stalled, and a former South Carolina segregationist. It seems that the more respectable in his party want no part of Daschle's ambitions.
Once the ground was prepared, in marches Daschle on Meet the Press, to administer the coup de gras. He all but declared the effort a failure because Mullah Omar and Usama bin Laden's heads are not yet displayed on stakes outside the White House. Then it all blew up in his face. Eight Americans die for what Daschle has just labelled a failure.
Then, just a couple of days later, there's more bad news for Daschle. we learn that there won't be a budget deficit after all. As part of an earlier strategy, Daschle blamed Bush for causing both the recession and the deficit, charges that a sophisticated public both knew were a bunch of baloney. Specifically, he blamed the Bush tax cut, but then quickly backed away from advocating its repeal. That job he farmed out to Ted Kennedy. What shreds remained of this strategy really started falling apart with a crescendo of upbeat economic news, including a report from the Congressional Budge Office that we'll run surpluses both this year and next.
It's really ironic that Daschle would even have the nerve to attack Bush on the economic or the war front. Daschle's ignorance on both is so easy to document. After all, wasn't it Tom Daschle, among many other in the Democratic Party, who insisted that the economy was doing just fine, even as it slipped into recession? And what credibility does the Jimmy Carter wing of the Democratic Party have on war or any other aspect of foreign policy.
If there is ever a statue raised to Tom Daschle, it will be erected by Republicans, thanking him for all he did for them