Standing their ground.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Democrates

As the Bush Administration pushes forward with its aggressive plans to tear up the Constitution and launch its liberty jihad, Senator Barbara Boxer has stepped forward as the voice of Democratic opposition.

In her celebrated clash with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the confirmation hearings, Boxer quoted Martin Luther King Jr., in what ought to be the Democrats' new motto: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

The life began draining out of the Democratic Party the day it decided to take a pass on opposing the most aggressively rightwing Administration in history. Fortunately, Boxer and a handful of colleagues decided to reverse the trend by publicly repudiating Bush in what was expected to be a noncontentious confirmation process. In taking a principled stand against Rice and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a few Democrats became the party's backbone.

The counterpoint to this position, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, took to the floor to endorse Rice and to caution fellow Democrats against giving aid and comfort to America's enemies by opposing Bush's nominees, or his policies. The criticisms of Rice, particularly her dissembling on Iraq, Lieberman said, "are all about the past."

"I don't hear any criticisms about where we are now or where we should go in the future," he said. (Memo to Joe: The war in Iraq rages on. Thirty-one Marines died in a single incident on the highest-casualty day of the conflict for the United States, the same day you were making your let-bygones-be-bygones remarks.)

Sure, Rice and the rest of the Bush team made a lot of self-contradictory statements about weapons of mass destruction. But "if you're just upset about some of the things this Administration has done in Iraq ... give [them] the benefit of the doubt." Lieberman pleaded.

Lest anyone think there's a minority party, in this country that opposes Bush's crusade to spread freedom's "untamed fire" to "the darkest corners of the globe," Lieberman declared that, "in the final analysis, we're together. We're together on what we're doing in Iraq and on the spread of freedom and democracy around the world."

Why is this man a Democrat?

It was a Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who stepped up first to oppose the Pentagon's frightening new warmaking powers. After New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh and The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is running his own secret...