Views of Democrats

Hawken Blog's Nitin Julka posts a letter from someone explaining why they won't vote for the Democrats in 2004. I suspect I'll spend a lot of time debunking such things in the year to come, so why not start. From the letter:

"Not with the raving lunacy that has captured the Democratic party. Not when National Security is considered dispensable, if considered at all. Not when the Democrats fault George Bush for creating French obstruction. Not when the Democrats secretly applaud American deaths because it proves George Bush is "wrong." Not for a party that hates the South, the West, anything not New York (I'm from New York, so I can say that) or San Francisco, or anyone who feels proud flying the American flag. And above all else, not for a party that panders to the protesters who waive signs blaming "the Zionists" for the world's ills."

I can accept as a legitimate issue whether or not Bush or the French caused the failure in the United Nations, but everything else here seems little more than a bizarre caricature. How, precisely, are the Democrats seeing national security as dispensable? Is there not a lot of rhetoric from Howard Dean in particular about what a great country the U.S. is? Do the likes of John Edwards and Dick Gephardt really hate everything not from New York? The real tip-off, of course, is the final line, since too my knowledge only Dennis Kucinich is not strongly pro-Israeli, and not even he has signed up for global conspiracy theories.

This will, of course, not stop Republicans from spinning things that way.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein has a post on Democrats and the south that relates to some of these issues.