The NYPost has a stunning op-ed piece out today by Ari Melber which claims 50% of democrats do not think Al Quaeda is a priority:

Exactly 50 percent of Democrats do not believe dismantling al Qaeda should be a top foreign-policy goal. In fact, when recently asked to name the top two “most important foreign policy goals,” more Democrats worried about outsourcing than about al Qaeda.

If true, this is a surprise to even an ex-democrat like me. The democrats are a house seriously divided. Half wish the War on Terror would go away, and everything would be right in the world through negotiating (and they blame America for being too dense to see the path to Nirvana). The other half align with the rest of the country who understand we have to make some major, long term, consistent efforts to change the dynamics in one of the oldest regions on the planet.

It’s a far cry from 2001, when Democrats supported military force in Afghanistan. Since then, however, the Iraq War polarized public opinion on foreign policy. As anger towards Bush mounted, most Democrats did not confine their opposition to Iraq — they became skeptical of military force overall.

Well this makes sense, as the left lost power and prestige their anger at Bush began to poison every and all issue of the day to the point if Bush says “the Sun will rise in the east” the left would say “over our dead bodies”. They do not care about anything except opposing Bush. Which makes them more and more irrelevant, infortunately. Does this sound like partisan rhetoric? Well, it is a feeling shared by many:

Americans now give the Republican Party a 15-point edge on national security, according to the Century Foundation poll; only 51 percent of Democrats say they trust their party more on “maintaining a strong military.”

UPDATE:

Daly Thoughts has done some investigating and has learned this poll is fairly old (from January). So the conclusions drawn from it may not hold anymore. But it is fair to say there is a security gap between left and right. And I would like to see some more recent numbers given the Durbin debacle and the murkiness on the Downing St memos.