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Via ThinkProgress, we get this great commentary from Tom DeLay:

They don’t want to fight this war on terrorism. If they did, Bill Clinton would have led us into the war on terrorism and against Islamic fanatics. Their world view is, “Can’t we all get along? Surely we can talk our way out of this.” And so when we are attacked, their first reaction is to recoil, and say, “This is really horrible. It’s too harsh and you can’t go after these wonderful people that just killed a bunch of Americans. You’ve got to just find a leader here or there, put him in jail,” instead of understanding, as the President understands, that we are at war. We are at war all over the world and you have to go get these terrorists and either put them in a cell or a cemetery. That’s all they know. And we have to do it with overwhelming force. That’s something that i criticize the administration for right now.

I don't know a single liberal who thinks this way. Not one. Furthermore, I haven't met anyone who even comes close to advocating something as stupid as this. Not outside of San Francisco, anyway. I realize that DeLay's mission is to score political points, not to actually work to protect the nation, gut good lord! This is really ridiculous.

DeLay would argue that as a liberal I don't take the threat seriously. But that's entirely backwards. What pisses me off about the current administration isn't that they are trying to fight terrorism. It's that they are going about it in ways that makes this nation much less safe. It's that they treat terrorism as a political issue rather than an issue that is above politics.

When the nation faces a threat such as this, the goal of the majority should be to unite the country behind a common goal. But that's not what the Republican Party has done. Not once. And by dividing us, they have made us weaker. "A house divided..."

If DeLay wanted to address this issue seriously, he wouldn't be attacking a strawman. He wouldn't be working to convince part of the nation that the other part wants to see its destruction. We are, as he says, at war. So when precisely does he and his party plan to begin acting like it?

UPDATE: Want proof that this administration works to deliberately politicize the war on terror? Check out this timeline of the last 24 hours in the GWOT. And then consider this quote from an official inside the White House on today's raid in London:

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

And then put it in context:

Snow said Bush first learned in detail about the plot on Friday, and received two detailed briefings on it on Saturday and Sunday, as well as had two conversations about it with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But a senior White House official said that the British government had not launched its raid until well after Cheney held a highly unusual conference call with reporters to attack the Democrats as weak against terrorism.

An aide to Lieberman, who would have been one of the first Democrats to hear of the plot because he is the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said the lawmaker first heard of it late Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Cheney had suggested that Democrats believe "that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won't, we can't, be," he said.

While some Democrats have opposed some steps in the war on terrorism, and more and more are calling for a withdrawal from Iraq, no major figures in the party have called for a wholesale retreat in the broader conflict.

But Bush's Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains.

"I'd rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn't done well," one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

If ever there was a perfect example of what I mean when I say that Lieberman has been enabling the Republican Party, this is it. Lieberman rails on and on about how we should rise above partisan politics and work together. With these people? Are you kidding me? Isn't it clear by now that these people have no interest whatsoever in working with us? That they see us merely as a prop they can use in their quest to scare the nation into following their radical agenda? Why is this so hard for people to understand?