But that message also reinforces the impression amongst the wingnuts that democrats are the real enemy and eventually some wacko is going to act on that basis.

Finally we do need to remind the public about 1998. Mohammed Atta was learning to fly in Florida. Clinton was trying to track down OBL. And the republican party was focused on one mission – to bring down the President by any means necessary. We need to find quotes from congressional republicans from that time about the balance of power and the Presidency. What were they doing then to "keep us safe’?

The Bush Administration is faltering because its vision for a democratic Middle East (or whatever the vision is) became disconnected from the facts on the ground (or was never really connected to Middle East realities in the first place). The democratic party has not gained much traction in the meantime because they cannot get past the facts on the ground.

The Straussians in the West Wing seem to have baited much of the left into believing the false dichotomy that being "reality-based" is incompatible with projecting political power. Meanwhile Bush continues to believe that he can project power without being reality-based. 

Politics is the art of creating consensus about who we are.  That is an endevor of social construction, culture expressed as collective will.  It has become obvious that electoral politics need not be confined by empirical boundaries within one or two congressional cycles.  More recently it has also become clear that a political agenda cannot be successful beyond that without being grounded in empirical realities. 

The reality-based community and Dean seem to conclude that simply telling the truth is a political platform in itself.

The lesson is not that those realities negate the imagination and creation of a political consensus. The lesson is as old as Icarus;  don't let hubris fool you into believing that an initial victory of will frees you from the limitations of empirical realities.  Politics still requires the creation of consensus and projection of power.

Murtha has it right; declare victory and call for redeployment.  By doing this Murtha honors the troops, preempts Bush's drawdown of troops next year before the midterms while maintaining Bush's responsibilities for the lies and failures of planning. 

Juan Cole http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/dean-v.html
shows that the actual differences of these positions are not as great as the definitions would indicate.  But how we define these terms is how we create consensus.  Bush will maintain more support by calling his clusterfuck a victory than Dean will gain by calling it a loss.