Congrats to former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the new head of the Republican National Committee; you can watch Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin interview Steele here.

And sadly, as Allahpundit quips, "Let the racist 'progressive' photoshops begin!"

Fred Barnes suggests that "The Republicans' Best Weapon" is Obama himself:

In 1994, congressional Republicans carried laminated copies of their Contract With America (tax cuts, term limits, etc.) in their pockets. They may now want to laminate President Obama's inaugural address and carry it around.

This is not as silly as it sounds. Republican leaders believe the speech pleased them more than it did House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Obama's "new era of responsibility" echoed the "Personal Responsibility Act," the third of the ten planks in the Contract With America. Obama also said that it's not the size of government which matters but whether it works. Newt Gingrich coined that thought years ago. Obama lauded "risk-takers." Democrats want to tax them to death.

For the foreseeable future, attacking Obama will be counterproductive for Republicans. He's both enormously popular and the bearer of moral authority as the first African-American president.

Barnes notes that "Obama's words may be bromides or boilerplate that bear little relationship to his true sentiments or real plans." Well, as Jim Geraghty likes to note, those words (just words) all come with expiration dates.

"But so what?", Barnes adds. "Republicans in the House and Senate are a badly outnumbered minority. They have few political weapons at their disposal. Citing Obama's words makes political sense. It's at least worth a try. Republicans have nothing to lose."

As Greg Pollowitz writes, you won't be seeing these in the MSM--they've got more important issues to discuss.

David Horowitz has an exceptional piece on today's transition of power, placing it into both America's long-term history, and the last forty years of the left's culture war upon that tradition. As an up and coming player in Chicago politics, Barack Obama fell in with those who sought the latter; as the nation's 44th president, Horowitz lists numerous helpful signs of him embracing the former, richer tradition.

Which isn't all that dissimilar from the career path of Horowitz himself, come to think of it. As Paul Mirengoff writes, "David Horowitz may not have seen it all, but he has seen more than just about all of us, and from both sides of the political divide."

Paul quotes just about all of it, but I'll merely direct you to either link and strongly suggest reading the whole essay.

Heh: "Obama Inaugurated, Ex-Klansman Collapses."

One leading economic indicator wasn't impressed by today's festivities, as Reuters notes:

U.S. stock indexes extended losses and hit session lows on Tuesday after President Barack Obama's inauguration speech provided few new details about measures to tackle the growing economic crisis.

"I think people were looking for something, new plans, new hopes," said Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatam, New Jersey.

"They didn't hear something new."

To be fair, an inauguration speech isn't exactly the place to lay out a new administration's fiscal agenda, but still, between this, Ted Kennedy passing out, the racially charged benediction from Rev. Joseph Lowery, whatever caused Rahm to flip the Emanuel, and the jeering of the incoming president's supporters at the outgoing commander-in-chief, there were lots of fumbles during the ecstasy.

Update: Perhaps this (via the Professor) helps to explain today's market swoon: "In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian."

More" The temperature wasn't the only thing icy in DC today. Witness: "The awesomely awesome Carter/Clinton snub"--complete with video!

Bill McGurn, President Bush's former chief speechwriter, whom I interviewed in November while we were both on the National Review cruise, is spot-on when writes that as the president leaves Washington DC, "he carries with him the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation's capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one least commented on":

Here's a hint: It's not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

Read the whole thing, and also note this hopeful sign:

Mr. Bush's success in Iraq is equally infuriating, because it showed he was right and they wrong. Many in Washington have not yet admitted that, even to themselves. Mr. Obama has. We know he has because he has elected to keep Mr. Bush's secretary of defense -- not something you do with a failure.

Mr. Obama seems aware that, at the end of the day, he will not be judged by his predecessor's approval ratings. Instead, he will soon find himself under pressure to measure up to two Bush achievements: a strategic victory in Iraq, and the prevention of another attack on America's home soil. As he rises to this challenge, our new president will learn that when you make a mistake, the keepers of the Beltway's received orthodoxies will make you pay dearly.

But it will not even be close to the price you pay for ignoring their advice and succeeding.

(H/T: Jennifer Rubin, who rounds up plenty of other inauguration morning links worth checking out, at Commentary.)

John Hinderaker has a lengthy and sober assessment of President Bush's tenure in office. Definitely read the whole thing, but here's the linchpin of the post:

In assessing the pluses and minuses of the Bush administration, one always returns to Iraq. Many think that Bush was too slow to change strategies after sectarian violence erupted in 2006; others think that he deserves great credit for backing the surge and ultimately winning the war. The second proposition, I think, is indisputable, while the first is questionable. I'm inclined to agree with Dick Cheney that it's wrong to suggest that nothing good happened in Iraq until 2007.

With the benefit of a bit of hindsight, it seems to me that Bush's failings on Iraq were mostly political. It was always obvious that the biggest challenge in Iraq would not be felling Saddam, but rather what would come afterward. The ethnic and sectarian divisions in that country were well understood, and many (like me) wondered whether Iraq was really a country that could stay together once its tyrant was deposed. But Bush failed to adequately prepare the public for the tough, ambiguous conflict that was sure to ensue once Saddam was gone.

This failure was especially regrettable since the war, when launched, was not Bush's war but America's. Large majorities in the House and Senate voted to authorize the war, including most leading Democrats. But because Bush failed to prepare the public for the post-major combat stage, the Democrats could plausibly take the view that they had signed on only for the easy overthrow of a dictator. When the inevitable messiness ensued, they double-crossed the President. That was shameful, but it was also foreseeable, and it was enabled by Bush's failure to do the political work necessary to educate the American public.

In the end, the greatest failures of the Bush administration were political. Bush was the first MBA President, and he always seemed to think that results would carry the day. He followed Lincoln, who wrote that if events bore him out, no one would remember his critics, while if events did not bear him out, a thousand angels swearing he was right wouldn't make any difference.

That's fine as far as it goes, but Lincoln went to considerable lengths, sometimes to the derogation of the war effort, to make sure that public opinion in the North stayed with him. And he was, in the event, saved by the victories won by Grant and Sherman.

As John writes, "Bush's great failing was that his focus was almost exclusively on policy, and he was unwilling to pay adequate attention to politics." And its too bad--because had he reminded voters of the continuity on regime change of his administration and the prior one, the bipartisan support this effort had from 1998 until 2002, and the rank hypocrisy of the left's pivot on the issue, he could have done much to prop up the GOP in 2006 and 2008. Not to mention his own poll numbers.









Update: "Good luck to you on your travels, Sir. Be well."

More: "Closed Press."

Ann Althouse writes, "Here's the post where you can say good-bye to George Bush":

The sun has set on the last night of the Bush presidency. Now, tired old George can retreat to Texas and not be kicked around anymore. He can wait for that history he's always talking about to do its curative work. Someday, they'll say he wasn't so bad, but, my, how he was hated. Not by everyone, though. Many of us stood by him, beginning on September 11th, when he found out that he would not be permitted to spend his time in the White House trying to distinguish himself as a purveyor of compassionate conservative. Many of us would not abandon the man who needed our support, who was, perhaps, overwhelmed by the task that was thrust upon him. And now, the work is over, so I think it would be appropriate to say thank you to George Bush, who is -- to say what Barack Obama said of him -- a good man.

All-in-all, indeed.^TM Click over to Ann's blog if you'd like to post some thoughts about the outgoing president.

Tremendous passage from Paul Greenberg:

History is up to its old tricks again. The radical agitator of one generation becomes the conservative icon of another. Martin Luther King Jr. meets the very definition of an American conservative, that is, someone dedicated to preserving the gains of a liberal revolution.

Even when he was leading the civil rights movement, what appeal could have been more conservative or more American than his now classic speech before the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963?

"I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Is any passage more frequently cited against the quota system called Affirmative Action? Is any passage so clear a call for what conservative candidates for president always seem to be calling for -- character?

King's rhetorical might belied his relative youth; Orrin Judd adds, "the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn't even have been 80 until next year. All this change has occurred within his natural life span. Pretty remarkable."

Update: Don't miss Virginia Postrel's post on the generation of culture warriors immediately before King:

With the Tuskegee Airmen headed to the inauguration, let's take a moment to remember what they looked like when they were young and glamorous--and, of course, just how subversive that glamour was.

Be sure to scroll through the accompanying sideshow.

As Bloomberg.com notes, "Obama Inaugural Strains Lincoln Comparisons While Inviting Them":

Barack Obama's inauguration is dedicated to the proposition that all presidencies are not created equal.

In ways big and small, Obama is trying to summon Abraham Lincoln's spirit to the proceedings.

Obama will roll into Washington's Union Station today by train, duplicating part of Lincoln's railroad journey from Illinois for his swearing in. The president-elect is to appear at a concert tomorrow at the Lincoln Memorial, and will take the oath of office Tuesday with one hand on the Bible that Lincoln used in 1861. Inaugural planners drew so many ties between the Illinois legislators-turned-presidents that Obama may risk straining the comparison.

"Everyone wants to be Lincoln," says Harold Holzer, who has written or edited more than 20 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. "Is Obama overdoing it? Maybe."

For most of the 144 years since Lincoln's death, presidents of all political persuasions have tried to enlist Lincoln's reputation for honesty and courage in support of their own ambitions. Leaders "see in Lincoln's suffering validation of the criticism they have to endure," Holzer says.

In the early, pre-9/11 days of the Bush Administration, the left threw a snit about President Bush invoking JFK and his call for tax cuts to bolster a similar 21st century plan, as Jeff Jacoby wrote in March of 2001:

JFK's words are as persuasive today as they were four decades ago -- so much so that a group of Republicans has resurrected them for use in radio ads promoting Bush's tax-cut proposal. Narrated by Steve Forbes, the conservative publisher who has long championed lower taxes, the ads are designed to put pressure on Democratic senators in states Bush carried last year. "If Jack Kennedy can support tax cuts," Forbes says in the version of the ad airing in Louisiana (for example), "so can Mary Landrieu."

But not everybody welcomes President Kennedy's contribution to the tax-cut debate. Ted Kennedy, for one, is in a snit.

"It is intellectually dishonest and politically irresponsible," he fumes in a letter to the team that created the ads, "to suggest that President Kennedy would have supported such a tax cut.... If President Kennedy were here today he ... would be outraged by comparisons between his 1963 tax cut and the current proposal."

He wouldn't of course, and there's likely much in Barack Obama that Lincoln would have admired as well. But has any journalist asked someone in that slain leader's party if they're OK with one of their chief icons being co-opted for partisan purposes, as they did in 2001?

Update: Related thoughts from Sister Toldjah.

Via Jonah Goldberg, this is a well produced look at the political spectrum and its history. Jonah writes, "I have my quibbles, but overall I think this pretty useful." I'm very much in sync with the graph that outline the poltical spectrum, which appears at 30 seconds into the video:

For a guaranteed lump in the throat, don't miss this one: "One of New York's Finest Takes Care of Marine Hero in Final Days."

(Via The World According To Carl.)

Former athlete and congressman Jack Kemp, age 73 has been diagnosed with cancer. Here's the AP report:

Jack Kemp's office says the former housing secretary, congressman and Buffalo Bills quarterback has been diagnosed with cancer.

A brief statement says Kemp is undergoing tests to determine the origin of the disease and how to go about treating it. The type of cancer was not disclosed.

In the meantime, Kemp says he will continue to serve as chairman of his Washington-based Kemp Partners consulting firm and will remain involved in his charitable and political work.

After his football career, Kemp represented western New York for nine terms in Congress, leaving the House for an unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988. He later served as President George H.W. Bush's housing secretary and ran for vice president as Bob Dole's running mate.

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) adds:

"Jack Kemp has inspired a generation of conservatives with his unyielding commitment to freedom and free-market policies. Like millions of other Americans, I was saddened today to learn of his illness. My thoughts and prayers are with Jack, Joanne, and the Kemp family as Jack battles to defeat cancer. We need the strong, confident voice of Jack Kemp in the national dialogue as our country confronts the challenges that lie ahead."

In The American Spectator, Ryan L. Cole writes that mister, we could use a man like Silent Cal again:

Today Coolidge lies buried in a tiny Vermont village just a short distance from the house where he was born and raised. A humble headstone marks his final resting place; the word "president" is nowhere to be found on the simple marker. On the occasion of Coolidge's death, H.L. Mencken said, "Should the day ever dawn, when Jefferson's warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Calvin's bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service." Given the results of our recent election, the arrival of that day seems unlikely.

As Cole writes, Coolidge "had no interest in saving or rescuing the American people -- he possessed, what is today, an uncommon faith they could take care of that themselves."

Cole writes that when shortly before Coolidge died on this date in 1933, he was quoted as saying, "I feel I no longer fit in with these times." Imagine how he would have felt witnessing 2008: "The Year Americans Rejected Self-Reliance."

Had dinner at the Four Seasons tonight, on the drive down from New York State to visit my mom in NJ before heading back to California. Three observations:

1. If the New York economy is hurting, you couldn't tell it tonight, as the Pool Room was nearly packed.

2. The filet of bison with foie gras and Perigord truffle sauce main course was pretty amazing.

3. The older, salt and pepper-haired gentleman and his wife sitting opposite us were a seriously class act, picking up the tab for a young Marine in his dress blues having dinner with a young woman in a strapless dress that I can only assume was his girlfriend, fiancee or wife at the other end of our row of tables. When the Marine walked over to thank him, the older gentleman and his wife both replied, "No, thank you for everything you're doing to keep us safe."

Which is an awesome note to end the year on, all around.

If you missed it today on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, the year-end wrap edition of PJM Political is now online in handy portable podcast form (as frequent contributor James Lileks is wont to say).

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for the year-end edition of PJM Political as he recaps the key moments of the 2008 presidential election. Plus a look back at the decisive elections of the past with:

• Michael Knox Beran, the author of Forge of Empires: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, 1861-1871 describes "How Lincoln Saved The World."


• Amity Shlaes, the author of the New York Times best-seller The Forgotten Man on the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections.


• James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution on JFK and the election of 1960.


• Craig Shirley, the author of the Reagan's Revolution and the forthcoming Rendezvous With Destiny on the 1976 and 1980 elections and the fall and rise of Ronald Reagan.

Tune in here to listen!

In his profile of Paul Weyrich for the DC Examiner, Lee Edwards writes:

He was born on October 7, 1942, in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of working-class German Catholics. His father tended the boilers of St. Mary's Catholic Hospital for 50 years. He was politically active from an early age: at 19, he and his friends took over the Racine Republican party.

He worked for a local daily newspaper and then as a radio-television journalist before coming to Washington in 1967 as press secretary to Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).

He learned how to organize from the liberal opposition. During President Nixon's first term, he attended a meeting of key liberals planning the enactment of an open housing bill. Present were a White House official, a Washington newspaper columnist, an analyst from the Brookings Institution, representatives from several black lobbying groups, and aides to a dozen senators.

Weyrich noted that everyone took an assignment. The Senate aides promised that their bosses would make supporting statements and contact other senators. The White House official said he would keep everyone informed of the administration's strategy.

The newspaper columnist promised to write a favorable article about the legislation. The Brookings analyst promised to publish a timely study that would impact the debate. The black lobbyists agreed to produce public demonstrations at the right time.

"I saw how easily it could be done with planning and determination," Weyrich later recalled, "and decided to try it myself." With funding from conservative businessmen like Joseph Coors and direct mail assistance from fundraiser Richard Viguerie, he helped start major conservative institutions such as Heritage, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (later the Free Congress Foundation), the Senate Steering Committee, the Republican Study Committee, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Liberals as well as conservatives acknowledged his essential role. In January 1981, the AFL-CIO described the New Right and specifically the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress as smart, effective and responsible for "a whole passel of persons sitting in the U.S. House and Senate."

The manufactured dissent that Weyrich describes witnessing in the early '70s and emulating during its second half reminds of something Tom Wolfe told an interviewer about his New York Herald-Tribune salad days:

Well, one of the things is what I would call "media ricochet", which is the way real life and life as portrayed by television, by journalists like myself and others, begin ricocheting off of one another. That's why to me, in Bonfire of the Vanities, it was so important to show exactly how this occurs when television and newspaper coverage become a factor in something like racial politics. And a good bit of the book has to do with this curious phenomenon of how demonstrations, which are a great part of racial and ethnic politics, exist only for the media. In the last days when I was working on The New York Herald-Tribune, I'll never forget the number of demonstrations I went to and announced that to all the people with the placards, "I'm from The New York Herald-Tribune," and the attitude was really a yawn, and then, "Get lost". They were waiting for Channel 2 and Channel 4 and Channel 5, and suddenly the truck would appear and these people would become galvanized. On one occasion I even saw a group of demonstrators down in Union Square, marching across the Square, and Channel 2 arrived, a couple of vans, and the head of the demonstration walked up to what looked like the head man of the TV crew and said, "What do you want us to do?" He says, "Golly, I don't know. What were you going to do?" He says, "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You tell us."

As Edwards wrote, Weyrich simply took the methods of the left and moved them starboard. Something that Mary Katharine Ham notes that Rick Warren is doing in his recent interviews with the legacy media.

If you missed it yesterday on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, Saturday's PJM Political is now online; tune in here to listen.

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for his take on President-Elect Obama's cabinet choices, and the Pythonic implications of the "shoe toss" incident that bedeviled President Bush in Iraq.

Plus, from PJTV:

• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon debates Frost/Nixon with fellow Oscar-nominated screenwriter/producer Lionel Chetwynd.
  
• Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin talk with Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, now looking to helm the Republican National Committee, followed by their conversation with the surprise celebrity from the last month of the presidential election, Joe Wurzelbacher, aka...Joe The Plumber.
  

If you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives. And tune in to Pajamas Media's PJTV channel for video coverage throughout the week.

As you've undoubtedly read by now, Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich has passed away at age 66. At Pajamas HQ, Jennifer Rubin asks, "Who Will Be the Next Paul Weyrich?"

Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain has some thoughts on Weyrich and the state of American culture as a whole. Be sure to follow his links as well.

Comedian, writer and cultural commentator Evan Sayet emails in:

My Friends (I borrowed that from John McCain since he's not using it anymore.)

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) is the last Right to Laugh event of the George Bush era. Please try to join me and a great group of political (Republican) comedians as we skewer the media, the Demorats and, of course, the man who holds the "office of the President-Elect").

This is one of the best line-ups yet, featuring the great Al Sonja Schmidt, with guest sets from Monty Hoffman and Eric Porvaznik (Mr. E. Pluribus), John Ziegler (KFI radio, "How Obama Won") taking time out from answering his hatemail to emcee. I'll be your host and headlienr.

As those of you who have attended before know, the night usually includes famous radio talk show hosts, best selling conservative authors, a few movie and TV stars -- and that's just the folks on the stage! We typically have even more in the crowd!

So...see you all tomorrow and, if you would, please pass on word to others.

Merry Christmas!

Evan

The event is at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood and begins tomorrow at 8:00 PM--if you're in the area call 323-656-1336 for reservations.

Evan's email is also a great excuse to repost this, which is a terrific summing up of How We Got Here, to borrow David Frum's book title:

The Gray Lady sadly notes:

Representative William J. Jefferson was defeated by a little-known Republican lawyer here Saturday in a late-running Congressional election, underscoring the sharp demographic shifts in this city since Hurricane Katrina and handing Republicans an unexpected victory in a district that had been solidly Democratic.

The upset victory by the lawyer, Anh Cao, was thought by analysts to be the result of a strong turnout by white voters angered over federal corruption charges against Mr. Jefferson, a black Democrat who was counting on a loyal base to return him to Congress for a 10th term.

A majority of the district's voters are African-American, and analysts said lower turnout in the majority black precincts on Saturday meant victory for the Republican.

With all precincts reporting, Mr. Cao, who was born in Vietnam, had 49 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Mr. Jefferson, who had not conceded as of late Saturday night.

To paraphrase The Sweet Smell of Success, the cat's in the bag, and the bag's in the freezer.

Taken back-to-back, the last two paragraphs of the Times article are a hoot:

Mr. Cao, 41 and known as Joseph, fled Vietnam at age 8 after the fall of Saigon. His father was a army officer who was later imprisoned for seven years by the Communist government. Mr. Cao, who has never held elective office, has been an advocate for the small but prominent Vietnamese community here and has a master's degree in philosophy from Fordham University.

"Knocking Jefferson off is something you don't want to bet on," Elliott Stonecipher, a Louisiana political analyst, said Saturday night. "These elections continue to show us that there is a smaller, different and more progressive New Orleans that is emerging."

So electing a Republican who mercifully escaped Vietnam after American liberals of the 1970s left the nation to be slaughtered by the Vietcong and who ousted one of the most infamously corrupt Democrats of recent years counts as a "more progressive New Orleans"?

Hey, fine with me! It's rare that the Times sees a move to the right as progress, but I'll take it.

Update: Over at The "Moderate" Voice, Jazz Shaw makes a cheap shot that moves by so quickly, it's worthy of the drive-by legacy media:

Ed Driscoll doesn't seem terribly interested in a post-racial society, but will take a win in the GOP column any day of the week.

Hmmm--how does Jazz know I'm not "interested in a post-racial society"? Isn't a Vietnamese immigrant becoming a congressman in a district in which, as the Times article I quoted above notes, "a majority of the district's voters are African-American" actually a perfect example of a post-racial society?

The Judd Brothers are loaded for bear, err turkey, today--just keep scrolling.

Glenn Reynolds notes: "ANOTHER CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY: Winnetka, Illinois repeals its handgun ban."

Clearly, there's only one piece of music that fits:

Considering he was at least as tall as Romney, I wouldn't want to call him Mini-Mitt, but the gentleman whom Jim Geraghty pointed out to me during the National Review cruise as looking like Mitt Romney's stunt double is actually a blogger at Red State, and he has a terrific round-up (complete with video) of the cruise: "If we're going to have a nuclear holocaust, I'm going to the buffet first."

(You can read my immediate impressions of the cruise here.)

Zombietime proffers a new holiday: Victory in Iraq Day, November 22, 2008:

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now. Let me repeat:

WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ
And since there will never be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York for our troops, it's up to us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration.

Saturday, November 22, 2008 is the day of that celebration: Victory in Iraq Day.

What do you need to do to participate? Simple. Just make a post on your blog on Saturday, November 22, announcing that the war is over, and declaring that day to be Victory in Iraq Day. That's it.

If you want to write a short post (or a long essay) analyzing the nature of our victory or cheering the troops for a job well done, great; but if you just want to make a simple announcement of the victory, that's fine as well. Anything will do. Just come and join the celebration to mark the day.

Works for me--especially since we'll never see the folks who were forgainst the Iraq War acknowledge their 180 degree pivot in 2003.

Something for the optimists and pessimists at Pajamas Media HQ--and if the latter group are proven correct, some thoughts on who will blamed the most and why, and yet may very well be the party's best hope in the near term future--although the latter conventional wisdom doesn't always survive the campaign trail.

Having been dubbed racists and rednecks by Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA), (after previously being dubbed bitter and clinging by Barack Obama) at least one poll illustrates that his constituents are especially eager to prove the punitive liberal wrong.

In the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman asks, "Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?"

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson's victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. "We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970. On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and flashed the peace sign. Socially, they were nowhere. That was the shock of the Kent State massacre--the veteran martyrs of Harvard's University Hall and Columbia's Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing.

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why?

Schulman's piece appears to have written before a certain Ohio tradesman became a household name. But the blowback caused by Joe's walk-on part in the cold civil war reminds us that it is very much a class war--and specifically, the left's attempts to eviscerate the middle and working classes.

Related: Jennifer Rubin writes, "Suddenly, the race card doesn't look as important as the class warfare card."

Dave Burge of Iowahawk has a rare non-satiric post in which he writes:

We've all witnessed a lot of insanity in American politics over the last few years. Up until the last few days, none of it has seriously bothered me; hey, just more grist for the satire mill. But after witnessing the media's blitzkreig on Joe 'the Plumber' Wurzelbacher, I can only muster anger, and no small amount of fear.

Politicians -- Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, et al. -- obviously have to put up with some rude, nasty shit, but it's right there in the jobs description. Joe the Plumber is different. He was a guy tossing a football with his kid in the front yard of his $125,000 house when a politician picked him out as a prop for a 30 second newsbite for the cable news cameras. Joe simply had the temerity to speak truth (or, if you prefer, an uninformed opinion) to power, for which the politico-media axis apparently determined that he must be humiliated, harassed, smashed, destroyed. The viciousness and glee with which they set about the task ought to concern anyone who still cares about citizen participation, and freedom of speech, and all that old crap they taught in Civics class before politics turned into Narrative Deathrace 3000, and Web 2.0 turned into Berlin 1932.0.

Godwin's Law! you say? if the jackboot fits, wear it.

Or as Jim Treacher notes:

The whole "He's not a licensed plumber!" non sequitur is really fantastic. So, if you happen to be standing in front of Obama when he publicly reveals his socialism, what does the media do? Demands to see your papers. That's just delicious, is what that is.

Of course, at Matt Drudge once said:

"Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair".

Or be a plumber. But which job gets your hands dirtier?

(Meanwhile, Jim Lindgren spots a tax issue that doesn't involve Joe the Plumber, but an actual presidential candidate. Which is why the issue will never be raised by the media.)

Noel Sheppard writes:

Somehow I get the feeling we're going to be hearing much more from Joe...how 'bout you?

Post facto exit question: is Joe the Plumber this election's October surprise? Could he single-handedly change this entire campaign?

Think about it: regular guy wanting to advance himself without the shackles of a socialist tax plan.

Could this be a game-changer?

Not in the slightest.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, the legacy media have done "more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years." The media have internalized Joseph Conrad's famous aphorism from The Heart of Darkness and they're in the process of completely destroying Joe the Plumber, as an object lesson for anyone else who dares Think Different, just as they've already successfully done with Sarah Palin, just as they did 20 years ago with Dan Quayle. Occasionally, an apostate such as Ronald Reagan, Clarance Thomas, Rush Limbaugh or George W. Bush is able to survive such exposure and go on to powerful accomplishments, which is all the more reason why the media must destroy the Other, the Alien, before his message becomes too powerful.

Update: And just like that, a meme is born! Ed Morrissey (with a memetic assist from Jim Treacher) goes inside "The Tanning Bed Media."

As we've discussed numerous times around here, when states go from red, or even purple, to hard core blue--residents and businesses vote with their feet. (Even in the big blue states overseas.)

Ed Morrissey's latest post explores similar ground--and it focuses on a state (New Jersey) whose fiscal and gubernatorial woes were the subject of one of our very first podcasts.

Update: This comment underneath Ed's post crystallizes the opinions I've heard from several of my friends and family still in New Jersey.

Guest blogging for Hugh Hewitt, Bill Dyer notes the passing of Betsy Newmark's father at age 93:

I extend my condolences to Betsy Newmark, the fine blogger who's long been on both Hugh's and my blogrolls as the writer of Betsy's Page, on the loss of her father, George Washington Bamberger, last night at age 93. Like my own, Betsy's dad was a veteran, a volunteer who'd served in the Pacific theater in WWII. And as also was true in my family, she only heard some of her father's war stories when he told them to his grandchildren. But he no doubt reveled quietly and long in the calmer life of a husband, father and grandfather, and businessman. We all mourn with her the passage of yet another unpretentious American hero of our Greatest Generation, and we commend her father and his entire family for his life lived well.

Indeed.

In Forbes, Peter Robinson writes:

This is a story about using American politics to promote the highest of ideals and to realize the worthiest of accomplishments. You may be forgiven your skepticism. But keep reading.

Indeed--it's a terrific profile of War Connerly, who notes:

Politicians have seldom supported him. "When it comes to race," Connerly says, "political correctness is profound. Even conservative Republicans are afraid to take a stand." Organizations from chambers of commerce to unions to the League of Women Voters have fought him, instigating legal challenges that have so far thwarted his efforts to put initiatives on the ballot in Florida and Oklahoma. "In issues involving race," Connerly explains, "the establishment is always at odds with the people." But Connerly has succeeded in putting bans on racial preferences on the ballot in Washington, Michigan, Colorado and Nebraska. The people of Washington enacted a constitutional amendment banning racial preferences in 1997. The people of Michigan did so in 2006. The people of Colorado and Nebraska will make their decision on Nov. 4.

Will the measures in Colorado and Nebraska win? Comfortably, Connerly insists. Whenever bans on racial preferences are permitted to go before the voters, they win.

In a related item, Roger L. Simon explores "Dangerous times ahead: racism in the Blogosphere."

The great conservative filmmaker and film blogger "Dirty Harry" reviews David Zucker's new movie on his blog. And tune in here for a recent edition of PJM Political featuring audio interviews from Glenn Reynolds, Roger L. Simon and myself with stars Jon Voight and Robert Davi, and screenwriter/executive producer Myrna Sokoloff recorded during the film's premiere at the GOP convention in Minneapolis.

As Glenn writes, "If An American Carol does well this weekend, it'll make it a lot easier for the next film of its type to be made." As someone who's enjoys--on one level or another--the starboard side of the Blogosphere, you can help ensure the film's success; check here for times and theaters near you.

Update: Much more on the film from Kathy Shaidle, at Examiner.com.

"Dear Editor," Sarah Palin wrote in 2002. "San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase 'under God' away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words."

I just recorded a brief segment for PJTV's September 11th show. I had tons of notes prepared, since I didn't know how long I'd be on, so I'm reprinting some of them here in the form of a blog post on 9/11's impact on the culture war:

9/11 changed the culture quite remarkably, but it did so in ways that may not have been expected. Back in 2004, the great Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece in which he referred to "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The pressure was released during the 2004 election cycle, but when John Kerry lost, it mutated further into a virulent strain that was only fully released after Katrina. As Mickey Kaus very presciently noted, Hurricane Katrina gave the media a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq:

I'm not saying Bush and the Feds don't clearly deserve major grief for not getting today's National Guard aid convoy into downtown New Orleans a couple of days earlier. Some people are probably dead as a result. But the commentators on Washington Week in Review seemed a little too happy when proclaiming this a "debacle" that will damage Bush politically for a long, long time. And I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

In a very real sense, 9/11 also created the Blogosphere and the idea of partisan journalism--and I don't mean that in any sort of pejorative sense--which began with Matt Drudge and Fox News in the mid 1990s, and Rush Limbaugh's national radio show nearly a decade earlier, and began to become an increasingly accepted element outside of the conservative media.

In 2004, the New York Times admitted what was obvious to all concerned--that it was a liberal publication; and a year prior, Eason Jordan, then of CNN, admitted that his network had shilled for Saddam Hussein. The pressure cooker that Krauthammer refers to led directly to some incredibly sloppy thinking, such as Dan Rather's MemoGate at CBS, and the rise of MSNBC, an openly hyper-partisan division of an otherwise staid establishment liberal news operation like NBC. This morning, MSNBC nobly ran the videotapes of The Today Showfrom 9/11, when all was chaos and uncertainty except for the two towers and the Pentagon being hit. But yesterday, as Kathryn Jean Lopez noted, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC said:

The television networks were told that the Convention would pause, early in the evening, when children could still be watching, for a 9/11 Tribute, and they were encouraged to broadcast it.

What we got was not a tribute to the dead of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt. The Republicans gave us sociological pornography, a virtual snuff film.

In addition to hyper-partisanship, 9/11, also fueled (if you'll pardon the carboncentric pun) the rise of environmentalism in the media. Julia Gorin, whom I've interviewed for PJM Political on XM, had a piece in the Christian Science Monitor in 2006 in which she talked about environmentalism as a sort of Freudian displacement for the War On Terror:

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

That's why in 2004 we got "The Day After Tomorrow" - so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that's coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront "climate change," which only requires spending trillions of other people's dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees - they think money grows on them.
Why are these people so worried about the environment, anyway? It's not like they're living on this planet. Speaking of which, scientists have recently discovered global warming on Mars. See that? Martians need to stop driving those darn SUVs!

Notice that the undercurrent in all the doomsday rhetoric is America as chief culprit in the axis of enviro-evil (just as it is in all the world's turmoil). Having found a warm and fuzzy cause to snuggle up against in this big, bad, scary world, the enviros pick a fight with the one guy they're not scared of: America.

Such displacement also helps to explain the conspiracy theories and "trutherism." For a very long time, ABC had no problem running someone like Rosie O'Donnell as part of their daytime programming, who in the course of five years went from publicly claiming support for President Bush in the early stages of 9/11 to literally telling ABC viewers not to trust what they had just heard on Good Morning America and other news shows.

The events of the morning of September 11, 2001 have changed the culture in ways that few could anticipate that morning, and will continue to do so, no matter who wins in November.

Last October, there was an interesting, if sadly brief, discussion in the Blogosphere which attempted to define the culture war, the Red/Blue, Right/Left, conservative/Bobos Divide as a "Cold Civil War." Over at PJ HQ, Phyllis Chesler ponders if the coming election will cause its temperature to increase in a rather dramatic fashion.

Scott Johnson writes:

Governor Palin's political and media enemies have not yet drawn blood. Thinking to condemn her, for example, the director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance told the Associated Press: "Her philosophy from our perspective is cut, kill, dig and drill." Reasonable people might construe that as high praise. Indeed, it sounds like a winning slogan, if not a platform.

If this quote had run a week earlier, the vendors at the Republican convention would have sold 27,325 T-shirts with that slogan printed on it.

Related: Kevin Williamson explores the the flip-side of the T-shirt wars with an exploration of liberal fashionism.

"I love Ronald Reagan, but after Sarah Palin's speech I miss him a little less. He's watching. He's okay with that."

--John Nolte

Matthew Sheffield writes, "About a year into MSNBC's strategy of refashioning itself into the network for Bush haters, some consequences are starting to emerge for the cable channel and its corporate parent NBC":

Internally, the lurch to the left has resulted in numerous outbreaks of hostility as the remains of the old guard fight to protect themselves and the token conservatives find themselves increasingly marginalized.

Some external consequences are emerging a well now. While apolitical liberals still haven't kicked their CNN habit (and likely won't), MSNBC's corporate leftism has antagonized conservatives. It showed last night here in St. Paul as conventioneers held up signs denouncing the network and began a derisive chant of "NBC! NBC!" when Alaska governor Sarah Palin took a pronounced swipe at the media in her vice presidential nominating speech.

"I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone," Palin said in one of her biggest applause lines of the night.

Immediately thereafter, the audience started booing loudly and clapping. Within a second or so, various crowd members starting chanting out "NBC! NBC! NBC!" This quickly spread throughout the packed arena. Many conventioneers followed it up by pointing toward the MSNBC temporary studio inside the Xcel Energy Center, conveniently positioned next to the Arab television network Aljazeera by someone at the RNC.

After waiting for the boos to die down, Palin paused and delivered a retort:

"But here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion - I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country. Americans expect us to go to Washington for the right reasons, and not just to mingle with the right people."

Amusingly enough, MSNBC's biggest left-wingers Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews actually had discussed these lines in Palin's speech just hours before.

"Who those reporters and commentators might be she does not say, at least not in the excerpt. It will be interesting to see if they're named in that speech," Olbermann remarked to Matthews in highly defensive conversation between the two, NBC's Tom Brokaw, and Norah O'Donnell.

"There's no one I can think of, off the top of my head, who did what she is apparently complaining of tonight, but she will be doing the complaining herself."

Evidently the audience was a little smarter on that account.

Just click over and NBC the accompanying video.

Elsewhere in the old media war against conservatives, John McCain canceled an interview with Larry King after a drive-by attack dog interrogation from CNN's Campbell Brown of his strategist Tucker Bounds with the goal of dismissing Palin's gubernatorial experience.

Dick Heller gets his DC gun permit.

Veteran new media videographer Andrew Marcus and Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft have teamed up in order to form a more perfect blog titled Founding Bloggers. (Note proto-very early analog-era citizen journalists displayed on masthead.)

They'll be going on the road to both conventions, so stop by daily!

Details on the BrothersJudd Blog.

Mark Finkelstein of NewsBusters writes:

The screencap captures it nicely: Heather Wilson, smiling. Robert Wexler, mouth agape. On this afternoon's Hardball, the feisty, brilliant [bio: high honors Air Force Academy grad, Rhodes Scholar] GOP representative from New Mexico took on the duo of the combative congressman from Florida and host Chris Matthews, and walked away a winner. The subject was Obama's Berlin speech, and by extension his presidential qualifications.

You'll find excerpts below, but they don't do begin to do justice to Wilson's brio and the coolness under verbal fire she displayed. That's why I'd strongly encourage readers to view the video. Wilson kicked off her tour de force in commenting on a clip of Obama in his Berlin speech proclaiming that various walls, including one between American and Europe, "cannot stand" and must be torn down.

The video may take a few minutes to download, as it's Windows Media instead of Flash; but don't miss it--it's well worth your time.

Tony Snow, Fox News anchor, frequent Rush Limbaugh guest host, and of course, White House Press Secretary, has passed away at age 53.

By all accounts a remarkably fair and optimistic man; a sunny conservative in the mold of--well, isn't it obvious?--he was much beloved by fellow conservatives and many--but not all--on the opposite of the aisle in the legacy media.

Ed Morrissey has some thoughts here. And the Corner has loads of posts on Snow--just keep scrolling.

Snow's death, comes so quickly after the death of Tim Russert; both men passed at away at compartively young ages, in their mid-50s. News reports and op-eds in the coming days will allow for very interesting comparisons of how the legacy media treats one of their own, versus someone who questioned the conventional wisdom of an industry which pays lip service to multiculturalism and diversity, and yet reflexively leans, and hires, almost exclusively to the left. AP has already gotten their digs in; others are sure to follow.

Happy Fourth of July!

And remember, let's be careful out there--particularly when shopping for the appropriate seasonal pyrotechnic devices:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

As the Mirror Universe equivalent to the history of the American left that Kathy Shaidle reviewed today, Orrin Judd has an lengthy post with multiple reviews of leftwing author Rick Pearlstein's new book on Richard Nixon, including George Will's take:

Perlstein repeatedly explains Nixon’s or other people’s behavior as arising from an Orthogonian resentment of Franklins, including establishment figures as different as Alger Hiss and Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon “co-opted the liberals’ populism, channeling it into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the ‘best circles.’” By stressing the importance of Nixon’s character in shaping events, and the centrality of resentments in shaping Nixon’s character, Perlstein treads a dead-end path blazed by Hofstadter, who seemed not to understand that condescension is not an argument. Postulating a link between “status anxiety” and a “paranoid style” in American politics — especially conservative politics — Hofstadter dismissed the conservative movement’s positions as mere attitudes that did not merit refutation. Perlstein, too, gives these ideas short shrift.

As the pollster Samuel Lubell had already noted before the 1952 election, “the inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping.” Perlstein keenly sees that some liberals “developed a distaste” for the social elements they had championed, now that those elements were “less reliably downtrodden” and less content to be passively led by liberal elites.

The masses bought television sets and enjoyed what they watched. But Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (and formerly Adlai Stevenson’s administrative assistant) declared television a “vast wasteland,” thereby implicitly scolding viewers who enjoyed it. When New York was becoming a lawless dystopia, with crime, drugs and homelessness spoiling public spaces, August Heckscher, the patrician commissioner of parks under Mayor John Lindsay, sniffily declared that people clamoring for law and order were “scared by the abundance of life.”

A Newsweek cover story on Louise Day Hicks, who led opposition to forced busing of school children in Boston, described her supporters as “a comic-strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls ... the men queued up to give Louise their best, unscrewing cigar butts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck.”

Perlstein deftly deploys such judgments to illustrate what the resentful resented. Unfortunately, he seems to catch the ’60s disease of rhetorical excess.

Orrin--who knows a thing or two about book reviews himself--also makes a great observation:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much. [That's consistent with this Time article from January of 1970--Ed]

Of course, this perspective does tend to undermine the thesis that the consensus was never retrieved, but consider too that Nixon was followed by a Democrat who ran to the Right of where he and Gerald Ford had governed. The only other Democrat elected president since 1964 was likewise an Evangelical Southern governor. And, while Carter and Clinton only won very narrowly, several Republicans since have run up pretty big margins. The problem would seem to be a reluctance on the part of Mr. Perlstein and company to accept that the consensus has been restored but has shifted back to where it was pre-Depression, fairly far to the Right side of moderate. Thus, even when Democrats won back Congress in the 2006 midterm they've ended up governing little differently than Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay did.

It is instructive also to look at where the most divisive point in our politics is today: the racial/tribal divide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This is an entirely predictable function of the identity politics that still characterizes much of the Left, although Mr. Obama tried desperately to run as a cipher, lest voters discover his pastor and his politics and, inevitably, reject him as just another Northern liberal too far out of the mainstream to elect president.

Orrin writes that he'll be posting a more detailed review soon.

In the Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes, "the GOP is now a working-class party":

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

If the first half of that equation sounds familiar, it should: it's a theme that we wrote about four years ago when the GOP, and its incumbent president were riding high. After the midterms--and with more trouble potentially on the way--Douthat adds:

The second is that the GOP can't only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future "Party of Sam's Club" Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

Hopefully it won't take another Carter-esque extended economic malaise this time.

Mark Steyn notes that, pace Obama, guns and God, and proper respect for both, are what make Red State America a much healthier--and sustainable--place than the Biggest Blue State of 'em all: Europe. Steyn writes, "In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God’n’guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion":

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: it benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe — a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism. A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. That’s what a lot of Keith Reade’s laundry list — “gun-totin’,” “military-lovin’” — boils down to. As for “gay-loathin,’” it’s Oscar van den Boogaard’s famously tolerant Amsterdam where gay-bashing is resurgent: the editor of the American gay paper the Washington Blade got beaten up in the streets on his last visit to the Netherlands.

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to cast an eye across the ocean and see that. But then he did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

Will the last person out of San Francisco please turn off the compact fluorescent light bulbs?

This is fabulous:

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Ann Althouse looks back to Time magazine's January 5th, 1970 issue, which declared "The Middle Americans" as Time's Men and Women of the Year:

Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.

The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over — the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.

But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were 'discovered' first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves. In the Administration's voices — especially in the Vice President's and the Attorney General's — in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and this began to shape the course of the nation and the nation's course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans.

Ann writes, "Read the whole, awesome essay — and marvel that we've been talking about these things for the last 40 years":

Barack Obama's recent comment about the bitterness of left-behind small-towners may seem like the latest line of dialogue in a long, long conversation.

I'm not sure what's to marvel about--Obama's rhetoric in his less guarded moments is merely another byproduct of one of the more curious aspects of what Time, almost four decades ago, called "the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young" (who are not so defiant now, merely trapped in a leftover haze of conformity): their absolute inability to advance their mindset beyond the first days of Starting From Zero.

Arlen Specter talks tough to Senate Democrats.

This just in from the Economist (via the Judd Brothers): "Why conservatives are happier than liberals: a review of Gross National Happiness by Arthur Brooks":

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%). One might think this was because liberals were made wretched by George Bush. But the data show that American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.

This is not because they are richer; they are not. Mr Brooks thinks three factors are important. Conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to be married and twice as likely to attend church every week. Married, religious people are more likely than secular singles to be happy. They are also more likely to have children, which makes Mr Brooks confident that the next generation will be at least as happy as the current one.

When religious and political differences are combined, the results are striking. Secular liberals are as likely to say they are “not too happy” as to say they are very happy (22% to 22%). Religious conservatives are ten times more likely to report being very happy than not too happy (50% to 5%). Religious liberals are about as happy as secular conservatives.

Why should this be so? Mr Brooks proposes that whatever their respective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one (in the American sense of both words). American conservatives tend to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. This makes them more optimistic than liberals, more likely to feel in control of their lives and therefore happier. American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong”.

Say it with me now, all together: I need a study to tell me this?

So as he flies the blue ladies of the Emperor's Club into the sunset, we say "aloha, 5 O'clock Elliot" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Update: With 3,000 hours a year of annual fees, Mrs. Spitzer can certainly churn 'em and burn 'em with the best of them.

William F. Buckley passed away last week, and since I was on my cruise to Mexico, I didn't have a chance to blog about the death of the man who invented modern conservatism, and for whose Website I briefly contributed articles in the summer and fall of 2001 before taking up residence in the then-nascent Blogosphere. For an extended video look at the man, it's tough to beat the above profile by Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.TV.

One of Buckley's most important decisions, as I wrote a few years ago, was "casting out the John Birchers and their anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories." That's the subject of this exceptional article by Jonathan Tobin:

The long-term implications of Buckley's stands were enormous. By remaking the conservative movement in his own image, in which the emphasis was on anti-communism and a libertarian skepticism of government power, he ensured that it, and the Republican Party, which it came to dominate, would be a place where Jew-haters were unwelcome.

That enabled liberal Jews, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, to feel comfortable making common cause with the right on a host of issues as he began his own journey away from the left. Though expectations that the Jews would ditch liberalism en masse were always unrealistic, the birth of an intellectually viable brand of Jewish conservative thought in this country wouldn't have happened had not Buckley first cleaned out the GOP stables.

In terms of practical politics, Buckley's rout of the anti-Semites made it possible for the sort of bipartisan consensus in favor of support for Israel that we now take for granted. He replaced the Buchanan-like world of American conservatism that existed before National Review with something that was not only more successful, but purged of Jew-hatred. If Israel Lobby authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt want to find the real father of the enormous support for Israel in our political system today, they can look no further than the irrepressible Buckley, whose life was a testament to the power of ideas.

His was a political faith that most Jews never embraced, but as we survey a political spectrum in which our enemies are confined to the margins, we should all remember the unique achievements of this American original. May his memory be for a blessing for all who love liberty.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Over at Pajamas HQ, there's an article by Roger L. Simon, followed by a podcast interview which I produced, and transcript, of Roger's interview with Chris Peden, the councilman in Ron Paul's district who would very much like to replace him as congressman.

Harry Reid: bringing the right and the left together!

Compare and contrast: Over at Pajamas HQ, Aaron Hanscom wonders why college kids are mocking the dead:

More proof that tolerance for murder is becoming a trend comes from the story of two Penn State students who dressed as Virginia Tech shooting victims at a Halloween party. Not even a year has passed since Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, yet one of the Penn State students was disgusted that a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group called “People Against This Costume” in response to the tasteless choice of attire.

This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed…The thing is, everybody’s making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26 thousand that happen in America everyday. That’s the problem with college students. They all live in an ivory tower of privilege.

While it’s not politically correct to make a “big stink” about the killings of privileged college students or holiday shoppers at the mall, honoring the murderers of Israelis is PC approved. Consider last year’s big college costume controversy. When Syrian-born engineering student Saad Saadi showed up at a Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann had no problem posing with him for a photograph. Gutmann later explained that she wasn’t aware of Saadi’s choice of costume even though he’s shown in the photograph with a kaffiyeh around his head, a toy Kalashnikov rifle in his hand and six plastic sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. Moreover, Saadi explained that Gutman jokingly asked, “How did they let you through security?” when he asked her to take the photograph with him.

One wonders if Gutmann would have also found the humor in the Nazi costume Prince Harry wore to a party in 2005. Harry would have fit in perfectly in the class of one Harvard University professor, who has described his shock upon learning that the majority of his students didn’t believe anybody was to blame for the Holocaust. He referred to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”

Meanwhile, James Lileks scans the boards at Fark and is disappointed--if not exactly shocked--by the nihilism he observes:

There’s a great deadness in many people, a grim harsh joy in the conviction we are just “moist robots,” to use the cynic’s phrase, living our lives in a vast factory that arose by miraculous random happenstance. Nothing amuses them more than belief, and oddly enough, nothing angers them more. It’s not even what you believe. It’s the very fact of believing in something other than Flying Spaghetti Monster photoshop contest deadlines or the enhancements on Episode IV.

Simultaneously, the Denver Post profiles Jeanne Assam:

The guard who saved untold lives at New Life Church gives credit to God for giving her cover, and boosting her firepower as she shot a heavily-armed gunman.

“I give credit to God. I say that very humbly,” said Jeanne Assam. “God was with me, the whole time I was behind cover. Based on the firepower he had, compared to mine.”

“It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God,” Assam said.

Assam spoke at a press conference in Colorado Springs this afternoon. She is one of about 12 armed security officers at New Life Church, according to Pastor Brady Boyd.

She responded when Matthew Murray, 24, began targeting church members in Colorado Springs, after a rampage hours earlier in Arvada in which two missionary training center staff members were killed and two were injured. Two teenagers at New Life were fatally shot, and three others injured before Assam could shoot Murray.

There's something that makes Assam's attitude different than those in the other two items linked above. And I just can't put my finger on it.

Don't worry; it'll come to me eventually.

Recorded last year at Duke, as the college staff and local D.A. were attempting a real life mashup of Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons:

(Many more videos to be found at Fora.TV; hat tip: The Brothers Judd.)

Details here.

(Alec Baldwin could not be reached for comment.)

David Freddoso writes, "Hastert Resigns Today":

I am told that former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is faxing his resignation letter to Gov. Rod Blagojevich this afternoon.

Once the resignation is official, the governor has five days to set the special election within 120 days of the resignation. Because filing deadlines and the like prevent it from being much earlier, the primary will probably be held Feb. 5, the same date as the presidential primary.

Hastert announced Nov. 15 that he would be resigning before the end of the year.

That's the headline on Power Line's post announcing Lott's retirement from the Senate next month. As Allahpundit writes:

Bad on pork, bad on racial issues, bad on amnesty, and hostile to the one media weapon conservatives wield simply because it dared to challenge him. Like Mark Levin, I shall not miss him.

I doubt few Republicans will.

(But his hair--the Important Southern Hair!--was perfect. Maybe he'll hand it over to his successor!)

This sounds like a worthy cause:

Join Move America Forward for the “Honoring Heroes at the Holidays Tour” this November 26th - December 16th as we cross this nation holding pro-troop events in 40 cities across America to honor and salute the men and women of the U.S. military who will be thousands of miles away from their homes and families during this holiday season. (Help us pay for the cost of this effort by making a donation - HERE).

Along the tour we will be collecting more than 100,000 Christmas, Hanukkah and holiday greeting cards for our troops that we will deliver to them in Iraq and Afghanistan. Get your kids involved, and invite local schools to participate! On the outside envelope be sure to write either: “Christmas Card for Our Troops” or “Hanukkah Card for Our Troops” or “Holiday Card for Our Troops.” Hear what legendary TV personality, Ed McMahon, has to say about the effort - CLICK HERE to LISTEN.

Visit their Website, here.

If you've ever heard on me on PJM Political or a podcast, I think I have a pretty typical middle-of-the-road northeast accent, but this poll does a great job of triangulating its origins:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Philadelphia   Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.
The Midland
The South
The Inland North
The Northeast
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I'm not from Philadelphia, but I did grow up just across the Delaware in South Jersey, and I guess it's impossible to fully shake the accent.

(Via Betsy Newmark, who has some thoughts on how accents affect the messages delivered by politicans.)

Bryan Preston compares and contrasts; Glenn Beck loses it.

Rob Port makes a great observation: America's high standard of living changes the definition of "poverty"; he links to a post by Philip Brewer, who writes:

In the 1950s and 1960s, a working man could support a family at a middle-class standard of living with just one income. It might surprise you to learn that one person working full-time, even at minimum wage, can still support a family of four at that standard of living. Nowadays we call that “living in poverty.”

Rob adds:

I’m sure that will surprise a lot of people, but it’s all a trick that has been played upon us by the politicians. After all, it’s sort of hard for them to levy more taxes and expand the size and power of government unless they convince a significant chunk of us that we’re victims and cannot possibly get by without government assistance.

In the 1930s, as Amity Shlaes discusses in The Forgotten Man, it was logical to assume that poverty was partially a result of geography. But these days, as Orrin Judd and Kathy Shaidle each note (and from across the pond, so does Theodore Dalrymple in vast tracts of his back catalog), it's very often much more a function of mindset than anything else.

Jules Crittenden writes, "Columbus Day may be the most unPC holiday of the year. That’s why I intend to celebrate it doing the most unPC thing I can think of. Working for a living."

As I've written before, I belonged briefly to an organization called "the National Writers' Union" in the late 1990s; I got a couple of fun freelance assignments from their online tip sheet. But when one of their newsletters referred to Columbus Day by the angry left PC-euphemism du jour (see: Civil War, Cold), it was time for me to bail. Cult religions are far too exclusive for my tastes.

Update: Related thoughts here.

Outtakes from The Preppie Handbook? The 1981 summer Brooks Brothers catalog? (I know, I know, Papa Bush is a J. Press man. Please! Stop your letters and emails!)

In any case, Robin Givhan's next article writes itself.

Well, it's not that new a podcast--I actually recorded this last December, just as Tech Central Station was transitioning away from podcasting back towards emphasizing traditional print articles. But I didn't want this interview with author Paul Kengor and his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism to be abandoned entirely, so I'm sharing it here, as a sort of late summer rerun. While there are a few questions near the end of my interview with the author tied to the then-recent mid-term elections, most of the material discussed is pretty timeless stuff: how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War--and spent much of his adult life preparing for the job.

27 minutes, 33 seconds in length, 25.2 MB file size, and no iPod required--virtually any PC with a broadband connection can download and play a podcast. So click here to listen!

Lots of details, and a running update, at Michelle Malkin's.

U.S. News & World Report reports, "Momentum Shifting To GOP In Iraq Debate".

Good. But somebody tell this member of the GOP.

Hot Air has the details.

Like I said when Karl Rove resigned, very few White House staffers in any administration go the distance. Snow says he's resigning for financial reasons; but I can't help but think that not having to wade into ground zero of the legacy media's attack machine every day will also be good for his health. In terms of Snow's endless public good cheer and media savvy professionalism, whoever his successor is will have some big shoes to fill.

Update: "What Will Tony Snow Do Next?", Duane Patterson asks--and suggests one possible scenario--at the newly reconstituted Radioblogger.com.

Some things are universal, whether it's over tapas in Madrid, or filet mignon in Manhattan:

Related thoughts on one of the topics that Henninger discusses, here.

"CBS 2 Exclusive: Denny Hastert Leaving Congress".

In the L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on Karl Rove's legacy, which he compares with another famous tactician of history: "Napoleon overstayed history's welcome and was treated harshly for it, first by the Russians and Mother Nature, then by his own people and, ultimately, by the historians":

Partisan victories are nice, but they aren't an end in themselves. Harry Truman, whom Rove and others see as role models for Bush, himself liked to quote Napoleon on his fateful encounter with the Russians: "I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere."

Compassionate conservatism succeeded as a political tactic by co-opting liberal assumptions in much the same way that Bill Clinton's triangulation stole conservative thunder. Rove was, famously, the architect of this strategy, and as such the left hated him not for his ideas but for his successes, which they now want to emulate at all costs. The net-root "fighting Dems" who care about partisan victory above all else are in many respects the children of Karl Rove.

"What is history," Napoleon asked, "but a fable agreed upon?" After he pens his memoirs from his Texan Elba, maybe we'll find out what fable Rove subscribes to: the one in which he was a champion for conservatism, or the one in which he liberated the GOP from conservatism.

Rove's second term fumbles are yet another reminder why so many cabinet members and White House staffers bail at the end of the first term, a mid-term election, or whenever the getting's good, rather overstaying history's welcome.

Update: Video from the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot added above. And click here for related thoughts from Power Line's Paul Mirengoff, who writes that "Karl Rove was neither a magician nor an evil genius. But he did help his candidates achieve most of what was possible."

Betsy Newmark's prediction for Karl Rove's future seems remarkably sound. Elsewhere, Rand Simberg's look at a Wall Street Journal news article on Rove's resignation brings to mind this moment from the heat of the 2004 election.

Meanwhile, Jim Treacher asks the question of the moment...

Update: More from Jules Crittenden. And Byron York writes:

He wasn’t. Beginning in late 2003, Rove became increasingly distracted by the CIA-leak investigation that would lead to his appearing not one, not two, not three, not four, but five times before prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury. Rove was first interviewed by the FBI in October 2003, first appeared before the grand jury in February 2004, and appeared for a fifth and final time in April 2006. He would have to wait until June 2006 before Fitzgerald informed him that he would not be indicted.

“Nobody on the inside would ever admit it on the record, and Karl would never admit it,” says one well-connected observer, “but when the full force of the U.S. government is bearing down on you and trying to put you in jail, trying to ruin you, and you know in your heart that you have done nothing wrong, and it drags on and on and on, and the politicians and prosecutors are coming after you — it can’t help but drain you.”

It did. In 2005 and 2006, by several accounts, Rove spent a significant amount of time accommodating the demands of the leak investigation. And any time he spent doing that was time that he did not spend looking after the needs of the White House. “Everybody in Washington who knew Karl and knew how the White House worked knew that when he was under that cloud, things started to go a little awry,” the observer says. “He had to spend a lot of time dealing with it.”

Read the whole thing, as they say in the halls of Coruscant.

As Ronald Reagan liked to say, those are the scariest words in the English language. Thomas Sowell writes that Bob Novak would agree:

Parents who want to counteract politically correct commencement speeches — often after four years of politically correct indoctrination on campus — might include among the things they give their graduate a new book titled The Prince of Darkness by columnist Robert Novak.

This book gives Novak’s eyewitness accounts of the numerous Washington politicians and bureaucrats he has dealt with as a journalist for more than half a century.

There is no way you can come away from this book thinking that there is something nobler about “public service,” as it actually exists, rather than the pretty picture painted by those who want to puff themselves up as members of a high-toned profession.

Even those of us who never had any grand illusions about politicians can come away from this book shedding any remaining illusions we might have had about some of our political heroes in both parties.

Novak covers not only what they said and did in public but also what they said and did in private — and why. He turns over a lot of rocks and shows what has been crawling underneath.

Novak became a Washington journalist back in the days of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. But neither they nor the political leaders of today escape his unsentimental scrutiny.

Most of these big political figures turn out to be very petty, self-centered, spiteful, shallow, deceitful, and incompetent. Novak spells it out in eyewitness detail from behind the scenes.

Nor does he let the media off the hook, including himself. Novak notes how often his own judgments and predictions proved to be wide of the mark, and how his drinking and other shortcomings led to bad results for himself and those around him.

This is history as it happened, without spin or an agenda.

As Sowell writes, you can get "a lot of enlightenment from a prince of darkness."

"The minority party has decided we have to get to 60 votes on almost everything we vote on of substance," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. "That's not the way this place is supposed to work."

Gee, and that's so unlike the previous five years, or even during the brief Jeffords-era when Tom Daschle was in charge.

David Frum writes that "The decision by Democratic senators to quash the so-called John Doe amendment is the first truly serious error made by the new majority":

The Democrats' decision to kill the amendment in a secretive way makes clear that they understand full well the danger of their vote. Andy McCarthy explains well over at the Corner just how outrageous this vote will sound to a typical voter:

What possible good reason is there to silence people who want to tell the police they saw suspicious behavior? Under circumstances where we are under threat from covert terror networks which secretly embed themselves in our society to prepare and carry out WMD attacks? Planet earth to the Democrats: To execute such attacks, terrorists have to act suspiciously at some point. There are only a few thousand federal agents in the country. There are many more local police, but even they are relatively sparse in a country of 300 million. If we are going to stop the people trying to kill us, we need ordinary citizens on their toes. Again, this is just common sense.

But it seems that the Democratic left cannot tolerate such sense. Forced to choose between multicultural orthodoxy or national security, the Democratic left has chosen multicultural orthodoxy. Fine. Let's ram the point home. Bring this measure to a vote again and again and again. Stamp it into the national consciousness. This is midnight basketball, Dukakis in the tank, and Willie Horton all rolled into one.

Over to you, Mitch!

Update: More from Betsy Newmark.

Fresh off his interview with Capt. Ed on Blog Talk Radio, Hugh Hewitt's "Generalissimo" Duane Patterson writes:

A remarkable thing happened in the United States Senate earlier this evening, and it occurred over a rather unremarkable piece of legislation that was being debated. Conservatives, frustrated at the lack of a genuine leader of their party, may have finally found one in Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell.

Read the whole thing.

William Kristal explains why history will be kind to President Bush.

Right--as soon as someone can find a liberal from the New York Times or The Nation who has a favorable word for Richard Nixon, I'll believe this.

Update: Here's an article which has the audacity to claim that President Reagan, a man who, if you believe many in today's media, enjoyed universal bipartisan support in the 1980s, actually had a detractor or two during the MTV decade! Heresy I know, but still, for completeness sake, we're reposting our link to it.

Meanwhile, Power Line has some related thoughts.

National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru, June 27th:

President Bush made solid gains among Hispanic voters. Hispanics gave 21 percent of their votes to Bob Dole in 1996, 35 percent to Bush in 2000, and 39 to him in 2004. That is a much larger swing toward the GOP than we saw in the electorate as a whole, and supporters of the Bush approach to issues of particular concern to Hispanics can legitimately use it to strengthen their case. But they keep claiming that Bush did even better than he did—that he got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote—and it's just not so.

National Review's Mona Charen, yesterday:

In 2004, President Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote.

But hey, what's five or six percent amongst friends?

Jim Geraghty has some thoughts on what it should contain, with a goal towards "90 for 9": that ideally, 90 percent of conservatives should agree with nine of the ten items on the list.

(Via Jim's primary blog.)

In the L.A. Daily News, Bridget Johnson compares and contrasts two very different revolutions:

ON July 4, 1776, the colonies declared independence from Great Britain. Over the next several years, thousands shed blood for the cause of freedom, resulting in the constitutional republic of the United States of America led by our first president, the noble and righteous George Washington.

On April 1, 1979, the shah had gone into exile and the Islamic Republic of Iran was created. Over the next several months, free-thinkers were executed or imprisoned, and American hostages were taken for the cause of theocracy, led by the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khomeini.

One revolution signaled a brilliant dawn for humanity; the other heralded a dark chapter in history.

Read the whole thing.

Scott Johnson of Power Line writes:

President Calvin Coolidge rose to the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, with a speech providing a magisterial review of the history and thought underlying the Declaration. His speech on the occasion deserves to be read and studied in its entirety. The following paragraph, however, is particularly relevant to the challenge that confronts us in the ubiquitous variants of progressive dogma that pass themselves off today as the higher wisdom:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Indeed.

Update: In Commentary, Terry Teachout explores "Our Creed and Our Character", and its expression in American art.

Jonah Goldberg writes that "our wealth is really all in our heads. Literally":

In the United States, for example, less than a fifth of our wealth exists as material stuff like minerals, crops, and factories. In Switzerland, cuckoo clocks, ski chalets, cheese, Rolex watches, timber and every other tangible asset amount to a mere 16 percent of that country’s wealth. The rest is captured by the expertise, culture, laws, and traditions of the Swiss themselves.

These numbers come from Kirk Hamilton, a World Bank environmental economist and lead author of a new study, “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” In a fascinating interview in Reason magazine, Hamilton explains how, when measured properly, “natural capital” (croplands, oil, etc.) and “produced capital” (factories, iPods, roads, etc.) are the smallest slices of the economic pie. What Hamilton calls “intangible capital,” which includes the rule of law, education and the like, is by far the biggest slice. The entire planet’s “natural capital accounts for 5 percent of total wealth, produced capital 18 percent and intangible capital 77 percent.

This makes some intuitive sense. We’d all rather be the man who knows how to fish than the man given a fish. Or think of it this way: The Malthusian thinks only about hardware, when the money is in software and design. China makes America’s iPods; America collects the profits.

Also, the richer a country gets, the less it needs to live off its natural resources. Therefore, it becomes cheaper — and more popular — to protect the environment. This has been the trend in Europe and America, and hopefully it will be around the world.

This sea change in economic thinking doesn’t cut easily along the left-right political axis, and its implications could be profound. “Root-causes” liberals can find a great deal of satisfaction in the emphasis “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” places on education. According to Hamilton, education explains about 36 percent of a country’s intangible wealth. Conservatives can find solace in the importance of property rights and, moreover, in the confirmation that not all cultures are equal — at least when measured on their ability to produce and sustain wealth. And both right and left will agree that the rule of law — including fair courts and government transparency — is the single most important contributor to a nation’s wealth.

A potential lesson for the World Bank may be that building roads, dams, and factories in the third world is a fool’s errand until those nations have the intangible capital required to maintain such things. The Marshall Plan’s success in rebuilding Europe after World War II stemmed not from the U.S. footing the bill for concrete and bulldozers but from the intangible capital locked in the hearts and minds of everyday Europeans.

In an odd way, I think this complements Weisman’s depiction of a post-human future. The greatest symbols of our civilization — from skyscrapers to libraries — not only count for a mere fraction of our wealth, they would turn to dust and rubble if we disappeared. The hardware is nothing; the software, everything. All that civilization is and can become exists within us. If we forget that, we forget literally everything.

Read the whole thing, and for more Fourth of July Jonah, don't miss his thoughts on preserving a national identity.

Update: Speaking of the role that brain power plays in building wealth and national greatness, City Journal asks, "Why have we stopped naming schools after great public figures?"

Happy Fourth of July!

And for some music to further set the mood, here's the Ed Driscoll Orchestra (aka Sonar and Reason) perfoming the "Washington Post March".

(On Monday, a friend sent me this link and asked me to make a loop of the WaPo March for the NRA's float in the Morgan Hill Fourth of July Parade; after routing all of the MIDI tracks through the synthesizers in Reason, and some reverb, I'd like to think it at least sounds a bit better than the version on the site.)

James Lileks' appointment as Blogger In Chief at the Minneapolis Star Tribune is paying huge dividends, as he's actually giving readers a reason to read a newspaper's blog without gnashing their teeth. (Fancy that.) Something tells me that the Strib hasn't run anything this much fun--not to mention patriotic--since about 1965:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Obligatory exit question: in addition to his multimedia skills, is it safe to assume that Lileks knows his way around fireworks infinitely better than these huckleberries?

President Bush commutes Scooter Libby’s sentence; emergency paramedics stand by at MSNBC just in case.

Update: Thoughts on Olbermann's latest meltdown here.

Mark Steyn writes that "Impudent citizens got Sen. Lotthorn's goat":

Sen. Trenthorn Lotthorn, meanwhile, thinks America is a nation of goatless girls. They don't understand goats the way an experienced goat-farmer such as himself does. "If the answer is 'build a fence,' " Sen. Lotthorn declared, "I've got two goats on my place in Mississippi. There ain't no fence big enough, high enough, strong enough, that you can keep those goats in that fence.

"Now, people are at least as smart as goats," the senator told Mario Recio of the Sun Herald. "Maybe not as agile. Build a fence? We should have a virtual fence. Now one of the ways I keep those goats in the fence is I electrified them. Once they got popped a couple of times they quit trying to jump it. I'm not proposing an electrified goat fence," the Lottly Goatherd added. "I'm just trying … there's an analogy there."

By now, his analogy had jumped the fence. But what an awesome monument to the senator's reign it would be: Hadrian's Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Great Electrified Goat Fence of the Rio Grande. They would sing songs about it:

"Grab your goat and get your hat

Leave your worries on the doorstep

Just direct your feet

To the sunny side of the fence … "

Follow the bouncing ball, and sing read the whole thing.

E.J. Dionne, June 22, 2007: "The dynamic in American public life...is the move away from the right and a discrediting of the conservative era".

Mark Tapscott, June 29, 2007: "Winston Churchill once remarked that God takes care of drunks and the United States of America and so it seems to be as we approach the end of a remarkable week in which milestones of success for the conservative movement have come one after another".

Here's Jim Geraghty on May 18th:

Two words for anybody who thinks this immigration bill is a done deal, and there's no way enough opposition builds:

Harriet Miers.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Score One For Alt-Media: Immigration bill fails".

Mark Krikorian looks at all of the forces that Alt Media was up against:

Today's defeat of the Senate amnesty bill was more than a run-of-the-mill legislative victory, representing as it did a self-organizing public's defeat of combined force of Big Business, (some of) Big Labor, Big Media, Big Religion, Big Philanthropy, Big Academia, and Big Government.

Speaking of Big Media, oh to be a fly on the wall in this newspaper's editorial boardroom.

Update: Welcome Jim Geraghty's Kerry, Hillary Campaign Spot readers! Please look around; there's sure to be a few other things here you'll also enjoy.

Byron York has a great post on how the Web has helped to shine a light on the shady backroom machinations to get the amnesty immigration bill passed:

Here’s something new. The first true Internet-Age presidential campaign was in 2004. The first major Internet-Age Supreme Court nomination was Harriet Miers, in 2005. Now, in 2007, we’ve got what is arguably the first truly major down-and-dirty Roberts-rules-of-disorder parliamentary battle fought under the searchlight of the blogs.

The Internet was critical to the immigration bill’s first failure. If not for the blogs, the bill’s deceits and flaws would not have been so well or quickly exposed, and "comprehensive reform" would probably otherwise have passed within a couple of days. Now we’re at yet another new level. The public is being exposed to a basket of legislative tricks–of a sort that are rare in any case, and surely of a kind that have never been subjected to mass and rapid-fire public exposure. The undemocratic character of all that is happening here is being conveyed to the public in short order and with clarity–often through the medium of Senate aides themselves.

Do the Senators now called "Masters of the Universe" understand this? Presumably, senate aides, who certainly read the blogs, have communicated to their senators how dangerous it is to be exposed in this fashion. But maybe some senators still don’t get it. They seem to think they can get away with backroom maneuvers in an era when blogs are serving as virtual fly-on-the-wall cloakroom cameras.

Earlier today, in "Off the Table," I argued that passing this bill is not going to make the immigration issue go away. On the contrary, the blogs-eye-view we’re getting of all this sausage making is going to be frozen in the public memory for a very long time. It’s going to inspire new campaigns, and it’s going to haunt the Masters of the Universe–and the Amnesty 8, too. I still don’t think they quite realize this. In fact, the Masters’ false belief that quickly passing this bill is going to somehow get this issue off of their backs is the method behind this their deceptive madness. They don’t seem to realize that they’ve already been caught with their pants down.

"Masters of the Universe" tend to have a fairly short-lived stay on Mount Olympus. Certainly, nobody's used that title to describe bond traders in a long, long time.

Update: "I have only my intuition to go on. My intuition tells me that it is impossible to be cynical enough about what is transpiring here".

"When we say that Congress lacks credibility, this is what we mean. When was the last time Congress worked so hard to pass legislation that so few supported, so many of which supported it because it won't work, and whose opponents hated it so badly? Certainly not within my memory".

E.J. Dionne, June 22, 2007: "The dynamic in American public life...is the move away from the right and a discrediting of the conservative era".

CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen, June 25, 2007: "Conservatives go 4-4 today at the Supreme Court".

The latest batch of Supreme Court rulings are occurring, including their decision on the infamous "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. Orrin Judd writes, "the Left is going to be hyperventilating somethin' fierce" over their decisions.

And speaking of which, as Ed Morrissey writes, this action to ban free speech by the city government of Oakland and backed by--surprise!--the Ninth Circuit--can't hit the Supreme Court fast enough.

Update: Further thoughts on the SCOTUS' rulings from Stop the ACLU, Gay Patriot, and Betsy Newmark.

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker writes that in an era when "free speech is under attack as, perhaps, never before in our history", the Supreme Court's decision on Federal Election Comm’n v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., is "A Small But Possibly Seminal Victory for Free Speech".

Jeff Jacoby writes:

On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman .

In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity.

Mindless conformity--it's so 1967!

Austin Bay interviews Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) in the latest Blog Week In Review, online now at Pajamas HQ.

Bryan Preston writes, "Rather than stand with the administration against Iran" Joe Biden and the Democrats "have chosen to keep applying political pressure against the administration at home":

It has the effect of a classic pincer move, one pincer political and formed by the Democrats for the purpose of weakening the administration to the point that’s ineffectual; the other pincer formed by the Iranians arming terrorists from Afghanistan to Gaza and nearly everywhere in between. I don’t think it’s a coordinated pincer, but it might as well be: The mullahs probably can’t believe the luck they’re having in getting useful noises and pressure from the Democrats against Bush. So we will see more violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, northern Israel and southern Israel, and Biden will use that violence to argue that “See, this administration can’t do anything right.” Biden will never do two things that might help make the situation marginally better. He’ll never show unity against an enemy of the US as long as a Republican administration is in the White House, and he’ll never just shut his yap long enough for the administration to do what may need to be done.

Read the whole thing.

As Hunter S. Thompson once said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And at the moment, there's nobody weirder than today's professional politicians.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's apparently found his RINO soul mate in Mike Bloomberg, goes politically incorrect and gets it right. Meanwhile, Trent Lott appears to be doing an infinitely weirder RINO impersonation--he was last seen praising Teddy Kennedy (and of course, the Dixiecrats) and is now attacking talk radio--which brought him to the height of his power 13 years ago, thus allowing him to live out the Peter Principle on a national stage.

On the left, that's something that Harry Reid seems to demonstrating right now, as he first unintentionally echoes Mark Steyn--then tosses his quote down the Memory Hole.

Related: Via Instapundit, "Did Reid Really Say That?"

Update: Oy.

Eschewing conventional wisdom, Jules Crittenden isn't afraid to declare a lame duck when he sees one. Or maybe two, depending upon how you look at them.

So when will Mary Katharine Ham make the cover of Cigar Aficionado?

(More Sopranos fever, here.)

Kimberly Strassel of Real Clear Politics writes:

There's been a capitulation on global warming, but it hasn't happened in the Oval Office. The Kyoto cheerleaders at the United Nations and the European Union are realizing their government-run experiment in climate control is a mess, one that's incidentally failed to reduce carbon emissions. They've also understood that if they want the biggest players on board--the U.S., China, India--they need an approach that balances economic growth with feel-good environmentalism. Yesterday's G-8 agreement acknowledged those realities and tolled Kyoto's death knell. Mr. Bush, 1; sanctimonious greens, 0.

Read the whole thing.

(H/T: OJ)

Bill Quick, who gave the Blogosphere its name, believes that its starboard side was crucial in sinking--for now at least--the near-universally reviled immigration bill:

And I have to say that the right blogosphere as a whole did an excellent job of revealing and mobilizing this sentiment. First, we exposed the crudely hacked polls that claimed amnesty was overwhelmingly favored by those they polled. Second, we publicized the polls that showed the true state of affairs - that Americans hated this travesty - and thus gave folks who thought they were alone in their opposition the comfort of knowing that, far from being a lonely minority, they were part of a whopping majority. Third, we turned up the heat on congress, and kept it on flambe until the bill was toast. Fourth, we exposed the bill itself to public scrutiny, so that voters understood what was being attempted supposedly in their name. Fifth, we acted as instant response teams to the lies being told about the bill by the hacks, flacks, and whores desperate to pass it on behalf of the special interests they fronted for.

Ten years ago, this bill would have been passed and signed by the president before most Americans were even aware that it existed. Those days are over.

The right blogosphere has put many notches in its belt - Dan Rather, Trent Lott, Ports Dubai, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales (for SCOTUS), the destruction of the GOP congressional majorities, and now the Bush/Kennedy/McCain amnesty plan. This one was the biggest yet.

Pat yourselves on the back, folks. And welcome to the big leagues.

On the other hand, Politico writes that it's not over yet.

John Hinderaker makes a great point, noting that "I always thought that the Jefferson scandal hurt Republicans, ironically, more than Democrats":

CBS News is reporting that this afternoon, Congressman William Jefferson of Louisiana will be indicted "on more than a dozen counts involving public corruption." No doubt our readers will remember that Jefferson was caught with $90,000 in cash in his freezer.

I always thought that the Jefferson scandal hurt Republicans, ironically, more than Democrats. Jefferson's malfeasance came to light at the height of the "culture of corruption" attacks on the GOP, and I don't think it sank in with most voters that Jefferson is a Democrat. Mostly, it was just seen as more confirmation that Congress is corrupt, and that hurt the party in power. Now, of course, things are different, and the mud will land where it belongs.

Denny Hastert's circle-the-wagons mentality certainly did help matters, but the GOP had lots of other wounds, most self-inflicted, in 2006.

(I'm in the American Airlines' Admirals Club in San Jose, flying out to the Corzine International Motor Speedway, err, New Jersey, if my flight--already delayed an hour--ever takes off.)

Update: Last week, Roll Call discussed the foot-dragging of the Democrats' House ethics committee to explore the Jefferson matter.

Well, it certainly wouldn't surprise me, at this point. As Bill Quick writes, "In the vein of LBJ and Walter Cronkite, I think it is fair to say that if George W. Bush has lost Peggy Noonan, then he has lost the Republican Party". (Though for a contrarian view, Ed Morrissey partially disagrees with Noonan's take.)

Glenn Reynolds has further thoughts on what he dubs the GOP's Death Wish--though, as I've said in the past, without the cool Herbie Hancock or Jimmy Page soundtrack to soften the blow.

Just to continue our trip down memory lane, Peggy Noonan says that it's Pappa Bush meets Jimmy Carter time for GWB, writing bitterly that "President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder":

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.

Needless to say, read the whole thing--and check out James Lileks' thoughts on the same topic, about 23:30 into this MP3 clip from Thursday's Hugh Hewitt Show.

David Frum writes, "It's Divorce":

That's what has happened between President Bush and his party over this immigration bill. And if they insist on pursuing it, I fear it is what will happen between the Senate GOP leadership and the party base as well. The issue has already all but killed the McCain candidacy. A letter from a reader expresses the sadness and anger I see in so much of my mail:

I voted twice for this man and his abdication of the most fundamental executive responsibility, to protect our country from foreign invasion, is cause for regret.

Talk is cheap. The most responsible course of action that this president can take on immigration is to do nothing. Leave it for the next president. Focus on Iraq and then go home.

Signing this bill would render what little good he has done meaningless by comparison.

I wish he were already gone.

If it is divorce, not many want to pay the alimony.

Further thoughts from The Washington Examiner and Jim Geraghty.

Update: Allahpundit notes that the divorce may be mutual:

First it was Chertoff, then Bush, now Chavez: three Republicans, one of them president, another a cabinet member, the third a would-be cabinet member, all not merely criticizing the base’s position on amnesty but impugning their character for taking that position.

A few months ago, I explored the media's Red Queen's Race to the bottom--President Bush seems to engaged in one of his own, regarding the support of his base, and his poll numbers.

Back in January, we linked to a post by David Frum, who wrote:

The day will come, and probably soon, when American liberals and the American left will wake up to the fact that (as Tom Wicker said of Richard Nixon in the book of the same name) on domestic issues Bush was "one of us." Much as they disliked Bush's foreign policies, cultural style, and political methods, he actually had more in common with them on domestic issues than he did with his own political base. It will someday be very hard to explain why liberals so hated Bush. I suppose it just goes to prove that - despite all those left-wing books about the false consciousness of those poor deluded rubes in Kansas - culture trumps economics for elites at least as much as for ordinary voters.

Today, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Richard Cohen discovers something some of us on the right have been saying for a while: if you hold your head just so and look at Bush from the right angle, he looks an awful lot like a liberal.

Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey; it's also worth re-reading Jonathan Rausch's "The Accidental Radical" from four years ago, which remains a pretty good look at Bush's overall governing "strategery".

John Goldberg on the sudden--if not entirely surprising--rehabilitation of John Ashcroft's rep amongst the Beltway left:

If in 2002 I had written that by 2007 Democrats would be singing Ashcroft’s praises as a man of integrity and sound temperament, I would have been laughed out of the room. Right now, predicting a rehabilitation of George W. Bush elicits similar guffaws from the same crowd. But the fact is, if Ashcroft can be rehabilitated, anyone can be.

Read the whole thing.

Mickey Kaus on immigration; Mark Steyn has a modest proposal in response.

Meanwhile, as Hugh Hewitt gets under the boilerplate and read the fine print, he advises, "Send Lawyers, Clerks, Judges, And Background Checks".

Guns and money probably wouldn't hurt, either.

Prominent GOP leaders booed by party faithful over immigration bill. As Glenn Reynolds notes:

I still don't know enough to know if the bill is good or bad. But if the bill is actually a good bill that the GOP base would accept if they read it . . . then that's an even bigger indictment of the GOP leadership for failing to sell it. At this point, they've either mis-sold a good bill, or produced a bad one.

Hugh Hewitt is reading the actual text of the bill (and needless to say, there's lots of text) and recommends that, "the president and the GOP Senate leadership need to postpone any cloture vote until the law is examined, debated and amended".

That sounds remarkably prudent to me.

Meanwhile, "Oklahoma's Brand of Immigration Reform Barely Makes News; Guess Why?"

Is the Immigration Bill DOA when it hits the House?

Update: As Hugh Hewitt writes, "N.Z. Bear has the picture worth 1,000 posts".

More: Mickey Kaus disagrees with Power Line's thesis: "Opponents of the GOP cave-in on immigration would be fools, I think, to rely on Nancy Pelosi's House to kill the legislation...Hugh Hewitt's instinct--to try to stall the bill now, in the Senate--seems sound".

Mickey Kaus has some words of encouragement for those feeling disenfranchised by the Senate's immigration bill yesterday.

Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on the immigration bill: "Whether or not this is a good bill -- which I'm not sure of one way or another -- it's likely to be political disaster for the GOP. Can you say 'death wish?'"

Dean Barnett lists one potential immediate casualty: "Today’s events put the non-viability of the McCain candidacy into stark relief. McCain has committed so many offenses to conservatives over the past six years that he can’t realistically hope to emerge from their shadow".

Update: Meanwhile, another congressional story may be flying under radar while the immigration bill dominates the news, at least in the Blogosphere: "Congress OKs $2.9 trillion budget plan".

More: Ed Morrissey has a contrarian take on the immigration bill:

As I wrote yesterday, this is about as good as we will get in this Congress. In fact, the Democrats probably had enough votes to pass something much more like a wide-open amnesty, given a few Republican votes in support of that and the relaxed attitude of the White House on immigration reform. The GOP did a pretty good job of holding the line and forcing the Democrats to include the border-first triggers, the reduction of the family interest, and the rest of what Kyl managed to retain.

It's not great, and it's not even very good. It's not bad, though, and given our lack of strength in Congress and the White House on this issue, it's a good deal that will strengthen our national security now rather than wait another two years to address it. To quote the Rolling Stones, you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. This is one of those times.

I don't think that argument is going to mollify Hugh Hewitt, who's not a happy camper--to the say the least--on his radio show right now.

"Your university may not honor your military service, but the United States of America does".

--President Bush in the White House East Room for an ROTC commissioning ceremony.

"This is what my 9th grade teacher told me government is all about and I finally got to experience it".

--Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on today's immigration agreement.

Allah writes:

From Drudge bombshell to news article to sinfully delicious talking points to retreat in the span of about three hours.

Might be a new record.

* As defined by Mickey Kaus.

As Glenn Reynolds would say, "They told me that if George W. Bush were reelected, freedom of speech would be on the way out. And they were right".

Or are they?

Andy McCarthy explains why in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s "present hour of need, his only enthusiastic supporter appears to be the president":

Throughout her tumultuous tenure as attorney general, Janet Reno could always rely on Democrats and liberals to circle the wagons when critics ripped her judgment, competence, and forthrightness. They’d close ranks when the opposition claimed her Justice Department elevated political considerations over legal ones. By contrast, in Alberto Gonzales’s present hour of need, his only enthusiastic supporter appears to be the president. Why?

Because of politics. Not politicization, as in partisan obstruction of particular investigations. Rather, good, old-fashioned politics in the best sense of the word: namely, an administration’s accountability to its supporters and its fealty to the policies that induced their support.

The Reno Justice Department, whatever else you may think about it, cared passionately about signal “progressive” causes and backed them to the hilt, regardless of criticism. To the contrary, the Gonzales Justice Department and, indeed, the president, often turn spaghetti-spined when the priorities of their base are at stake. How surprising, then, that when friends are most sorely needed there are none to be found.

You can only tune out your base for so long before it reciprocates.

(Via Ed Morrissey, who reminds us to get used to the endless hearings. "We have two years to live in Subpoenaville".)

This doesn't sound like a smart move on Speaker Pelosi's part:

WASHINGTON, Apr. 24, 2007- - As the House and Senate prepare to vote this week on the final conference report on the $124 billion troop funding bill -- which would also mandate that U.S. combat troops begin withdrawing from Iraq on October 1 at the latest -- Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to come to the Hill tomorrow to brief lawmakers on the progress of the recent troop escalation.

ABC News has learned, however, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will not attend the briefing.

"She can't make the briefing tomorrow," a Democratic aide told ABC News Tuesday evening. "But she spoke with the General via phone today at some length."

A Pelosi aide said the speaker on Tuesday requested a 1-on-1 meeting with Petraeus but that could not be worked out. He said their phone conversation lasted 30 minutes.

Last week House Democratic leaders were criticized by their Republican counterparts when they initially declined an invitation from Petraeus to brief House members on the status of the war due to "scheduling conflicts."

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the decision "irresponsible" and constituted a "dereliction of duty." But by the end of the day Pelosi's office changed course and scheduled a briefing for Members of the House for Wednesday, April 25.

The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says the senator will attend the classified briefing with senators on Wednesday at 4 p.m.

But his mind is also already made up.

Robert Bidinotto, editor of the Objectivist New Individualist magazine agrees with my take from Saturday on Michael Bloomberg and (original inner circle member) Nathaniel Branden's "Stolen Concept" concept.

Speaking of Bloomberg, I was going to comment on his recent fashion faux pas, but the photo of Val Kilmer that Tammy Bruce found today makes Mayor Mike seem like the very definition of sybaritic elegance.

Update: City Journal's Nicole Gelinas has more on Bloomberg's public and private transportation woes.

Jim Geraghty writes, "Today's partial-birth abortion ruling complicates lives for the Democratic candidates. The GOP is probably 90some percent opposed to partial-birth abortion; for them it's a no-brainer":

Even Rudy liked it.

For pro-choice candidates, the interest groups (NARAL, etc.) are likely to declare this decision the first step on a slippery slope, the camel's nose in the tent, etc., and thus they will declare this decision disastrous.

Jim collects quotes from Edwards and Obama, but given the current name of his blog, one candidate's quotes are, at the moment, prominently missing, and are perhaps being formulated as we speak. Given that she'll probably want to run as the successor to her husband's policy that abortion should be "safe legal and rare", it should be interesting to watch her triangulate on this issue, and see which direction(s) she breaks towards.

Update: Jim has revised and extended his post to include Hillary's remarks, which are of a kind with Edwards and Obama. I think her husband's take would have been more artful under similar circumstances.

Don Surber writes:

Irony alert. The Washington Examiner pointed out: Under Bush, unemployment dropped to numbers seldom seen — far below the Clinton years. Clinton’s people counter with well, the stock market took off when he was prez. Wait a second, aren’t Republicans supposed to be the Wall Street guys while Democrats are the blue collar guys?

Not necessarily; just ask John Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards.

According to a Washington Times article from 2003, the Transportation Security Administration's slogan is "Dominate. Intimidate. Control." But it sounds like their real slogan should be more like our headline above, based on this story from Minneapolis' KSTP:

A Canadian woman and her boyfriend didn’t think it was funny when security officials at Minneapolis-St. Paul International made them pawns in an April Fool’s prank.

Kate Burgess and her boyfriend were returning from Mexico when they had a two-hour layover at MSP.

As they placed their bags on the conveyor belt and went through security, Kate’s bag triggered a detector.

According to Kate, when the detector went off a Transportation Security Administration employee said, "That’s it, call police."

As more TSA employees surrounded her, Kate suffered a severe asthma attack.

That’s when a supervisor told her it was an April Fool’s joke.

"They scared me, but even worse they humiliated me…I won’t ever travel through Minneapolis again," Kate said.

In a statement, the Transportation Security Administration said, "TSA staff communicated with Ms. Burgess and expressed our regret. While our inquiry revealed no irregularities in the actual screening process, we do not condone or tolerate inappropriate remarks or behavior by our staff.

Via Michelle Malkin, who asks a question "for Congress or whomever: Why doesn't the zero-tolerance, no-joking rule apply to the chuckleheads at TSA?"

"They're running away with their little curly tails between their legs", writes Glenn Reynolds, adding, "It's a disgrace, but par for the course for this bunch".

Not at all a surprise, of course. But very far removed from how they were actually elected in the first place.

Update: Ed Morrissey explains what comes next:

The President will definitely veto this bill, and the Democrats do not have anywhere near the votes needed to override. That means that Congress and the White House will have to reach some sort of compromise, or else theoretically allow the troops to remain in Iraq but without the funds to either fight or come home. If the President doesn't veto it, he has to start retreating in four months, to which he will not willingly assent. It will take weeks to unravel, and in that time I believe that Congress will work on a much smaller supplemental to keep funding going while the negotiations ensue. Reid, however, wants to wait until after the spring recess to start even on the conference committee talks, which will drag out the event even further.

Undoubtedly, Reid won big by declaring defeat. No one really expected this to pass, but Reid managed to talk Hagel and Nelson into reversing themselves, when even the ladies from Maine remained steadfast. He and Nancy Pelosi made it clear that the last election had its consequences, even if it took them several variations on the defeatist theme to do so.

One thing is certain: Chuck Hagel can skip the exploratory committee for the 2008 race.

Elsewhere, Michelle Malkin explains Reason Number 9,327,235 why the 1970s will never end.

Another Update: "Not with a bang but a whimper".

Coming so quickly after Cathy Seipp's demise, this is dreadful news. As Mary Katharine Ham writes, "Keep Snow in your prayers".

(For all sorts of reasons, this sounds like a smart move by the HuffPost.)

"Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) today asked Former President Bill Clinton if he would be available to testify at the Democrats' Thursday hearing on presidential pardon authority":

"Former President Clinton is no stranger to controversial pardons, most notably the pardon of Marc Rich on his last day in office," stated Ranking Member Smith. "I can think of no better person to address this issue."

At Thursday's hearing of the Judiciary's Crime Subcommittee entitled, "The Appropriate Use of the Presidential Pardoning Power," Democrats are expected to explore what is and is not the appropriate use of pardons, despite a president's plenary power to issue pardons.

President Clinton granted pardons or commuted the sentences of nearly 500 people, including fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose wife donated $450 thousand to the Clinton Library. Other pardons included a person accused of cocaine trafficking and a former Democratic committee chairman indicted on political corruption charges.

The Constitution gives the President the absolute authority to grant clemency, commutation, and remission of fines for offenses. Despite this absolute authority, presidents are not immune from criticism and even congressional attempts to restrict pardon authority.

"Mr. Clinton's exercise of his pardon authority would be of real interest to Members of the Subcommittee," concluded Smith. "I hope he will lend his expertise."

Cute. But something tells me that President Clinton will have another gym workout that he just can't get out of that day.

When someone tells you that he hates America, or that the U.S. deserved it on 9/11, read him this list.

Or as Patterico dubs it, "This is the Dawning of the Age of Inquirious".

Mary Katharine Ham writes, "Put your head between your knees, and kiss your next two years goodbye" as it's Subpoeana Showdown time in Washington:

Dean says Bush is itchin' for a fight, and this will all make the Congress look bad, since they'll be abandoning the war and other pressing matters for a witch-hunt. First, kudos to Bush for getting the word "witch-hunt" in there. It made the headlines and colored the issue his way for at least a news cycle.

Second, I'm not sure dragging this out makes Democrats look that bad. The media will continue to give them a pass, the American public won't know much except that they're tired of hearing about the varying definitions of "executive privilege, and it will blame both Congress and the president for that. Unfortunately for Bush, there have been too many complicated scandals (some legit, most not) pinned on him successfully, partially due to bad damage control at the White House, to suddenly convince people this is just a partisan witch-hunt, I think. And, also unfortunately for Bush, he earned the cronyism charges to some extent with the Brownie and Miers fiascoes, so that's hard to escape as well.

And speaking of the 1970s, it's a chance for the media's only two memes to finally merge this year: Vietnam and Watergate, Part XXXVIII

General Kenobi: I have placed information vital to the refinancing of your 30 year adjustable mortgage into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father in Paramus will know how to retrieve it.

Or is that the Post Office is taking Jonathan Last's beneficent Empire contrarianisms just a bit too seriously? In any event, it's a reminder of something else Jonathan wrote on the topic: what an utter failure the recent trilogy has been to develop characters anywhere near as iconic as the original movies.

In the L.A. Times, where Jonah Goldberg performs somewhat of the same role that David Brooks did at its east coast counterpart before they buried him under the TimesSelect firewall, Jonah writes that "Unity Is Overrated":

It has become a central ritual of our times for Beltway priests like the Washington Post's David S. Broder to lament the coarseness, acidity and all-around ickiness of our polarized political culture. They're not absolutely wrong. All I need to do to appreciate the toxicity of the political culture is check my e-mail each morning.

Indeed, since at least the election of Ronald Reagan, the left and the right have grown ever more snappish with each other. Each feels entitled to take the wheel without suffering any backseat driving. Each side feels the other is illegitimate in some way, which somehow justifies their nastiness. That can be a shame, but really, it's not the end of the world.

We've seen worse. For example, in his 2004 book, "The Two Americas," Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg proclaimed: "Our nation's political landscape is now divided more deeply and more evenly than perhaps ever before."

This might strike some — say, anyone who's seen the scene in "Gone with the Wind," in which all those Civil War dead and wounded are laid out like cordwood — as a bit of an exaggeration. Call me crazy, but such bloodshed seems like a deeper sign of division than a bunch of partisan bloggers sweatily pounding their keyboards, or liberals and conservatives watching different cable news networks.

Read the rest.

Of the recently concluded "Scooter" Libby trial, Mark Steyn writes:

So much of the current degraded discourse on the war -- ''Bush lied'' -- comes from the false perceptions of the Joe Wilson Niger story. Britain's MI-6, the French, the Italians and most other functioning intelligence services believe Saddam was trying to procure uranium from Africa. Lord Butler's special investigation supports it. So does the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Wilson's original charge is if not false then at the very least unproven, and the conspiracy arising therefrom entirely nonexistent. But the damage inflicted by the cloud is real and lasting.

As for Scooter Libby, he faces up to 25 years in jail for the crime of failing to remember when he first heard the name of Valerie Plame -- whether by accident or intent no one can ever say for sure. But we also know that Joe Wilson failed to remember that his original briefing to the CIA after getting back from Niger was significantly different from the way he characterized it in his op-ed in the New York Times. We do know that the contemptible Armitage failed to come forward and clear the air as his colleagues were smeared for months on end. We do know that his boss Colin Powell sat by as the very character of the administration was corroded.

And we know that Patrick Fitzgerald knew all this and more as he frittered away the years, and the ''political blood lust'' (as National Review's Rich Lowry calls it) grew ever more disconnected from humdrum reality. The cloud over the White House is Fitzgerald's, and his closing remarks to the jury were highly revealing. If he dislikes Bush and Cheney and the Iraq war, whoopee: Run against them, or donate to the Democrats, or get a talk-radio show. Instead, he chose in full knowledge of the truth to maintain artificially a three-year cloud over the White House while the anti-Bush left frantically mistook its salivating for the first drops of a downpour. The result is the disgrace of Scooter Libby. Big deal. Patrick Fitzgerald's disgrace is the greater, and a huge victory not for justice or the law but for the criminalization of politics.

Read the whole thing.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "lo and behold, the Democrats are behaving as if Iraq is Vietnam all over again. But it is only now dawning on the Democrats that the Vietnam War wasn't exactly their finest hour":

The Democratic pickle is exquisitely simple: In the past election, they ran as the anti-war party and promised to bring the war to a close, but, like the dog who finally catches the car fender, they're at a loss about what to do now. As Virginia's Rep. Jim Moran says of his fellow Democrats, they "want to make sure this is still President Bush's war," but the only way they can end the war is to take possession of it. The Democratic base thinks that'd be fine. But, one gets the sense, someone in the party's leadership understands that might be a problem.

Long-lasting myths

The Democrats are incapable of escaping the gravitational pull of the Vietnam myths they've nurtured for decades. At the same time, the liberal memory of the Vietnam War has become so gauzy and saccharine with nostalgia that they're unprepared to grapple with the downsides of their own all-purpose analogy. All that seems to matter is proving that the Iraq war not only has been lost but must be lost, lest the Vietnam worldview be invalidated. As my colleague Rich Lowry said in regard to Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha's effort to sneakily thwart the Bush surge: "It used to be that the war had to end because it was a failure; now it must fail so that it can end." For example, Massachusetts' Sen. Edward Kennedy ridicules the notion that a withdrawal from Iraq would have grave humanitarian costs.

"I heard the same kinds of suggestions at the time of the end of the Vietnam War," Kennedy told NBC's Tim Russert, mocking the notion that we'd have a "great bloodbath" with more than 100,000 dead. "And for those of us that were strongly opposed to the war, (we) heard those same kinds of arguments."

Yes, but those arguments were right. Our withdrawal from Vietnam did contribute to a great bloodbath. More than a half-million Vietnamese died at sea fleeing the grand peace Kennedy and his colleagues orchestrated. And more than 1.2 million Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, thanks to the power vacuum created by our "humanitarian" withdrawal. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., a presidential candidate, insists that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq can't make things any worse. In 1975 he took a similar line: "The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now." Someone rent Dodd a DVD of The Killing Fields.

Of course, the costs of defeat in Vietnam were hardly just humanitarian. America's loss at the hands of a small, comparatively weaker nation arguably prolonged the Cold War and has long served as an emboldening example to enemies eager to believe Uncle Sam has a glass jaw — from Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden.

In the wake of 9/11, Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's lieutenant, warned: "O, American people, your government is leading you to a new losing war. O, U.S. people, your government was defeated in Vietnam and fled scared from Lebanon. It fled from Somalia."

The Democratic Party itself — once the leader in vigorous internationalism — has since Vietnam been perceived as fundamentally unreliable on foreign policy by many American voters. Indeed, someone in the party recognizes this, which is why Democrats are working so hard to avoid being seen as the primary authors of U.S. defeat in Iraq, the way they were perceived after the Vietnam War.

Read the whole thing.

Two prominent conservative radio hosts describe the crossroads the movement currently finds itself. Of the verdict in the Scooter Libby trial, Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners:

The libs here are poking the hibernating bear and they're going to wake the bear. You're mad. Everybody that's called me today is fit to be tied over this. This can do more to revive a hibernating conservative movement than anybody else could, plus the liberals and the Democrats own defeat with the US military and so forth. So don't cash in the chips. It's way too soon to do that. That's not even an option. I don't want to hear about it.

But the recent Coulter kerfuffle should also be a wake-up call, as Michael Medved notes:

In the run-up to the fateful election of 2008, conservatives face a clear-cut choice: we can rebuild our movement as a broad-ranging, mainstream coalition and restore our governing majority, or else settle for a semi-permanent role as angry, doom-speaking complainers on the fringes of American politics and culture.

We can either invite doubters and moderates to join with us in new efforts to affirm American values, or we can push them away because they fail to measure up to our own standards of indignation and ideological purity.

In short, we must choose between addition and subtraction: either building our cause by adding to our numbers or destroying it by discouraging all but the fiercest ideologues.

No political party or faction has ever thrived based on purges and insults and internal warfare, but too many activists on the right seem determined to reduce the conservative cause to self-righteous irrelevance.

* * *

Republicans need to return to the open, expansive conservatism of Ronald Reagan: more concerned with bringing in newcomers than driving out dissenters, more committed to winning elections than to scoring points in arguments, more determined to steer the government in the right direction than to sit at the sidelines carping about inevitable decline. We should make skeptics feel welcome as Republicans and urge them to fight the issues inside the party where they can have the most impact.

Every major event, every potential speaker, every resolution, every specific approach, deserves evaluation in terms of effectiveness in party building—winning new adherents to the cause.

We should ask a crucial question before we speak or act: will this draw people to conservative ideas and ideals, or will it serve to turn them off and push them away?

"I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next".

The proverbial picture that's worth a thousand words--and a trillion or so dollars.

Forget Al Qeada--Congressional Democrats are urging President Bush for a surge against his vice president:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday phoned President Bush to air her complaints over Vice President Dick Cheney's comments that the Congressional Democrats' plan for Iraq would "validate the Al Qaeda strategy."

Pelosi, who said she could not reach the president, said Cheney's comments wrongly questioned critics' patriotism and ignored Bush's call for openness on Iraq strategy.

"You cannot say as the president of the United States, 'I welcome disagreement in a time of war,' and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country," the speaker said.

If that sounds familiar, it's not the first time that a prominent Democrat has asked the President to Make. It. Stop:

Early in 2004, after winning the nod as the Democrats' candidate for the presidency, John Kerry boldly shouted to President Bush, "BRING. IT. ON." But in August of 2004, Kerry ended up personally asking President Bush to...Make. Them. Stop--make the Swift Boat Vets stop attacking him. And you could argue that it was at this moment that Senator Kerry lost the election, because he couldn't bother to defend his record in the wake of his former colleagues reminding modern voters of Kerry's early 1970s duplicity while in the Naval Reserves. Instead, Kerry ended up whining about the Swift Vets' opposition to his candidacy to his primary opposition, the incumbent president, inadvertently increasing President Bush's stature as a result.

It's also reminiscent of the reactions by the left to one of Karl Rove's speeches in 2005, in which he said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote back then, the left's high dudgeon responses "just provide an excuse for Republicans to repeat every single stupid or unpatriotic thing that every Democratic politician ever said. And there are a lot of those". And that list has only grown since exponentially.

Dean Barnett notes that saying Massachusetts' Deval Patrick "has stumbled out of the gate as governor would be an understatement":

First, Patrick decided that the modest Ford Crown Victoria that Mitt Romney tooled around in for four years was beneath him. Rather than lease another Crown Vic or remain in the one that Romney used right up until his last day in office, Patrick opted to lease a $46,000 Cadillac. Actually, it would be more accurate to say he opted to have the state lease a $46,000 Cadillac. None of the funds for the gaudy new ride came out of Patrick’s pocket, even though the new governor doesn’t lack for means.

Then Patrick compounded the tin-eared politicking. When the local media challenged him for this excess in a time of fiscal austerity, Patrick defended it as a necessity because Ford had discontinued the Crown Victoria. There was only one problem with this story – Ford hasn’t discontinued the Crown Vic. Patrick later ascribed his mistaken assertion to a misunderstanding with the State Police. Since the Staties lease only about 80,000 Crown Vics a year, it’s understandable how they could make such an error.

Heh.

Meanwhile, in a City Journal essay titled "Steamrolled", Steven Malanga writes that unlike his eventually much-maligned predecessor, "Governor Spitzer loses his first Albany battle".

Ezra Klein writes:

We spend a fair amount of time talking about detainee treatment and Guantanamo. But there is no greater, or more common, human rights abuses in America than those occurring in our overcrowded, constantly expanding, jails.

It never seemed to bother California's former attorney general of course. But then, he had issues of his own to work out. Maybe his successor will do better on this issue, but while it may increase my CO2 emissions, I'm not holding my breath.

Joe, we hardly knew ye!

Update: Meanwhile, Biden's original target, before he shot himself in the foot, carries some pretty extensive baggage of his own, apparently.

More: Will Al Gore jump into the fray on Oscar night? That's what Donna Brazile, his former campaign manager is speculating.

Another Update: Betsy Newmark asks:

Now that Drudge has picked up on this interview, I have to wonder if the media will pay half as much attention to this gaffe by Biden as they do to Republican gaffes. Will the Washington Post run as many stories on it as they did on George Allen saying macaca? Will every story about Biden and his resolution against the war have comments about Biden, the man who spoke so demeaningly of Barack Obama? Will this be taken as some sort of verbal expression of what Biden really thinks about blacks? Will reporters tie together these other racist-tinged gaffes that Biden has made and draw some grander generalization? Or will it be laughed off by all the reporters who just think that Joe Biden is such a nice guy?

As Betsy adds, "I think we know the answers to these questions". Sadly, yes.

According to SurveyUSA, Jim Webb's statewide approval ratings in Virginia are 42% approval, 47% disapproval. My Election Analysis adds, "Approval ratings are below 50% in all geographic areas of the state, 45%-44% approval among independents. This stands in stark contrast to other members of Webb’s freshman class, all of whom are still basking in the afterglow of their recent election".

Maybe it was the tacit suggestion to nuke Iraq in his rebuttal to the president's State of the Union address that did it...

In between offering helpful tips to harried air travelers, Robert Bidinotto links to this quote by David Frum:

The day will come, and probably soon, when American liberals and the American left will wake up to the fact that...on domestic issues Bush was "one of us." Much as they disliked Bush's foreign policies, cultural style, and political methods, he actually had more in common with them on domestic issues than he did with his own political base.

Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

Michael Medved writes that brevity is the soul of wit, especially when it comes to the SOTU (note our use of four-letter acronym as time-saving gesture, only slightly offset by pedantic time-wasting quip afterwards!):

Let's face it: Most SOTU speeches are snoozers -- even when delivered by first class orators like Reagan and Clinton. All the departments of government contribute their own ideas during the preparation period, and expect some nod from the president. These stately, lumbering addresses provide pomp and grandeur and lots of opportunity for partisan applause, but only rarely can anyone remember what the president actually said.

If Bush kept his remarks to less than a half hour (including applause) rather than the customary hour-or-more, he'd throw the opposition and the media (often the same thing, by the way) utterly off balance. Rather than listing all his hopes and plans in the speech, he should sketch out broad visions -- and simultaneously release to the press and Congress far more detailed plans and proposals.

Speaking of throwing the opposition and the media utterly off balance, a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt asked a great question of White House Press Secretary Tony Snow: why are transcripts of key speeches released beforehand? Why not keep your opponents guessing as long as possible?

Ed Morrissey notes that the speech President Bush is giving tonight will be an attempt to achieve a Schwarzeneggerian triangulation with a suddenly left-leaning Congress--but at the strong risk of alienating Bush's conservative base, much as Arnold has already done in California.

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden writes the speech that President Bush would never give, and more's the pity.

(Sorry for the lack of posting. I'm in the midst of quite an interesting project that, if it pans out, should be lots of fun. More details when and if things reach fruition.)

Dean Barnett notes:

In my Saturday post on Peggy Noonan, I wrote that I agreed with Peggy that the President’s “frequent inability to communicate and his constant inability to persuade” was both an irritant and a major problem. For some reason, many commenters and a certain hysterical blogger seemed to miss that paragraph and thought that I declared criticizing the president to be strictly off limits – such people will have to learn to read more closely or others might begin to question their intellectual rigor and honesty. Regardless, the fact that the President at this point in time can’t get through to the American people is hardly debatable. However history remembers George W. Bush, it won’t be as The Great Communicator II.

Sadly, I agree--for a quick comparison, check out this clip of the Gipper in the early 1960s.

But Winds Of Change writes that on the other side of the aisle, today's media lacks the ability to communicate as well, except in shop-worn cliches that lack any sort of context:

Words like "neo-conservative," "civil war," WMD," "democracy," "treason" inhabit the core of the public discussion about Iraq -- and no two people who use them daily can agree on what they mean. Are 20-year-old Sarin gas artillery shells WMDs? Is Dick Cheney a neo-conservative? Is Iran a democracy?

Every 100 deaths in Iraq is a "grim milestone," by fiat of the media. It is the most overworked cliche of local journalism since, "Rain couldn't dampen the spirits/enthusiasm of _____ graduates of _____ high school during last night's commencement ceremony as they looked to the future and pondered the past."

It requires no thought or reflection. It treats round numbers as the definition of reality. This has been a media trope since the first shots were fired ("After days of intense searching by ground and air, U.S. forces on Saturday found the bodies of two soldiers missing north of Baghdad, as the toll of American dead since the start of war topped the grim milestone of 200 ..." -- Associated Press, June 29, 2003). I doubt anyone who wrote any of these headlines could explain to you why death number 3,000 was enormously more significant than death number 2,997. Certainly not to the parents of number 2,997.

Does it help you to know these numbers divorced from context? Are there not many Americans who would consider, say, every 1,000 abortions nationwide a "grim milestone?" Even if you set 1,000 battle deaths (not the AP's preferred 200) as the benchmark for "grim milestones," you had a grim milestone every five days during America's involvement in World War II with nary a "grim milestone" headline to show for it.

As Winds Of Change writes, "Orwell, thou should'st be living at this hour".

Update: Hugh Hewitt grades Tim Russert's performance on Meet The Press yesterday:

Tim Russert is by far the best of the MSM hosts, but that's just not saying much. Not asking four senior senators about Iranian forces in Iraq and Iranian weaponry killing Americans, and to leave largely unexplored the real possibility of post-withdrawal blood-letting on a scale that dwarfs the violence today and which returns Iraq to the violence on a scale of the worst days of Iraq is media malpractice. Imagine interviewing Stanley Baldwin in 1936 and finding time for one or two questions about Hitler, and then following with four MPs and discussing only Spain and Ethiopia, and not Germany.

The MSM is fixated on Bush, and not the war or our enemies. A decade from now --or even sooner-- the collapse of the media's responsibility to at least mention to the public the scale of the looming danger will be obvious.

Just think of it as the news they kept to themselves.

More: Related thoughts, here.

Meanwhile, AP illustrates Winds Of Change's charges perfectly, on a story that doesn't even involve Iraq (unless you're Alec Baldwin, of course).

Power Line's Scott Hinderaker writes:

It is difficult to comprehend that Martin Luther King, Jr. was only 39 years old at the time of his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, or that the prospect of his death weighed so heavily on his mind. He seems too young to have accomplished so much, or to have maintained his judgment under such trying circumstances.

Meanwhile, Star Parker writes that she's "Thinking About Iraq on King Day":

The characteristic of greatness - whether we are talking about a great man or great art - is that it transcends time and place. It dips into that which is universally and eternally true and applies those truths to a particular moment and a particular place.

Re-reading, after many reads, Dr. Martin Luther King's words of Aug. 28, 1963, the famous "I Have a Dream" speech, his greatness rings clearer than ever.

Because King did indeed touch the heavens on that day and pull down kernels of eternal truths about freedom and the condition of man, those words of 40-plus years ago have relevance to our struggles today. They can serve as guidance in these difficult times.

Am I saying that King's message from 1963 can guide us in today's conundrums _ about our embroilment in Iraq, about the Middle East, about America's role in the world? Yes, I am saying this.

Read the whole thing.

Tammy Bruce links to a Bloomberg article which quotes a freshman Democrat from Indiana:

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Representative Joe Donnelly, a freshman Democrat from Indiana, has a blunt message for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: Stick to a ``middle-of-the-road agenda'' or their party's control of Congress may last just two years.

If Pelosi "goes too far one way or another, we're not coming back,'' Donnelly says. He sees his party's victory in the November elections as less an endorsement of its agenda than a rejection of Republican rule: ``People just got real tired of this bunch, and they fired them.''

Donnelly's view reflects those of many of the 30 House Democrats elected in districts previously held by Republicans. Their fragile hold on their seats means they'll be pushing their new speaker, who represents heavily Democratic San Francisco, to limit confrontations with President George W. Bush and the Republicans over taxes, the war in Iraq, stem-cell research and abortion.

Sounds like a wise suggestion to me, but overreach by Pelosi and Reid seem, initially at least, to be the far more likely scenario.

John Hawkins presents "The 21 Most Annoying People On The Right In 2006".

For the most post, I'd say those who made the list richly deserved it. Of Michael Savage, John writes:

Savage is so habitually obnoxious and over-the-top that I'd be tempted to think that he is a liberal pretending to be a conservative in order to make right wingers look bad if there weren't so many people who actually like listening to this clown.

He's not the first to come to that conclusion.

(The flipside of the list is here.)

As this editorial in Opinion Journal notes, Gerald Ford arguably did as a good a job as possible, given the astonishingly weak hand he was dealt in the mid-1970s. As the Journal notes, the 1970s was the decade of "America's Suicide Attempt", as historian Paul Johnson dubbed it:

It is true that Ford was something of an accidental President, the only one in U.S. history never elected as either President or Vice President. Before Nixon picked him to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew as his Vice President, Ford had been contemplating retirement from his Grand Rapids, Michigan, House seat. But like another unlikely President from the Midwest, Harry Truman, he had reserves of honesty and fortitude that served him well.

He made a particular contribution in pardoning Nixon, though he knew Nixon's enemies would accuse him of a quid pro quo. The decision cost him dearly in the polls and may have cost him the election in 1976, but it also spared the country from years of division over a criminal trial that special prosecutor Leon Jaworski seemed determined to pursue.

Congress had trampled over a weakened Nixon, and another Ford contribution was restoring some measure of executive authority. Far more than Nixon, he used his veto pen (66 times in 895 days), blunting liberal excesses after Democrats picked up 46 House seats in 1974. He also deserves credit for resisting the isolationism that was rampant as the Vietnam War wound down. It was a rare period in postwar U.S. history when the public favored spending less on defense.

Democrats exploited the mood in early 1975 to block Ford's funding request for our allies in South Vietnam, as the North began its offensive. Ford pleaded with Congress that "American unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives could seriously affect our credibility throughout the world as an ally," but to no avail. Saigon fell by April, and the boat people and massacres in Southeast Asia soon followed. Thus one irony of this week's praise for Ford as a unifying President: At the time, he was mocked as clumsy and dull, and he was vilified for blocking Congressional priorities. Any of this sound familiar?

Yes--with the exception of villifying Richard Nixon (whose paranoia helped furnish his own noose), the playbook of the left for attacking Republican presidents has changed little since the days of Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, and certainly since Ike in the 1950s.

And incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is living up to it; apparently he'd rather be exploring Inca ruins in South America than attending a former president's funeral. And Jules Crittenden writes:

Last night we saw that Wonkette couldn't wait for the funeral to start bashing Gerald Ford.

Here comes Bob Woodward, who can't wait until Ford is cold to start using him to bash Bush.

Not entirely surprisingly, Thomas DeFrank of The NY Daily News has a different take on Ford's opinions of Bush and Iraq than "the boring fabulist", as Peggy Noonan recently dubbed Woodward.

Update: On the other hand, "Even if [Reid's absence during Ford's funeral] is deliberate, look at it this way — it gives Republicans cover to skip Dhimmi Jimmy’s canonization when that day finally rolls around".

More: And speaking of the seventies and suicide!

Meanwhile, it's probably time to call Ghostbusters--or at least Maceo Parker--as another seventies icon also disapproves of the Iraq War immediately after his death this week.

As always, Mark Steyn is spot-on:

So much of what ails us dates from the Seventies: It was the decade when the Continent fully embraced the social-democratic cosseting that's enfeebled its citizenry and the mass immigration necessary to keep it affordable, the decade when the petro-dictatorships of the Middle East realized the west would do anything to keep the oil flowing, and the decade which gave us the twin templates through which the media, the academy and the other American elites fit all major events, domestic and foreign - Watergate and Vietnam. Though it was a war he inherited from his three predecessors, it fell to Gerald Ford to preside over the final retreat from Vietnam and to bequeath to history the great emblematic image of American weakness and failure: the scrambling choppers over the US embassy in Saigon. As was plain then and is plainer now, the left saw American defeat as its own great victory. They enjoyed the pain the "long national nightmare" inflicted on national self-confidence, which is one reason they love to revive it at every opportunity. (See Pinch Sulzberger's pathetic self-regarding commencement address from last year.) Understanding the enduring damage Vietnam and Watergate would do to the body politic, Ford attempted to lance the boils. He failed, but it was an honorable effort by an honorable man. Rest in peace.

Update: Tammy Bruce looks at Ford through a gimlet eye: "yes, I know he died, and I'm sorry for him, and his family. But there will be no Love Letter here". Read the rest--while I do think Ford was a good man, he was an exceptionally weak president, and as Tammy writes, Ford's ineffectiveness led directly to Jimmy Carter's dire four years malaise.

I'm in the Admiral's Club at D-FW waiting for my flight back to San Jose, California; watch for regular blogging to resume tomorrow. In the meantime, Betsy Newmark and Pajamas have lots of thoughts and links regarding President Ford's death at age 93, and Hugh Hewitt has a devastating Socratic evisceration of the Wall Street Journal's anti-Blogosphere Joseph Rago, who fits Virginia Postrel's definition of a Stasist to a T.

John Hawkins' round-up is here.

Meanwhile, with plenty of material to choose from, Times Watch selects "The Worst Quotes of the Year from The New York Times".

Update: Speaking of worst quotes of the year, get a load of this AP piece from August:

When outsiders think of Cuba, it’s often the lack of political freedoms and economic power that comes to mind. Cubans who have chosen to stay on the island, however, are quick to point out the positives: safe streets, a rich and accessible cultural life, a leisurely lifestyle to enjoy with family and friends....For all its flaws, life in Castro’s Cuba has its comforts, and unknown alternatives are not automatically more attractive....Many foreigners consider it propaganda when Castro’s government enumerates its accomplishments, but many Cubans take pride in their free education system, high literacy rates and top-notch doctors. Ardent Castro supporters say life in the United States, in contrast, seems selfish, superficial, and — despite its riches — ultimately unsatisfying.

— Associated Press writer Vanessa Arrington in an August 4 dispatch, "Some Cubans enjoy comforts of communism.""

More 2006 MSM idiotarianism, here.

Pajamas Media has made public the Inspector General's Official Report regarding Sandy Berger and his theft and destruction of classified national security documents.

Hey, Congressman! Yeah, you in the navy blue flannel Brooks Brothers suit! Big test coming up? Say, an interview with Jeff Stein of The New York Times? Or simply taking over the House Intelligence Committee? Then this is the crib sheet for you. Pass it on when you're done.

James Lileks writes, 'John Bolton is out as U.N. ambassador, and many folks are singing hurrah: Our long international nightmare is over!"

Bolton didn't realize the rules of the game, it seems. The object of the U.N. is not to advance U.S. interests. The object is assure a steady flow of money and excuses to various illiberal regimes, to issue gravely worded statements of concern when a member nation starts slaughtering its citizens in numbers that require two commas, and to condemn Israel.

The last point is particularly important. Israel's mulish refusal to remove itself from the map is a particular affront to the finely tuned sensibilities of the diplomats, and requires weekly condemnatory resolutions, if only to keep the moral faculties limber. Russia could annex the Baltic states and it wouldn't evoke the same ire produced by a civilian casualty in a Gaza raid.

To paraphrase Stalin: One death is a tragedy; a million will be referred to the permanent subcommittee on statistics.

No, the U.S. ambassador must realize that the U.S. is the problem. It was the goody-two-shoes U.S. that didn't play along with Oil-for-Food. It was the U.S. that cruelly tricked the U.N. into putting sanctions on Iraq; it was Bolton who attempted to build international consensus opposing Iran's Atoms-for-Peace program, which was undertaken solely to heat dove nurseries. The man was a pain, and the international community is glad he's gone.

So who would they like to see in his stead? Let's consider the candidates.

Read on. And don't miss Ed Morrissey's thoughts on Kofi Annan's farewell address to one his most important constituent groups, the editors of the Washington Post.

Daniel Henninger writes, "Baker-Hamilton won't stop Beltway bloodshed":

Before this Sunday's talk shows use the Baker-Hamilton bulldozer to bury alive the Bush Doctrine and the "neoconservatives," let us suggest there is an alternative version of the Iraq narrative--one that is less a collapse of doctrine than simply the result of bad, possibly fatal, decisions the administration made in 2003.

The years 2003-05 don't exist in the ISG study, which is almost wholly about the horrors of the past year. But in the war's immediate aftermath, from May 2003 onward, Baghdad was rebuilding, notwithstanding continued violence. Retail commerce came to life. A strong real-estate market emerged. New cars filled the streets, and Iraq's universities reopened. But it was also in May that someone in the Bush administration made the worst decision of the war, as described on this page in June by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an interview with our Robert Pollock.

"The biggest mistake, honestly, if you go back," said Mr. Zebari, "was not entrusting the Iraqis as partners, to empower them, to see them do their part, to fill the vacuum, to have a national unity government."

It sounds like Richard Perle would agree with that assessment.

"When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand."

--Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican National Convention.

Kirkpatrick death at age 80 was announced today; Commentary has reprinted her landmark "Dictatorships & Double Standards" essay that brought her to the attention of Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s. and would eventually lead to her appointment by President Reagan as United States ambassador to the United Nations.

Two words: Bolton Resigns.

Tammy Bruce adds:

Make no mistake--this is not a casualty of the new Dem majority, the loss of Bolton is due to the incompetence and cowardice of the previous Republican majority. And they wonder why they got fired.

And the sad thing is, by and large, they probably really do.

Not sure how things are in Darth Vader's neck of the woods, but down here, Pajamas writes that a dueling battle over orbital defense is coming to planet Congress next year: "Democrats to Gut Missile Defense / Bush to Announce 'Orbital Battle Station'".

Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi tabs Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, for the job. As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

Well, it ain't Alcee Hastings, which is kind of a downer when we're talking about entertainment value, but a major plus when we're talking security of the country. I'll take security in that choice.

Indeed^TM. She also has some thoughts on his voting record--and nepotism. As MKH writes, "Funny how we never heard much abou this stuff until after Dems took control".

Go figure.

In a pair of his trademarked FAQ lists, Dean Barnett looks towards the future, both near term and far. He explores the not-so-rosy future of The Baker Commission; and the legacy of President Bush--of which the jury's still out.

James Webb, class all the way:

The Washington Post reports that at a recent White House reception for freshmen members of Congress, Senator-elect James Webb tried to avoid President Bush. He declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the president. Eventually, however, Bush found him and asked him how his son, a Marine, was doing. Webb responded, "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President." Bush said, "That's not what I asked you; how's your boy?" According to the Post, Webb "coldly" replied "That's between me and my boy, Mr. President."

The Hill adds this charming detail:

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

Kudos to President Bush for making the extra effort to seek him out, knowing that the ill-tempered Webb would more than likely self-destruct. But Power Line notes that Webb's more than willing to change his mind about a president, should the situation require it:

Webb seems to get off on disrespecting presidents. In 1997, he said:

I cannot conjure up an ounce of respect for Bill Clinton when it comes to the military. Every time I see him salute a Marine, it infuriates me. I don't think Bill Clinton cares one iota about what happens in a military unit.

However, when Webb needed Clinton's help, he brought the man whose administration he had called "the most corrupt in modern memory" to help him raise funds. Webb explained his about face by claiming that 9/11 had wiped the slate clean.

Thus, if Bush cared, he could take solace in the knowledge that if the wind changes, so too will the attitude of the erratic opportunist from Virginia.

Allah writes that he's just tossing the base some red meat to momentarily placate them:

Smells like something Webb’s people planted in order to give the Kossacks something to moon over before, in a gesture of scorn and contempt, he spits out their collective schwanz and goes maverick on them.

Jim Webb: the Joe Lieberman of 2012!

Me? I'm just happy he didn't ask for his rifle, as another rootin-tootin' reactionary ex-vet did a couple of years ago before meeting the president.

Update: George Will has some further thoughts.

Allah writes, "Fox News just broke in to say that [Alcee] Hastings has confirmed he won’t lead" the House Intelligence Committee. The Professor writes, "That's bad news for the GOP, but good news for the Democrats, and the country".

We're still in the preseason, but that's O for 2 for Speaker-to-be-Pelosi, incidentally.

Update: In a post titled with a variation of Mickey Kaus's great "Alcee Ya!" pun, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes, "Pelosi reportedly is still resolved to deny the chair to her adversary Rep. Jane Harman, who was in line for the position and (for a Democrat) would not have been a bad choice. So Pelosi still has an interesting decision to make."

Meanwhile, Alcee has his "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more" moment.

Thomas Sowell writes, "This country needs to be able to draw on its best people from every walk of life and from every part of the political spectrum. But the nation is not going to get them if going to Washington means seeing the honorable reputation of a lifetime dragged through the mud just because someone disagrees with you on a political issue":

But the nation is not going to get them if going to Washington means seeing the honorable reputation of a lifetime dragged through the mud just because someone disagrees with you on a political issue.

Our confirmation hearings for federal judges have become a circus and a disgrace. Nominees who have fought for civil rights, even in the days when that was a risky thing to do in the South, have been pictured as "racists" just as a political ploy to keep them from being confirmed.

Washington has become a political meat grinder where character assassination is standard procedure. Clever and glib people say "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." But the far larger question is whether the country can afford to repel people who are desperately needed but who may have too much self-respect to let political pygmies smear their character.

We need to attract allies abroad as well as Americans at home. Yet too many in the media are as ready to trash our allies as they are to trash Americans whose politics they don't like. It is a great game to some. But it is a dangerous game to play when the country is facing unprecedented threats.

Washington, and by extension, the mainstream media, is a world of endless payback for past aggressions, and the cynicism of those who play the game most aggressively increases exponentially daily. If 9/11 and Saddam Hussein couldn't stop that cycle, I don't know what can.

In an article for The American, his own dramatically retooled magazine for the American Enterprise Institute, publisher James K. Glassman writes of James Webb, "Billed as a moderate, the new Virginia senator sounds more like an old-school leftist":

Webb was widely portrayed as a centrist in a race in a state that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964. But such terms--left, center, right--mean less and less. Virginia Postrel, in her superb 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, distinguished between dynamists, who, with realism and enthusiasm, welcome the opportunities of a new world of technology and global exchange, and advocates of stasis, like Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, who fear and rail against the changes.  Writing in the journal under the headline "Class Struggle," Webb reveals himself to be a member of the latter group--a chip-on-the-shoulder populist whose framework of analysis is an obsession with class and power relationships.

Or as Jacob Weisberg recently dubbed them, "The Lou Dobbs Democrats".

Read the rest of Glassman's essay.

Richard Miniter (who was superb on this week's Blog Week In Review), takes the pulse of the GOP.

Meanwhile, Condi Rice sounds like she's caught a bad case of State Department-itis.

(Sorry for the hit & run, telegraph style posts. I'm in the San Jose American Airliness Admiral's Club, getting ready to visit family in New Jersey for Thanksgiving.)

Or not: Steven Malanga expalins why a Democratic Congress won’t help New York.

Newt Gingrich writes that President Bush has a choice to make:

The election results pose two enormous strategic choices for America. First, the obvious outcome of a Democratic-controlled Congress and a Republican White House is the need for bipartisan cooperation in order to get anything done. The key question is: Which kind of bipartisanship will emerge? Will there be a Ronald Reagan approach to bipartisanship which appeals to the conservative majority of the House? Or will there be an establishment bipartisanship which cuts deals between liberals and the White House?

That proved to be a two-edged sword for his father, who was able to (barely) achieve a majority to approve the liberation of Kuwait, but at the cost of raising taxes, with first fueled the minor recession of 1991, and then created a cudgel for the Democrats to use against him in 1992.

Over at Real Clear Politics, John McIntyre has another Republican election postmortem, and some (rather upbeat) thoughts on where the GOP goes from here.

(Via the prophetic Austin Bay.)

Meanwhile, Ex-marks the spot! Click on the above link for Mary Katharine Ham's bipartisan dysfunctional ex-girlfriend theory of American politics.

Bryan Preston of Hot Air has a long, detailed post analyzing how Republicans lost the midterms:

What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses? Nancy Pelosi and her wing of the Democrats are running around as though the elections validated their hard left view of the war and the world, but according to James Carville’s Democracy Corps, this election did no such thing.

What cost the GOP its power? Iraq? Foley? Look at page 6 of Democracy Corps’ post-election report. The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05?

Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history.

As Preston writes, "Combine 9-11 and Katrina, and the Bush administration has had to deal with two of the worst disasters in American history, one brought on by foreign aggression that was years in the making, and one the wrath of nature."

Near the start of the media's wretched Katrina coverage, which had painted the Superdome as the site of numerous rapes, and had fictitious snipers shooting at rescue helicopters, Mickey Kaus presciently noted that, "In short, Katrina gives [the media] a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq." And they milked it for all that it was worth. Preston adds:

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Which confirms something that Peggy Noonan wrote in August:

The other day ABC News's Internet political report, The Note, argued that President Bush, in his then-upcoming veto statement and other presentations, had better be at the top of his game if he wants his party to hold on to Congress in 2006. "[Mr. Bush] is going to need to be focused and impressive, not easy pickings for the Rich-Krugman-Dowd-Stewart axis."

As I read I nodded: That's exactly true. What was significant is that The Note did not designate as Mr. Bush's main and most effective foes Pelosi, Dodd, Reid, Biden, et al. Mr. Bush's mightiest competitors are columnists and a comedian with a fake-news show.

This is one reason the media is important. (Not "are important." Language evolves; usage changes; people vote with their tongues. It's not the correct "return to normality"; it's the incorrect "return to normalcy." It's not "the media are" it's "the media is." People see the media as one big thing.)

One big reason the media is important is that they change things. And they lead. On 9/11 itself it was the media--anchors, reporters, crews sent to the scene, analysts--that functioned, for roughly 10 hours, as the most visible leaders of the United States. The president was on a plane; the vice president was in the bunker and on the phone. It was on-air journalists who informed, created a seeming order, and reassured the public by their presence and personas and professionalism.

So they're important. But very recently it seems to me they're important because it is from the media that Mr. Bush's most effective opposition--attacks on his nature and leadership, attacks on his policies--comes. Among the Democrats an op-ed columnist has more impact than a minority leader.

It is common wisdom that newspapers are over. But when the most powerful voices against a powerful president at a crucial time are op-ed jockeys, newspapers are not over. Or perhaps one should say paper may be over, but news is not.

Rich Lowry has further election postmortems, here.

Update: Related thoughts on Republicans and the media, from a Hollywood (conservative) perspective.

Another Update: Dr. Helen explores the psychology of the big-screen TV:

My patients, regardless of political party, often come in and parrot to me the news they hear on tv without question. You know, the Dems are great, the Republicans evil and such. When I watched the news just now with Nancy Pelosi and Wolf Blitzer, it seemed that they were right in my media room, talking to me personally. TV encourages people to think by linking images in their brains. Are these images stronger and more persuasive on a big screen with high def like the new ones out than they were on the smaller less clear ones? Now that tvs are getting cheaper and cheaper as well as bigger and clearer, will the emotions of viewers become even easier to manipulate? And if so, how will that play out in a medium that is captured by the liberal media? As tv's get bigger, clearer, and cheaper, will we start to see blue everywhere?

That sounds like an environment tailor-made for a story like Katrina, which, while, as Kaus noted, was a way for the media to "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq", also had a similar fog-of-war type environment. It gave the media the opportunity to craft the most lurid stories possible, along with enormous amounts of plausible deniability afterwards.

Whilst currently located thousands and thousands of miles away in Turkey, Jim Geraghty has managed to take a pretty accurate snapshot of Washington, and the political retreads poised to--for lack of a better word--grace the stage in 2007:

And if you think the sole fallout from Trent Lott’s reappearance in the Senate GOP leadership is going to be just “a few bad headlines and a little disgust” … well, I think the word “macaca” can refute that notion. With Lott’s return to leadership, all of the GOP’s outreach efforts to African-Americans that were already sputtering after Katrina just collapsed. What’s more, the GOP just alienated millions of non-aligned soccer-mom-type voters whose sole mental picture of Lott are his comments about Thurmond and his stammering, ham-handed efforts at damage control afterwards. (Yes, the Democrats’ procedural wizard, Robert Byrd, was a Klan member (from one kind of a wizard to another, huh?) and yes, it’s unfair that the media gives Byrd a free pass. Deal with it. Life is often unfair, particularly in Washington, and particularly when dealing with the media.) Every time Lott plays a key role in a vote in the coming two years, we will see or hear the words “Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, who offended many African-Americans in 2002 with comments that appeared to endorse segregation, said today that…”

By comparison, had the GOP Senate caucus gone the other way, the sentences would read, “Senate Minority Whip Lamar Alexander, who in 1996 demonstrated an unhealthy level of enthusiasm for red and black plaid, said today that…”

I don’t say this as a huge fan of Lamar Alexander, but simply to note that he doesn’t come into the job with enormous amounts of baggage that a hostile media and political opponents will utilize at every opportunity. In a media environment such as this, you don’t give your opponent a stick to beat you over the head with.

Of course, our friends on the other side of the aisle may be about to elect House Majority Leader Murtha (Fund's article is a must-read) and House Select Intelligence Committee Chair Alcee Hastings, who was impeached as a judge and convicted for bribery. So our great nation is getting the worst of both worlds.

Unfortunately, it's tough to argue with that.

That's the headline on Robert Bidinotto's latest post; considering whom the Republicans just named as Senate minority whip, I'm afraid its title may be apt.

But then, as Dean Barnett writes, "Is it just me, or is it becoming increasingly apparent that the Republicans and Democrats are determined to engage in a two year dumb-off?"

Update: Michelle Malkin adds:

"Just when the MSM focus had fixed on the Democrats' culture of corruption and business-as-usual, along come Beltway Republicans to remind us of how lame the GOP leadership is."

She dubs it "Another GOP Maalox moment".

Sister Toldjah would like to introduce you to the new Senate Majority leader.

Meanwhile, as the Washington Post attacks Jack Murtha, including mention his 1980 ties to Abscam (those Swift Boaters!), Betsy Newmark writes, "Gee, wouldn't it have been nice if the Post and the Pennsylvania papers had aired these stories before the election, but I guess that would have interfered with the whole 'Republicans are the only corrupt party' around message."

Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

When Murtha shivved Hoyer in June with his announcement, we noted the hubris of Democrats squabbling over leadership positions that they had not yet earned. Now we see the hubris of a Speaker-elect who thought she could re-order her political caucus without considering the views of other members. She's already less than popular with the Congressional Black Caucus (which also may explain the decision by Rangel and Maxine Waters to support Hoyer), and she can hardly afford to alienate many more Democrats if she expects to win election as Speaker.

Pollster Frank Luntz has some excellent suggestions for the GOP if they wish to return to power:

The future must be better than the past. The 1994 Contract With America wasn't a political gimmick. It was a clearly articulated agenda that addressed the day-to-day problems and concerns of average Americans. It was tough on spending, tough on taxes, tough on welfare, tough on crime--tough on all the things Americans wanted less of so that they could have more of what they really wanted: freedom and security. Several dozen members begged their leadership to offer a new Republican contract in 2006 because they sensed, correctly, that the party had lost its focus on the future and was interested only in defending the present. The response? Silence. The next leadership team needs to remember that no vision means no votes.

The mood of this country has changed since 2004, and because of it, some have already written off Republican chances for recapturing the House and Senate in 2008. The question Americans will be asking is whether Republicans learned anything from this election. The answers will determine the future of the GOP: that of a phoenix or a pariah.

The lack of an updated Contract, and the silence over Rumsfeld until immediately after losing suggests a GOP that has essentially been playing prevent defense, since about the time that Social Security reform was tabled. As any NFL coach will tell you, in a tight game, that's usually a recipe for defeat.

Last week, Glenn Reynolds wrote, "Say what you will about the elections, but I think the Democratic Congress is going to bring us a lot of comic relief."

Tough to argue with that!

Update: "Do not taunt Happy Fun Speaker Pelosi"!

Update: Mickey Kaus spots the Murtha Mobius Loop:

Of course, [the] more Murtha thrashes around like a frantic whale, the more attention he attracts--and the more he puts Pelosi's rep on the line, and the more he makes her pull out all stops to help him. See this Corner analysis.

Thrash on, Jack!

Why is Nancy Pelosi endorsing Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Okinawa) over the seemingly more moderate Steny Hoyer? Pork plays a big, big part of it, as Ed Morrissey explains in a post well worth your time.

Mark Steyn explains why, shortly before the midterms last week, the US didn't suffer the equivalent to the Madrid subway bombing--an 2004 Al Qaede attack carefully timed to occur shortly before that country's elections:

The enemy aren't a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.

Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.

And that does seem to be the incoming strategy du jour, doesn't it? As Glenn Reynolds writes, acquiescing to a retreat from Iraq is "the sort of thing that could make the Republicans a minority party for the next 40 years, and deservedly so".

Over at the Chicago Boyz blog, Steven Den Beste spots a contrast in post-election reactions:

2000, Democrats: "We wuz robbed!"
2002, Democrats: "We wuz robbed again!"
2004, Democrats: "We wuz robbed yet again!"
2006, Republicans: "Bummer. Oh, well, we'll do better next time."

Read the rest. Apropos of nothing, I love this line on his own blog, where Steve writes: "1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us."

On the bright side, at least Ingsoc comes with a pretty bitchin' soundtrack though. (In a fine example of synchronicity in action, I'm actually listening to it right now.)

In USA Today, Jonah Goldberg places the midterms into perspective:

Now that the midterm elections are over, and the GOP has lost the House and possibly the Senate, the Republicans like the referendum spin after all. This was just a year to throw the bums out, they say, and a few scandal-plagued bad apples cost the barrel a whole bunch. Meanwhile, the Democrats insist that voters made a bold "choice for change," whereas before, change merely meant "not Bush."

Now change means whatever Pelosi, Reid, New York's Sen. Charles Schumer and Co. want. This is a major bait and switch. If I tell my waiter, "I don't want to eat this hamburger," I've made a choice for change. That doesn't mean I've automatically embraced whatever he brings me in its place. A moldering pottage of road-killed badger is no less change than a steak. But it's not necessarily what most diners have in mind.

Republicans will have a tougher time winning the spin war, not because they have the worse argument, but because they have a worse environment to make it in. America has been moving to the right since at least 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Since then, the GOP has seen its power and popularity grow as a result, albeit not in perfect tandem. Bill Clinton beat the first George Bush largely because he ran as a centrist Democrat. When he wavered in his centrism, the increasingly conservative electorate punished him with the 1994 Republican takeover of both the House and the Senate, which lasted until this week (not counting the 2002 switch in the Senate caused by the defection of Vermont's Sen. Jim Jeffords). And, of course, in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush won back to back elections. In other words, the GOP was due for a shellacking, and any shellacking would seem like a sea change. But in a historical sense, this week's shellacking was a bit lacking.

Since the direct election of senators (i.e. the past nine relevant midterm elections), the average losses in a president's sixth year have been 34 House seats and seven Senate seats. By that standard, the Democrats came up just shy of average. Republican losses in the Senate in 1986 were worse, but few now remember those elections as a national repudiation of conservatism. Yet that's how we're supposed to interpret this week's news. That's hard to do if you look at the candidates who put the Democrats over the top.

Sen. Joe Lieberman's win in Connecticut was hardly a victory for the progressive base.

If Sen. George Allen of Virginia loses, it will be partly because he contracted a terrible case of Dukakisitis — a debilitating disease that causes the victim to run cartoonishly awful campaigns — and because Democrats threw in former Republican Jim Webb, a gun-toting, big-military, anti-affirmative action, right-leaning populist type who quit the Reagan administration as secretary of the Navy because it wasn't hawkish enough.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Bob Casey unseated Sen. Rick Santorum because he's a nominally pro-life Democrat. Indeed, according to data collected by the leftwing Media Matters for America, 16% of the Democratic candidates in the most competitive races described themselves as "pro-life."

There are other telling indicators. A Fox News election day poll suggests that perhaps a third of supporters of the gay-marriage ban on Virginia's ballot voted for Webb, while similar bans passed in several other states as did a ban on racial preferences in Michigan. Shortly before the elections, one in five self-described independents were "very enthusiastically" voting Democratic.

'Fat and lazy'

These are hardly indications of a sudden lurch to the left in American politics. The GOP got thrown out of office because it got fat and lazy and because Democrats — with the help of a transmission-belt media — convinced a lot of voters that they could simply change the channel on the war by voting for "change."

The great irony is that the best thing in the world for the Republicans — though perhaps not the country — would be if the Democrats actually believed their spin and tried to act on a mandate that isn't there. Given the underlying historical trends in conservatism's favor, that would ensure another victory in 2008 for the GOP — as the party of change.

I'm not at all positive that this is merely a two-year timeout, particularly in the Senate, where, as I understand it, far more Republicans are up for re-election in 2008 than Democrats. But on the other hand, immediate post-election actions such as this and this make it sound like it's back to the radical chic 1970s for Democrats, and not towards the center, where the bulk of the electorate seem to be.

Update: More here:

Sen. Evan Bayh, a veteran Indiana Democrat, said Tuesday’s election was a vote against the status quo and not an affirmation of his party’s agenda.

In an interview Bayh, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, said most Americans don’t really know what Democrats stand for, Gannett News Service reported.

“And if we serve up a highly partisan, ideologically extreme, Democratic version of what they just voted against, we’re not going to do very well.”

Gee, you think?

Another Update: Charles Krauthammer adds, "This is not realignment":

As has been the case for decades, American politics continues to be fought between the 40-yard lines. The Europeans fight goal line to goal line, from socialist left to ultra-nationalist right. On the American political spectrum, these extremes are negligible. American elections are fought on much narrower ideological grounds. In this election the Democrats carried the ball from their own 45-yard line to the Republican 45-yard line.

The fact that the Democrats crossed midfield does not make this election a great anti-conservative swing. Republican losses included a massacre of moderate Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest. And Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats, brilliantly recruited by Rep. Rahm Emanuel with classic Clintonian triangulation. Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, antiabortion, pro-gun, anti-tax -- and now a Democratic House member.

The result is that both parties have moved to the right. The Republicans have shed the last vestiges of their centrist past, the Rockefeller Republicans. And the Democrats have widened their tent to bring in a new crop of blue-dog conservatives.

Not surprisingly, I agree with that last paragraph. But Betsy Newmark is quick to add that while that sounds good on paper, it's probably not going to work out anywhere near as smoothly in real life:

This may all be quite true. But that doesn't mean that the liberals who are in the leadership of the Democratic Party won't be in control and they certainly aren't going to suddenly become moderates just because the victory was narrow. Can you see John Conyers or Charlie Rangel holding back on all that they have wanted to do for the past 12 years just because of a narrow victory? That would be the biggest surprise of all from this election.

Nancy Pelosi has her work cut out for her, but unlike the last 12 years, as Speaker of the House, she'll be given lots and lots of room for error by the legacy media.

At first glance, I think this is a result of the usual post-election loss deck chair rearranging rather than Bill Maher's show-biz hypocrisy, but there’s no additional detail to go by at the moment.

Will Michael Steele replace him?

There seems to be two takes on Donald Rumsfeld's resignation/walking the plank. On the one hand, there's the "Brilliant Timing!" strategy, which Mario Loyola of National Review sides with:

What's interesting about the timing is that this morning we woke up to a new Democratic congress, and by the time of the evening news everyone was talking about the new secretary of defense. Another suspiciously well-timed blockbuster announcement from the White House.

On the other, there's the "are you kidding me?!" timing, of which Dean Barnett is a proponent of:

In my travels through America’s ranking conservative circles the last few months, it is no exaggeration to say that the only praise I ever heard regarding Donald Rumsfeld came from my own mouth. As unpopular as Rumsfeld had become in liberal circles, he was even less well liked in conservative circles where his brusqueness and arrogance were not just the stuff of legend but were experienced first hand. Frequently.

So I was stunned when President Bush told the nation a week before the election that Donald Rumsfeld would be remaining through the end of his term. First, this hadn’t squared with what I had heard from insiders who tend to be reliable in regards to such scuttlebutt. Second, this seemed like a maladroit play since the only conservative I knew who really wanted Rumsfeld to stay was me. While I was flattered that the White House would go to such lengths to ensure my enthusiastic support (perhaps they saw how I had personally sunk the Allen campaign with a few withering phrases), the gesture really wasn’t necessary.

Thus it was a bizarre coda to the election season when the President “resigned” Rummy yesterday. If he was going to deep-six the SecDef, it would have made a lot more sense to do it a few months earlier and signal a “new direction” in Iraq (however bogus or fanciful) to a country that genuinely pined for one. Moreover, if he was going to fire Rummy the day after the voting was done, why did the President alienate undecided voters by falsely declaring his intention just days earlier to go to the mattresses on behalf of his beleaguered Pentagon chief?

It makes no sense. There’s not enough lipstick in the world to preetify this pig of a political move. The White House’s political operations seem to be perpetually stuck in Katrina-mode, and that’s not good news for any of us.

On the upcoming Pajamas Blog Week In Review this week, Glenn Reynolds posits that the fifth anniversary of 9/11 would have been perfect timing for Rumsfeld's resignation to be announced, with both a historical event for cover, the chance for a positive spin put onto it, and the ability for Republican candidates to hit the stump discussing the new approach to Iraq that Dean mentions above. Throwing him overboard yesterday, makes President Bush look small, as Mark Steyn is noting to Hugh Hewitt today, even as I'm typing this, paraphrasing the remarks he wrote on his Website yesterday:

To fire him mere hours after the polls closed makes the President look small. I'm reminded of when Harold MacMillan fired some of his closest cabinet colleagues 45 years ago, and Jeremy Thorpe stood up in the House of Commons and wryly remarked: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life."

Update: Here's a parody of a Rumsfeld interview, in which the hologram of Rumsfeld himself parses the "Political Jujitsu" theory:

Nobody saw this move coming yesterday. Nobody was prepared. It was a brilliant shifting of weight. Yesterday was supposed to be the Democrats big day. They were all going to wear new suits and dresses and give speeches congratulating themselves and talking about how they were going to fix the country. Instead all the news programs spent that time speaking about my resignation and today all the print media will be talking about me and my successor. The Democrats can't even complain because they have been practically begging for my resignation. By the time this dies down - nobody will want to look at their new suits or pretty dresses and they sure won't want to hear their flowery speeches because the time would have been well past that. The bonus is that the Main Stream Media doesn't even see how they were used. Brilliant move by the President.

ALR: But Mr. Secretary are you saying your tenure as Secretary of Defense was ended simply to control news cycles?

Rummy: Goodness no. When all is said and done I will be the longest serving Secretary of Defense in history. All Secretaries of Defense step down. This just happened to be the right time for me and if the President was able to time the announcement to take the wind out the sails of some blowhards well then that's just gravy. The important thing to me is that our brave men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are honored and protected and I think this resignation helps with those ends.

ALR: Again Mr. Secretary I apologize but I don't follow your reasoning.

Rummy: Well Chris you understand the process involved here correct? It will be a few months before Bob Gates even gets his confirmation hearing. The administration will be able to use the confirmation hearings and my farewell tour to reinforce the case of what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest. When the memoirs and the latest Bob Woodward-style inside looks start coming out in the ensuing years, months, or heck, weeks, based on quickly the media moves these days, I'll be curious to know the real reason.

More: "GOP furious about timing of Rumsfeld resignation".

Dick Armey, who along with Newt Gingrich, was one of the headmasters of the Class of '94, puts the election into sharp perspective: "I've always wondered why Republicans insist on acting like Democrats in hopes of retaining political power, while Democrats act like us in order to win."

Read the whole thing.

Update: Bill Whittle emails Glenn Reynolds:

Over in Tim Blair's comment section, a guy named Dave S. said this:

"The Republicans lost and the Democrats won for the same reason -- they distanced themselves from their base. "

That's the sentence of the year, in my opinion.

Is John Bolton and The Moustache Of Doom about to join Rumsfeld on the golf course?

The Democrats have won control of the House, and as of right now, it looks like the Senate as well. On the other hand, they won several of their races with Republican-lite candidates such as James Webb (if Webb does indeed pull it out), and as Glenn Reynolds writes, "Huh. Pro-war Lieberman -- targeted by antiwar types on that issue -- wins. Chafee -- who was much more anti-war -- loses". So you can't quite call it back to September 10th. And in individual states, some very conservative bills have passed as well.

Always the optimist, Hugh Hewitt looks at the good news for Republicans in today's results:

Hillary's path back to the White House is much more difficult with her party in the majority in the House, and much much more difficult if the Senate falls to Harry Reid's command as well. Clarity as to her party's fecklessness will be back within the first six months, and the GOP frontrunners --Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney-- do not have to serve in the almost certain to be paralyzed Senate.

The Beltway-Manhattan media elite is now stuck "covering" Democratic majorities. Sure, they will go easy on them, but it is much more difficult to cover for a majority than a minority.

And it is a wonderful day for new media, especially talk radio. For two years we have had to defend the Congressional gang that couldn't shoot straight. Now we get to play offense.

I am concerned for the country that the Democrats have won, but the Republicans are indeed going to find this sojourn in the minority a potentially very good thing.

If the GOP adopts and refines the tactics the Democrats have used for the past four years all will be well two years hence, and perhaps even better than well.

Just as long as they don't adopt their tone.

Last year at this time, Jonah Goldberg preciently wrote:

Behold: We have entered the Age When Dinos and Rinos Rule the Earth. See them battle each other for absolute dominion!

Though this might sound like a cool monster mash of the "Mechagodzilla versus Godzilla" variety, it's a good deal less exciting and more depressing, like a taste test between 2% milk and soy milk. What we are witnessing is the dawn of the boring phase of the Great Republican Realignment, and it promises to have liberals and conservatives alike going bonkers.

I should back up. Dinos, of course, are "Democrats in Name Only." Rinos are their GOP counterparts. Nobody actually ever admits to being a Republican in name only. Rather, these are epithets used to describe politicians of insufficient ideological purity or partisan backbone. Think David Gergen without the smoldering sexual intensity. Or, if you can't, think moderates, squishes, apostates, New York Times-pleasing "mavericks," centrists, and all the others who want to "get beyond labels" or get a standing ovation from the Brookings Institution.

Galloping toward the center is nothing new in American politics. The parties have always regressed to the mean. The center of gravity is in the, uh, center. What's changed is that the center has — finally — been moving an eensy bit to the right.

If you go by the bills that won, and the candidates that won, that sounds correct--several individual conservative Republican candidates didn't win--but most far left anti-war types like Ned Lamont didn't clean-up, either. As Jonah mentioned in his recent TCS podcast with me, Democrats win when they move towards the center (just ask Bill Clinton), and right now, the center is where the action is. That doesn't sound like an environment that will be smooth sailing for a quintessential San Francisco Democrat like Speaker Pelosi over the next two years, but we'll see.

Update: "The GOP lost. Conservatism prevailed".

More: Kevin McCullough writes:

Make no mistake... America IS a center-right nation and election night 2006 confirms this!

No I'm not smoking anything...

And yes it will come back to haunt democrats in the days to come.

More centrism here; this is downright conservative--though not very libertarian.

Meanwhile, Second Amendment stalwart Dave Kopel writes:

I do not disagree that the Democratic gains in Congress will, on the whole, be harmful for the economy, and extremely dangerous for the war against Islamofascism.

Nevertheless, the class of pro-gun Democrats who will be joining the House and the Senate includes some who will eventually become party leaders, and who will help move the Democratic party back towards its traditional position of respect for the civil liberties of the American people. A very constructive development, in the long run.

Update: "Radio Equalizer" Brian Maloney writes, "Rather than being won by Democrats, this election was lost by Republicans". Tom Delay agrees.

More: "Even Charlie Rangel admitted that people didn't vote for Dems because they're liked, but as a protest against the current situation."

John Kerry is predicted to be the next president of the United States in 2004!

In other early polling data, "Remember: As goes Guam, so goes Guam".

Elsewhere, Allahpundit (caffeine be upon him tonight) will be tracking returns throughout the night.

Mickey Kaus asks, "What does it tell you about a political party if in a year of epic disaster for their opponents the best they can hope for is a 51-49 majority in the Senate?"

Meanwhile, in Opinion Journal, Arthur C. Brooks picks up on a theme that Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayward discussed with me in our TCS Daily pre-election podcast:

By all rights, the Republicans left in Congress after this election should be able to pool to work in one minivan. Instead, they are probably facing a 10% setback in House seats--hardly a disaster by midterm election standards. What's more, many of the Democrats at the vanguard of today's political "revolution" are not exactly left-wing zealots. Robert Casey, who leads incumbent Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, opposes abortion rights. On issues of gun control and immigration, Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee sounds like a Republican. James Webb, who seeks to unseat Virginia Sen. George Allen, actually used to be a Republican. The lesson is that Democrats can win modestly if the Republicans implode, and preferably if they look more or less like Republicans. This is hardly a mythic victory for the American left; indeed, the larger cultural picture--in which the election is but a minor political datum--remains strikingly bleak for American liberalism.

Read the rest for Brooks' thoughts on why that is; this sort of over-the-top fearmongering and hyperbole is a big reason, in my book.

I voted an hour ago in my California suburb, and once we got past a brief glitch where they listed as inactive, despite having voted in 2004, things went perfectly smoothly. The electronic voting machine was simple and easy to use, and generated a paper receipt stored in the machine as well, in case its CPU crashes.

But a Hugh Hewitt reader is reporting very different results from the electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania.

In a separate post, Hugh writes, "Rick Santorum is going to have to pay for many lawyers"; the Election Law blog currently has an "Orange" alert for the chances of election litigation nationwide.

Update: Whoops--guess I spoke too soon about how smoothly things were running in California--I blame Haliburton. Or Diebold. Or maybe Kinko's.

Related: Over at Tech Central Station today, Glenn Reynolds reminds us "Why We Should Worry More About Vote Fraud":

As I write this, nobody knows how the elections will turn out. That hasn't stopped some preemptive claims of fraud, though:

Pelosi cautioned that the number of Democratic House victories could be higher or lower and said her greatest concern is over the integrity of the count -- from the reliability of electronic voting machines to her worries that Republicans will try to manipulate the outcome.

"That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?''

Hmm. I thought there was also the variable of how the voters decide to vote on Tuesday. Pelosi seems to regard that as a foregone conclusion, though the polls have been wrong before.

But this sort of talk -- destructive and self-serving as it is -- merely underscores a point I've made before: An election system that is less than transparent is one that's open to conspiracy theories and fear of fraud, whether or not fraud is actually present. And I've heard quite a few other Democrats echoing Pelosi -- and quite a few Republicans speculating that a Democratic Congress will ride in on a wave of votes from dead people and illegal immigrants. That sort of thinking seems much more common among respectable members of both parties than it was a few years ago, and I think there's reason to fear it's getting worse.

For four years now, Prof. Reynolds has been a vocal proponent of paper ballots over electronic voting machines, and here's yet another vote in their favor: ripped paper's a lot cheaper to replace when a frustrated voter blows a gasket and takes it out on the voting booth:

In Pennsylvania, a would-be voter was arrested at a polling place in Allentown, where election workers said he smashed an electronic voting machine with a paperweight.

Authorities didn't know what caused the outburst. "He came in here very peaceably and showed his ID, then he got on the machine and just snapped," volunteer Gladys Pezoldt told The Morning Call of Allentown.

The machine's screen was damaged and it was not immediately clear if votes recorded on the machine could be retrieved. Police said the man faced charges of felony criminal mischief and tampering with voting machines.

Or as my wife just said to me, "Great--we have 'going postal', 'road rage', and now 'touchscreen rage'".

On The Other Hand: Paper has its flaws too, of course.

No, we don't have any early poll numbers. But we do have a report of a poll worker in Kentucky who's been charged with assault for "for allegedly choking a voter and pushing the voter out the door", according to AP.

I was just on Tammy Bruce's radio show discussing this incident, gallows "humor" at Newsweek, and other election day craziness--which Michelle Malkin is documenting throughout the day; and Instapundit will no doubt be posting about as well.

The Anchoress, Fausta, and (of course) Pajamas are loaded with links to keep you busy while waiting for the voting machines--whatever kind they are--to open.

And in the exact opposite of those posts--Bill Whittle is back with another long, long post, with very, very few links: he's written 8,497 words; read every one of them.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt writes:

I will be up early looking for the first wave of Beltway-Manhatten media machine reports of doom for the Republicans and waves for the Democrats.

Don't believe a word of it.

And there will be many, many early words tomorrow, and no doubt, more than a few exit polls (real or imagined, ala 2004's election day) leaked, despite the networks' best promises to the contrary.

Brendan Miniter writes, "Regardless of the outcome of today's elections--and recent polls show races tightening in favor of Republicans--if the GOP wants to be competitive on the national stage, it will have to first find a way to become competitive again in the Northeast".

Related thoughts, here.

Mary Katharine Ham is calling for you: "There are so many fun and exciting Republicans just waiting for you to call them."

P.J. O'Rourke once wrote a well-known book titled Parliament of Whores, but Minnesota's attorney general appears to be taking the title just a little too seriously, Power Line writes:

Here in Minnesota, Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty is locked in a tight re-election battle against Attorney General Mike Hatch. By any normal standard, Pawlenty's record is fantastic, and he is a highly talented politician who should have no trouble gaining a second term. But this year, it's not easy for any Republican running in a state like Minnesota.

Hatch has been around for a long time, and he reminds me a bit of Richard Nixon. Hatch is reasonably able, but seems ill-suited to politics. He is not very likable, frankly, and seems to struggle constantly to restrain his volcanic temper. Yesterday, Hatch may have doomed his long-cherished hope to become governor when, in a burst of anger, he called a reporter from the Duluth newspaper a "Republican whore."

As John Hinderaker adds, "I just realized I forgot to explain the title of this post. The reporter whom Hatch called a 'Republican whore' is a man. If it had been a woman, the race would be over".

Those Shirts, or some enterprising blogger with a Cafe Press account could have a lot of fun with Hatch's hiccup.

The Pajamas Blog Week In Review election preview podcast should be up later today at this link. If the anticipation is too much for you and you need an additonal 10ccs of pre-election political podcasting while you're waiting, tune into my interview with Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayward over at TCS Daily, or this podcast with Lorie Byrd of WizBangBlog.com, John Hawkins of RightWingNews.com, Scott Elliott of ElectionProjection.com and Richard Ross of ConservativeswithAttitude.com.

(Found via Betsy Newmark.)

A few years ago in the NFL, the league resorted to stopping beer sales in the fourth quarter to keep rabid fans in places like the Cleveland Brown's Dawg Pound calm. Short of taking away obsessed political junkies' cable TV and cable modem access, I'm not sure what the solution is to this week's burgeoning fourth quarter political lunacy. It's much like what occurred during the endgame of the 2004 election:

Yesterday, a crazed nut tried to rush George Allen's campaign staffers. And Karl Rove's mind control rays somehow caused the attorney and former Democratic candidate for governor of Maine who was behind the November Surprise of 2000 to wear an Osama bin Laden mask and toy guns and hand grenades on the side of the road in Maine, where he was promptly arrested. (Halloween prank gone awry? No, I don't get it either. But I guess it's better than the weird duck-billed fishing hat he was photographed wearing in 2000.)

But they all pale into significance when compared to The Fresca Smear.

Update: Speaking of the one fourth quarter incident that probably could have been avoided through judicious Fresca banning, these fellows have a response that's well worth reading.

Will Kerry's gaffe hurt him in 2008? And over at the temporarily reborn Kerry Spot, Jim Geraghty wonders how it impacts the competition on the other side of the aisle in the Senate:

But if this Kerry thing dominates the last week of the campaign, a big reason is going to because the Media's Favorite Republican refused to provide cover to Kerry. Instead, as Byron reports, he's body-slamming Kerry. Hard.

If 2006 turns out to be a not-that-bad year for Republicans, and this story is credited with being a crucial late factor, then McCain - who already has a lot of Republicans owing him favors for helping them out on the campaign trail - is probably going to get a lot more conservatives saying, "You know, McCain might not be such a bad party man after all..."

When Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon last appeared on the "Blog Week In Review" podcast, he quipped that the 2008 presidential election begins the day after the midterms. In actuality, Kerry's blunder and McCain's response may signal the start of it right now.

Update: More 2008 impact: John J. Miller writes, "This year's campaign already has dashed the presidential hopes of George Allen. I suspect that he won't even run". Actually, if he wins next week, I think he still might run, but he'll probably be too damaged to win the nomination. But who knows? Nobody suspected that Kerry would be the last man standing in his party's presidential race, during the Dean-obsessed fall of 2003.

Handing a nice midterm bon-bon to the GOP, John Kerry steps in it. But then, he's an old hand at this stuff.

Over the weekend, I noted that Lynne Cheney and Bill O'Reilly each asked their interviewer the question; Kerry's major gaffe allows every Republican up for reelection a chance to ask it of the person he's running against.

Update: Charlie Rangel also lost it recently, but then that's nothing new, either.

Meanwhile, Dean Barnett puts all the pieces together:

Democrats must be cursing that damn Karl Rove. How does he do it? From where in the black depths of his soul did he conjure the idea of putting a microphone in front of John Kerry’s mouth during the last week of a campaign season? We all know the truth now, and it is incontrovertible: Karl Rove is one magnificent bastard!

In a more serious mode, Dean adds:

John Kerry thinks his service in Vietnam four decades ago means his every comment and action should be beyond reproach. It doesn’t work like that. Ask Duke Cunningham.

He's also still counting on the 1972-era media to cover for his gaffes. It doesn't work like that these days, either.

Update: Not surprisingly, retired Col. Austin Bay, whose weekly podcast I produce, isn't very happy with Kerry's remarks; read the whole thing.

I have an election preview with Jonah Goldberg, the editor-at-large of National Review Online, and Steve Hayward, the author of The Age of Reagan, over at TCS Daily.

(Only a handful of Klingons and Cylons were harmed in the making of this podcast.)

The dead have arisen--and they're still not voting Republican! (Sorry Bart.)

Maybe Harold Ford can chart the eschatological implications of this development...

Update: Or maybe we could ask Joel Stein of The L.A. Times for his take.

In her latest op-ed, Peggy Noonan writes:

In the Republican base, that huge and amorphous thing, judgments are less tough, more forgiving. But there too things have changed.

There remains a broad, reflexive, and very Republican kind of loyalty to George Bush. He is a war president with troops in the field. You can see his heart. He led us in a very human way through 9/11, from the early missteps to the later surefootedness. He was literally surefooted on the rubble that day he threw his arm around the retired fireman and said the people who did this will hear from all of us soon.

Images like that fix themselves in the heart. They're why Mr. Bush's popularity is at 38%. Without them it wouldn't be so high.

But there's unease in the base too, again for many reasons. One is that it's clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of "conservative."

He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining. He didn't go to the people whose loyalty and support raised him high and say, "This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm changing things, here's my thinking, here are the implications."

He didn't? Maybe I'm not following the point that the nearly always astute Noonan is trying to make, but wasn't Compassionate Conservative pretty loudly discussed and debated during the 2000 election--and beyond?

Well, now that I have your attention, the latest Pajamas "Blog Week In Review" podcast discusses Kinky Friedman, and other third party Texas gubernatorial candidates, along with Joe Lieberman's third party run in Connecticut.

The Democrat former mayor of New York offers some advice on Iraq along with his election predictions for November. And speaking of which, sorry for not much posting on Tuesday--I'm puting together a podcast which also contains some election predictions from a couple of popular journalists/pundits whom I interviewed for TCS Daily; watch for this to go up fairly soon.

Last week, I linked to a Rich Galen essay on how November could see loads of Al Gore-style lawsuits launched to contest close elections. John Fund picks up the theme at Opinion Journal.

At least at first glance, this sounds like a sign of desperation, as Democrat Harold Ford Jr. crashed Republican Bob Corker's press conference this morning for an impromptu debate.

Update: No wonder Ford lost it today: "Big news in Tennessee: Instapundit voted for Corker".

Rich Galen writes that November could be a long year:

I think it is very likely that we will not know whether Republicans or Democrats will organize the House until the vote for Speaker is taken sometime in the early afternoon of January 3, 2007.

As of today, the last three people this side of the planet formerly known as Pluto who think the GOP will maintain control of the Congress are Karl Rove, Mary Matalin and me.

Let us assume that one side or the other ends up with a three seat margin: The GOP holds its losses to 12 seats; or the Dems pick up 18 seats.

That assumes that every one of the 435 individual elections produce clear winners on election night.

Ain't gonna happen.

There will be a minimum of four and perhaps as many as 8 or 9 recounts. And because so much is at stake, every close election will be fought to the fourth corner of the last hanging chad of the final contested ballot.

In 1984 the recount of the election to determine a winner in southwest Indiana went well past the opening of Congress in 1985. Some years later, a recount in which I was involved, just west of St. Louis, went until just days before Christmas.

It is very possible that the number of recounts will exceed the margin either party has as we move through November and into December.

But wait! There's more!

Read on.

Glenn Reynolds sounds the alarm; Ed Morrissey says not so fast. Hugh Hewitt invokes "The Cleveland Advantage".

Meanwhile, Big Lizards and Jim Geraghty both discuss the GOP GOTV machine--which will need to be working on all eight cylinders next month.

Man, oh Manischewitz: As Allah writes, "Let the word go forth: nothing has ever topped this, and nothing ever will."

Oh how I long for the simpler days when all it took to smear your opponent in an ultra-controversial TV commercial was a kid plucking a daisy.

...Can Lucy pull the football away from Charlie Brown?

Right around this time three years ago, James Taranto looked at the October surprise, California-style:

Columnist George Will has lived up to his future-tense name. On Sept. 4, he made this prediction about the California governor's race:

Ken Khachigian, a veteran Republican strategist, warns that [Arnold] Schwarzenegger should brace himself for what has become the Democrats' trademark tactic. In football it is penalized as a "late hit," but in politics it is often rewarded with success. George W. Bush received such a hit in the final weekend of the 2000 campaign--the revelation of his drunk driving arrest 24 years earlier. That probably contributed to an unusual development: Late-deciding voters, who usually break against the incumbent party, broke for Vice President Gore in 2000.

California Republicans have experienced late hits three times in the past 11 years. In 1992 Bruce Herschensohn narrowly lost a Senate race against Barbara Boxer when it was revealed on the Friday before the election that he and his girlfriend and another couple had visited a strip club. In 1994 Michael Huffington narrowly lost a Senate race against Feinstein when, a few days before the election, it was revealed that he had hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. In 1998 Darrell Issa--he is now a congressmen; his $1.6 million funding of the recall petition drive produced this recall election--lost a Senate primary when it was revealed that he had embellished his military record.

A late hit by the Davis campaign against Schwarzenegger cannot come so late that there is no time for another such hit, one against Davis's other problem, Bustamante. This could get even uglier.

Sure enough, the late hit came in a more than 3,500-word report in today's Los Angeles Times that Schwarzenegger has behaved like Davis supporter Bill Clinton.

Jim Geraghty checks in with his GOP guru to look at a decade of nationwide late hits:

Could there ever be a better time for the reassuring reappearance of the man who has been in Republican circles longer than I’ve been alive?

Ladies and gentlemen, my longtime sage source and mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Obi gets straight to the point about the Foley scandal, breaking in the final weeks of the campaign.

“At some point, some Republican is going to come out and say, ‘Hey. We’ve seen this show before, every cycle for the past couple of cycles. Starting in September, there’s a bombshell every two or three days for the last six weeks of the campaign, from the AP, from the big three networks, from the New York Times and the Post and Bob Woodward, and it’s always in one direction. It’s always a bombshell of bad news for the Republicans.’”

Obi doesn’t list them, but a right-leaning voter can remember – the infamous fake memos used by Dan Rather, the New York Times’ brouhaha over the al-Qaqaa weapons depot, the L.A. Times’ story slamming Schwarzenegger, the Bush DUI…

Obi wonders if the voting public is getting inoculated; that late-breaking revelations of scandals about Republicans are becoming too transparent to move voters; that they see these stories as a sympathetic media hawking the wares of the Democrats.

You do have to wonder how many times the October surprise strategy can work. Does it still work in today's demassified media environment? Hugh Hewitt doesn't seem to think so:

All previous patterns are irrelevant given the existence of the new media and the reality of the war.

We'll see if he's right in a few--long--weeks, with, no doubt, many more October surprises to come.

Update: Related thoughts from Mary Katharine Ham and Dan Riehl.

Densepack, The Feiler Faster Thesis, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Wellstone Memorial Redux: click for an assortment of opinion regarding the fallout from the Foley fiasco.

Update: Speaking of the Densepack Theory, (but not Foley), here's one October surprise from the left that's been quickly debunked. As Charles Johnson writes:

Nick Denton and his “blogs” Gawker and Wonkette need to apologize for their part in promoting this nasty fraud, or just accept that their credibility (if they ever had any) is now completely in the trash.

Hey, we have computers. We can fact check your fauxtography.

Another Update: Is the Foley fallout running into the Feiler Faster Thesis that Kaus mentioned above? In addition to its having been written before the latest pushback efforts, Jim Geraghty (click here for interview) has a great round-up of where the Folley Fiasco stands. (Sorry Gerard, I'm not calling it Masturgate.)

No, that title's not an oxymoron: Arnold decides not to gut the Electoral College.

Update: More on California, here.

Other than throwing the odd quarter into a slot machine in Vegas, I'm not at all a gambler. But I have to agree with this post by Libertas' Michael Kim, whose none-too-pleased with Sen. Bill Frist's tacking on an Internet gambling ban to an important port security bill.

Promising to end these sorts of last minute end-arounds and the culture of big government corruption that leads to them helped bring Republicans to Congress in 1994. That such a midnight maneuver could be attempted with a month to go before a close mid-term election seems like a surprisingly tone deaf stunt from Sen. Frist.

About five minutes before Mark Foley became the latest Crisis Of The Century, Charles Krauthammer looked at the story it replaced in the media:

Strange doings in Virginia. George Allen, former governor, one-term senator, son of a famous football coach and in the midst of a heated battle for re-election, has just been outed as a Jew. An odd turn of events, given the fact that his having Jewish origins has nothing to do with anything in the campaign and that Allen himself was oblivious to the fact until his 83-year-old mother revealed to him last month the secret she had kept concealed for 60 years.

Apart from its political irrelevance, it seems improbable in the extreme that the cowboy-boot-wearing football scion of Southern manner and speech should turn out to be, at least by origins, a son of Israel. For Allen, as he quipped to me, it's the explanation for a lifelong affinity for Hebrew National hotdogs. For me, it is the ultimate confirmation of something I have been regaling friends with for 20 years and now, for the advancement of social science, feel compelled to publish.

I've had a fairly good run with this one. First, it turns out that John Kerry -- windsurfing, French-speaking, Beacon Hill aristocrat -- had two Jewish grandparents. Then Hillary Clinton -- methodical Methodist -- unearths a Jewish step-grandfather in time for her run as New York senator.

A less jaunty case was that of Madeleine Albright, three of whose Czech grandparents had perished in the Holocaust and who most improbably contended that she had no idea that they were Jewish. To which we can add the leading French presidential contender (Nicolas Sarkozy), a former supreme commander of NATO (Wesley Clark) and Russia's leading anti-Semite (Vladimir Zhirinovsky). One must have a sense of humor about these things. Even Fidel Castro claims he is from a family of Marranos.

For all its tongue-in-cheek irony, Krauthammer's Law works because when I say ``everyone,'' I don't mean everyone you know personally. Depending on the history and ethnicity of your neighborhood and social circles, there may be no one you know who is Jewish. But if ``everyone'' means anyone that you've heard of in public life, the law works for two reasons. Ever since the Jews were allowed out of the ghetto and into European society at the dawning of the Enlightenment, they have peopled the arts and sciences, politics and history in astonishing disproportion to their numbers.

There are 13 million Jews in the world, one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's population. Yet 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, a staggering hundredfold surplus of renown and genius. This is similarly true for a myriad of other ``everyones'' -- the household names in music, literature, mathematics, physics, finance, industry, design, comedy, film and, as the doors opened, even politics. But it is not just Jewish excellence at work here. There is a dark side to these past centuries of Jewish emancipation and achievement -- an unrelenting history of persecution. The result is the other more somber and poignant reason for the Jewishness of public figures being discovered late and with surprise: concealment.

Read the rest.

Mark Levin questions the timing of the Foley allegations--and notes that there will be many more "surprises" to come this month. Or as Jim Geraghty writes:

So - we've got campaigns against "Rape Gurney Joe" in Connecticut; the Washington press corps wants to know if George Allen is now, or has ever been, a Jew; in Maryland, a staffer posted on her blog about the "Jewish noses" of donors and Oreos...

Heck of a campaign season, huh?

October's going to be a long year.

Update: Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes, "If this is Sunday, it must be another Washington Post front-page hit piece against the Bush administration", adding, "I guess we can expect the Post to lead with "drive-by" attacks in the Chandrasekaran, De Young, Woodward style every Sunday until the election."

Nahh--they'll expand to the rest of the week as November gets closer.

Another Update: "Real scandal, fake blog."

I haven't blogged on the cretinous Mark Foley (R-FL) or the fallout from his resignation, but Pajamas is your one stop source for blog linkage.

Elsewhere, Betsy Newmark writes that there's Florida precedent to replace his name on the ballot even later than Foley's resignation yesterday, adding, "How ironic that the Democrats were so thoughtful to explore this law and pave the way for the Florida GOP to find a way to perhaps salvage this election".

Does this mean that Florida could influence yet another contentious election year?

Senator Joseph Lieberman sits down to a video (and audio) podcast with maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon.

Many NFL analysts posit that this is Bill Parcell's last year as a head coach. When he leaves the Dallas Cowboys, Hugh Hewitt has an excellent suggestion for his next career move.

(Hey, if Parcells can handle Jerry Jones and Terrell Owens, Helen Thomas would be a snap.)

And not surprisingly, it's The Anchoress who defines it:

There is a deep and ugly chasm between left and right in this nation, like a sabre slice that is going untreated and infecting the whole body of the nation, and weakening it. As long as we have folks on the right referring to Democrats as “Demoncraps” and former presidents as “BlowJob”, as long as we have folks on the left referring to Republicans as “extra chromosome people,” (nice and compassionate toward the impaired, btw) and to the president as “Bushitler” the body is going to continue to weaken.

I know there are plenty of sites, both left and right, which engage in the ugliness of name-calling. But there are many on the right and some on the left, who do not. I simply prefer to be one that does not. If one blogger shrieks into his or her echo chamber, there really is no need to shriek back.

Hear, hear.

Read the whole thing.

John Podhoretz writes:

Greg Pollowitz, NRO's rookie of the year, blows the lid off Larry Sabato's unacceptably vague confirmation of the "George Allen used the N-word" story over at Sixers. Bottom line: Sabato says he's known about this for years. So why didn't Sabato bring it up in 2000 when he moderated a candidate debate between Allen and Chuck Robb?

Pollowitz's lengthy post can be found here. Video of Sabato with Chris Matthews, here.

Update: More here.

Over at Tech Central Station, my latest podcast interview is with Bruce Frohnen, the co-editor of American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, a huge volume charting the history and major players involved with just that, especially in its post-World War II, William F. Buckley-inspired form.

The Manolo ponders the important questions of the time of ours:

The Manolo has often wondered, is it the egg or the chicken: do the important men of the South obtain the important hair only after they become prominent, or does the important hair precede and perhaps aid in the rise to power? Only God and the Mr. Christophe know the answer to this.

Read the whole of the thing.

Betsy Newmark compares David Broder today with Broder in 1971 and sounds like she much prefers the '71 model.

On the other hand, it least his views have changed since then (if not necessarily for the better). That's more than some on the left can say.

Republican candidates for election or re-election support a Republican president!

Or as Jim Geraghty (whom we recently interviewed) writes:

One of the more intriguing comments I've run across lately came in Peggy Noonan's column, quoting another NRO blogger, Kellyanne Conway.

"The Democrats now are incapable of answering a question on policy without mentioning Bush six times," says pollster Kellyanne Conway. " 'What is your vision on Iraq?' 'Bush lied us into war.' 'Health care? 'Bush hasn't a clue.' They're so obsessed with Bush it impedes them from crafting and communicating a vision all their own."

That seems accurate. I realize that I'm not the target demographic for Democratic messages, but I wonder how many voters out there feel like, "Okay, fine! We get it! You hate Bush! You really, really hate him! Got it! Now, tell me what you're going to do to solve our country's problems, because if you don't have a better idea, there's no point in me showing up to vote you into office."

Maybe BDS alone will be the left's ticket to victory in 2006--but it wasn't in 2002 and 2004.

(Incidentally, sorry if you couldn't access the site earlier today. Apparently my Web host is having server issues of some sort. Fortunately, they seem to be subsiding, if not yet 100 percent resolved.)

Compare and contrast. This AP article is headlined, "IRS Investigating Liberal Calif. Church":

The Internal Revenue Service has ordered a prominent liberal church to turn over documents and e-mails it produced during the 2004 election year that contain references to political candidates.

The IRS is investigating whether All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena violated the federal tax code when its former rector, Rev. George F. Regas, delivered an anti-war sermon on the eve of the last presidential election.

Tax-exempt organizations are barred from intervening in political campaigns and elections, and the church could lose its tax-exempt status.

Meanwhile, Harold Ford, running for the Senate in Tennessee, doesn't seem to mind breaking down the wall between the so-called separation of church and state:

With a stained-glass window behind him, candidate Harold Ford Jr. strolls through the Memphis church where he was baptized to tell voters this is the place where he learned right from wrong.

Using a church sanctuary as the backdrop in his newest campaign commercial, the Democrat running for the U.S. Senate has picked an unusual setting. One expert on religion and politics said it was the first political ad he’d heard of actually filmed inside a sanctuary. …

“Most Americans are religious people, and finding out about a candidate’s faith and finding where his values came from would be appreciated,” said John Green, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. He couldn’t recall another campaign ad filmed in a church.

Donald Sensing, himself an elder in the Methodist church, has some thoughts on what happens next.

Are New Jersey Democrats about to employ--yet again--the Torricelli Gambit, and replace tainted US Senator Robert Menendez at the last minute? As the Professor writes, "You'd think that the Jersey Democrats might try nominating people who aren't crooks". And it's worth heeding the words of Michael Graham, back in 2004:

"Don't assume you know who's on the Democratic ticket until Election Day."

But then, we are dealing with The Mob That Whacked Jersey, here.

"TSA Booty Up For Grabs on eBay"

[Admit it--you only linked to that post as an excuse to run that headline--Ed. Well, yeah!]

Glenn Reynolds explores a strategic quagmire; James Taranto sees a way towards Peace In Our Time.

Last week, Hugh Hewitt asked, what, if anything, will Arnold Schwarzenegger legacy as governor of California be remembered for?

Wally Cox isn't going to get the girl, Barney Fife isn't going to get to load his bullet, and Phil Angelides isn't going to get close to Arnold.

Arnold thus has the opportunity to get a mandate for something.

The Governator has been campaigning on infrastructure needs, which means the right to spend a lot on planning because given California's environmental laws, litigation-happy activists and the executive branch bureaucracies that Arnold has left unreformed, no major new project will actually happen. There won't be a new campus, a new connector tunnel, a new high speed train. There won't even be the conclusion of previously approved toll road in south Orange County.

Bridges will get repairs and a few widening projects will proceed. "Arnold, repairer of bridges" --this is how he wants to be remembered?

Because California is such a large map on which to work, its governor's do get remembered, for better or worse. Gray Davis was defined by the power crisis, Pete Wilson by his competent handling of major disaster after major disaster and for his embrace of Prop 187. Pat Brown was a builder, Jerry Brown a pop icon and the anti-builder, and George Deukmejian the law and order governor. Reagan, of course, was Reagan.

While California blogger Steve Frank praises his appointments of Republican judges, Chris Weinkopf writes that Arnold's legacy could be in serious danger of ending up as, ironically, the ultimate "girlie man":

Behold the new Arnold, a man bearing little resemblance to the revolutionary who toppled Gov. Gray Davis just three years ago. He’s politically compliant, eager to please, and anxious to avoid a fight. One might say . . . a girlie man.

Schwarzenegger has, in the parlance of the Left, “grown.” So has California’s government. In June, the governor signed a $131 billion budget, up 8.4 percent from the year before. Schwarzenegger’s spending plan is 30 percent larger than the one Davis approved in 2003, just before being ousted as a reckless spender.

“I don’t think the governor is a small-government Republican,” says Jon Coupal, president of California’s largest taxpayer-advocacy group, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation. Or, as GOP pollster Arnold Steinberg puts it, “He’s become a chamber-of-commerce Republican.” That is, “someone who confuses big business with free enterprise.” Adds Steinberg, “He lost his populist roots a long time ago.”

Still a Schwarzenegger supporter, Coupal is quick to point out that the governor hasn’t raised taxes. But it’s unclear how much of the credit belongs to Schwarzenegger and how much belongs to California’s constitution, which requires a two-thirds legislative majority for tax hikes. The Republican minority holds just enough seats to block tax increases, as it did throughout the Davis era. Besides, with a thriving economy producing $8 billion in unanticipated revenues over the last fiscal year, there’s more than enough cash on hand to sate even the biggest of Sacramento’s big spenders.

There are also billions more in planned borrowing. Courtesy of Schwarzenegger, November’s ballot will include $37 billion worth of bonds to rebuild crumbling infrastructure that Sacramento ignored for decades while tending to a perpetually growing bureaucracy and welfare state.

Schwarzenegger, who once spoke loftily about improving California’s business climate, has also warmed up to regulation. In July, he proposed legislation that would require drug companies to provide discounts to families earning as much as three times the federal poverty rate — despite having vetoed similar legislation twice in the past.

What prompted Arnold’s change of heart is last year’s special-election debacle. Emboldened by his ability to intimidate Democrats during his first year in office, Schwarzenegger had launched a “year of reform” campaign to pass several ballot initiatives. But he took on too many vested interests at once — teachers, public-employee unions, every major spending lobby, as well the state legislature and its gerrymandered districting plan. Labor unions spent tens of millions on relentless, highly effective attack ads, and sent protesters to interrupt his every public event.

In short order, Schwarzenegger’s once-stratospheric popularity ratings crashed, and his ballot measures failed. Worse, he lost the one trump card he could bring to negotiations with Democratic legislators — his threat to take matters directly to the voters. In the special election, Democrats discovered they no longer needed to fear Arnold’s popularity.

On the other hand, as of right now, it seems pretty unlikely that Arnold will be resuming his movie career in November.

Early in 2004, after winning the nod as the Democrats' candidate for the presidency, John Kerry boldly shouted to President Bush, "BRING. IT. ON." But in August of 2004, Kerry ended up personally asking President Bush to...Make. Them. Stop--make the Swift Boat Vets stop attacking him. And you could argue that it was at this moment that Senator Kerry lost the election, because he couldn't bother to defend his record in the wake of his former colleagues reminding modern voters of Kerry's early 1970s duplicity while in the Naval Reserves. Instead, Kerry ended up whining about the Swift Vets' opposition to his candidacy to his primary opposition, the incumbent president, inadvertently increasing President Bush's stature as a result.

Flash-forward to today--after, as Glenn Reynolds' notes, Ned Lamont's television ad producer and chief cheerleader Jane Hamsher dubbing his opponent "Rape Gurney Joe" and portraying him in blackface, it takes a huge amount of chutzpah for Ned to ask Joe to dial down the language:

Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont, the anti-war candidate who toppled Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary, says he was surprised by Lieberman and Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims that his victory could embolden terrorists.

“My God, here we have a terrorist threat against hearth and home, and the very first thing that comes out of their mind is how can we turn this to partisan advantage. I find that offensive,” Lamont said in an interview Sunday with The Associated Press.

After British officials disclosed they had thwarted a terrorist airline bombing plot on Thursday, Lieberman warned that Lamont’s call for a phased-withdrawal of troops from Iraq would be “taken as a tremendous victory” by terrorists.

Cheney on Wednesday had suggested that Lamont’s victory might encourage “the al-Qaida types” who want to “break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”

‘Seemed almost orchestrated’

Lamont said Lieberman’s swipe at his candidacy “sounded an awful lot” like Cheney.

“It surprised me,” he said. “It seemed almost orchestrated. It’s sort of demeaning to the people of Connecticut ... I thought the senator and the vice president were both wrong to use that attack (strategy) on the voters of Connecticut.”

The Lieberman camp Sunday brushed aside Lamont’s comments.

As well they should. Now that they've kicked Lieberman out of their party, the modern Democrats are the party of international pacifism, but at home, they're still the party that fights the dirtiest for an election. On some level--especially after his campaign's own antics, Ned knows this--but like Kerry two years ago, he doesn't seem to realize how weak he's making himself look by trying to play the losing "Make. Them. Stop." card when Lieberman points out the obvious. (And as Orrin Judd notes, "Way to keep a storyline that's hurting you going and to remind voters that Senator Lieberman is with the Administration against terrorism.")

"Fredo, you're nothing to me now. You're not a brother, you're not a friend. I don't want to know you or what you do. I don't want to see you at the hotels, I don't want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won't be there. You understand?"

--Michael Corleone

To follow up on our post last night, add another prominent Democrat who's giving their 2000 vice presidential candidate and three term senator the cold shoulder. Here's Bill Richardson and Joe Lieberman on the presidential campaign trail in September of 2003:

Lieberman, holding a glass of red wine, receives Richardson in the living room. They, too, are old friends. They worked on the 1992 Democratic platform together. They hug. "I'm not drinking alone," Lieberman tells Richardson as the governor is handed a glass. They clink.

"I wore this to curry favor with you," Lieberman says, pointing to a New Mexico pin on his lapel. "You also saw that I spoke a little Spanish in [the debate]."

"I thought that was Yiddish," Richardson says, and slaps Lieberman's right triceps.

"I love Bill Richardson," Lieberman says in a brief speech a few minutes later. "When the good Lord created Bill Richardson, he threw the mold away."

Richardson raises his glass to Lieberman, the last Democratic running mate, who, in turn, raises his glass to the man who might be the next.

Well, that didn't work out for Bill, did it? And it while these men may still profess their "love" and respect for each other, business is business, as Tammy Bruce notes:

All the polls, from the beginning, made it clear that Joe would win in a three-way general race, but the party hacks just couldn't risk upsetting Soros or their far-left Puppet Masters.

Now, in the ultimate bending-over for the party, Bill Richardson, Friend of Bill and Governor of New Mexico, has asked Joe Lieberman to "step aside" and not run as an independent.

Richardson calls on Lieberman to step aside:

[Richardson] called Lieberman "a good friend of mine" and a "true public servant."

But he said in a statement Thursday that he was backing Ned Lamont, the man who defeated Lieberman in this week's Democratic primary.

"I look forward to supporting Ned as he fights to help Democrats take back the Senate, and I call on Joe Lieberman to respect the will of the voters and step aside," Richardson said.

Uh. Yeah. Right. The will of the voters? That would be determined in November, Guv. For being the "pro-choice" party it's fascinating how that doesn't apply to elections and candidates. Obviously, the Dems know they cannot beat Joe, so they want him to surrender. They've been hanging out with the French too long. And gee, the party hacks did so much for him during the primary, I betcha he'd just love to do whatever they ask of him now. Not.

The Dems now have a rather slimy bed they've made, and they're all going to have to deal with it. But, as is the usual case for Friends of Bill and the nihilistic foundation he left behind, these same people don't want to deal with the repercussions of their actions--whether it be sexually assaulting a woman, lying to the American people, or eating one of their own--who happens to be the better person, the better candidate, and ultimately, the winner.

If Lieberman does win as an independent in November (and early polls favor him, though the key word is early), it will be very interesting to see what his relationship will be with his former party, and who makes the first efforts to bridge this exponentially widening gap.

Teddy Kennedy on Joe Lieberman at the Democrats' 2000 convention:

Earlier Tuesday night, Sen. Edward Kennedy strode to the podium to make comparisons between his brother, President Kennedy, who received the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles in 1960, and Gore. "How proud (John Kennedy) would be of Al Gore and our party and the new barrier of bigotry we are breaking down with the choice of Joe Lieberman as the next Vice President of the United States."

Jesse Jackson at the same convention:

In an evening dedicated to not only carving out the Democrats' positions, but introducing voters and viewers to Gore, Jesse Jackson praised the vice president for his selection of a running mate.

"The long arm of justice reaches neither for the political left nor the political right, but for the moral center," Jackson said in his measured cadence, running through a list of traditionally Democratic issues and heralding Gore and Lieberman as "America's dream team of the Democratic Party."

Jackson noted marked distinctions between the Gore-Lieberman ticket and the their Republican rivals, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

"In selecting Joe Lieberman, Al Gore has brought the sons and daughters of slaves and slavemasters, together with the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. He raised the moral chin bar. When a barrier falls for one of the locked out, it opens the doors for all."

But hey, that was then, and this now. BDS changes all:

Lieberman’s senate colleagues are wasting no time throwing their combined support behind Lamont, in a move they hope will stifle Lieberman’s independent ambitions.

“I pledge my enthusiastic support for (Lamont) in November,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said in a statement. “Ned is fighting to take our country in a new direction, both at home and abroad. His victory last night was a clarion call for change. Connecticut voters turned out in record numbers to change a failed policy in Iraq, to call for health care for all Americans, to fight for a truly independent judiciary and much more.”

As for Jackson:

"We're campaigning across the state for a big turnout on Tuesday," Jackson said, referring to Lamont's Democratic primary against incumbent Sen. Joseph Lieberman. "What is at stake is the direction of our country and its priorities."

The event turned into a full-fledged political rally, with supporters for both Lamont and Lieberman chanting for their respective candidates. Lamont shook hands with the Lieberman crowd as well as with his own constituents.

Recent polls show Lamont has a slight lead heading into the primary. The race has garnered national attention, with some prominent Democrats upset with Lieberman's backing of President George W. Bush on the Iraq War.

Jackson called Lieberman a good man, but said he had wandered away from the principles of the Democratic Party.

"His embrace of Bush's position before the war was a challenging one, but his continued embrace is incomprehensible," Jackson said.

"The idea of Iraq was based on the false premise of weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda connections, and the threat that never was the case. Now we've lost lives, and money, and honor. The price we're paying for the war in Iraq is that we no longer have the resources to invest in Hartford, Middletown, Bridgeport, New Haven. We are losing abroad and suffering at home."

Jackson complimented Lamont's dedication to a comprehensive medical plan, universal pre-kindergarten education and "big ideas that make sense."

Uh-huh. David Limbaugh puts it all into perspective:

But these Democrats, perhaps unwittingly, are just reinforcing what we've been saying about them: They have no constructive solutions and no policy agenda other than to oppose and trash President Bush and "his war." Reid and Schumer admitted as much when they essentially dismissed Lamont's role in the election, saying it was "a referendum on the president more than anything else."

Liberal Slate magazine confirmed this Democratic mindset in an article following the July debate between Lieberman and Lamont by conceding that "Lamont is less a candidate than he is a conduit" for the expression of displeasure against Lieberman for supporting Bush on the war.

Hopefully, Democrats will continue to glean the wrong message from this election and believe they can rely exclusively on an anti-Bush wave to carry them to victory instead of resuming their long lost role as a credible party offering an alternative agenda. Such ill-begotten and delusional smugness is exactly where we want them to be going into 2006.

We'll see. But along with this, in the meantime, I can't help but wonder what Lieberman thinks of his "colleagues" today.

Update: Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey.

More: Jonah Goldberg writes that "Lieberman fascinates political junkies because he's an outlier, like an albino rhino or the last of the Mohicans. And his loss doesn't usher in a new reality so much as confirm the familiar one":

Sure, Lieberman's 52% to 48% defeat was a very big deal politically. Looking at the dozen election cycles prior to 2006, political scientist Larry Sabato points out that among about 400 separate Senate races, only three incumbents were felled by primary challenges. That one of them was the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee just six years ago is amazing. But Lieberman's loss is a bit less dramatic given the Democratic Party's evolution over the last quarter of a century. Lieberman was always sui generis — a hawkish, culturally right-of-center Democrat from a blue state.

As many have noted, the only reason he could get away with his Bill Bennett-esque sermonizing is that he's an Orthodox Jew. For many liberals, when white Christian politicians talk about God, it's scary. When Jews do it, it's quaint. No Christian national Democrat has talked so openly and sincerely about God and traditional values in decades (a point acknowledged by the Democrats' so far insufficient efforts to re-energize their evangelical outreach). President Clinton came the closest, but liberals could overlook it because they suspected that he really didn't mean it.

As for Lieberman's hawkishness, it seemed anachronistic — and just plain odd. He supported Bush on the war more forcefully than many Republicans, justifying his refusal to criticize the president on grounds that politics should stop at the water's edge, particularly during a war. That's sweet, but rumors that such restraint is a respected American political tradition are greatly exaggerated. It was a lack of such restraint by Sen. George McGovern that created the latter-day Democratic Party, from which Lieberman sticks out, sore-thumb-like, today.

Read the whole thing. (As the fellow would say who probably sent you here.)

Another Update: Duane Patterson has some thoughts of his own on the cold shoulder Lieberman will be facing from now until November:

You've got to wish you were a fly on the wall in the Senate offices in the upcoming weeks and months, especially on the Democratic side.

As expected, virtually all of the Democratic Senators have dropped their "good friend" from Connecticut like a bad habit. Makes you wonder how the next three months are going to play out. Can you imagine Ted Kennedy passing Joe Lieberman by in the hall and immediately looking down to see where his feet disappeared to? Or John Kerry riding up the elevator with Joe and just staring silently at the floor numbers?...or even waiting to make sure he catches the next one instead?

The Senate has now become a microcosm of old Europe, and in this example, Joe Lieberman has become Israel. I'm not talking about the Senate in an anti-Semitic way, mind you. I'm merely saying the public attitude of the Senate towards Lieberman is going to be polite, cordial, and generally supportive where necessary, so long as he is in office. But behind the scenes, just like in old Europe, many Senators are going to be grumbling amongst each other and wishing that Lieberman, like old Europe feels about Israel, would just go away.

Newsbusters writes that the news media isn't immune to a rush of Nedrenaline, either:

It's fascinating how fast the roles have switched in the DNC Media's take on Ned Lamont. Today's front page in the WashPost printed the headline "Democratic Leadership Welcomes Lamont." Next to that, a promotional headline: "Will Lieberman Hurt or Help Democrats?" They're not asking whether Lamont as a Democratic poster boy will hurt or help Democrats. Overnight, Lieberman has gone from party stalwart to independent pariah in the wilderness. You might expect the Democrats to switch horses like they're changing socks like party politicians. But it ought to be more surprising that the "objective, mainstream media" follows suit (or sock) so slavishly.

Why?

Update 8/11/06: Add another "old friend" of Joe to the list of those who are now cutting and running on him.

Allahpundit channels the ghost of Niccolo Machiavelli:

How badly does the GOP want Ned Lamont to win? Badly enough to publicize this fact.

Meanwhile, the Professor has the "Best. Lamont. Spin. Ever". And a link to one of several Libertarians for Lamont! (Because extremism in the defense of nutmeg is no vice! Or...something like that.)

Neo-Neocon gets down and gets linguistic:

I hereby propose a new term for Democrats who remain in the party but are hawkish on security and foreign policy matters: paleodems. It lacks the heavy baggage of "neocon," and it's more descriptive as well, because such people are not conservative in most senses of the word (nor am I, by the way). It also retains a reference to the Democratic Party, reflecting the 20th century history and tradition of that party as muscular on defense.

Of course, I may be too late, because paleodems are becoming an endangered species. If extinction occurs, the "paleo" prefix becomes even more apropos.

Is there hope for the Paleodem? Don't miss Neo's postcript.

The Media Research Center notes:

Twice on Tuesday, CBS News correspondent Trish Regan labeled as "infamous" the embrace, derided as "The Kiss" by supporters of Connecticut Senate hopeful Ned Lamont, between President George W. Bush and incumbent Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman in the well of the House after Bush's 2005 State of the Union address. Regan didn't attribute the characterization to Lieberman's opponents. She stated it as fact. On the Early Show she explained over brief video of the event: "Ned Lamont has used this now infamous kiss to his advantage on campaign buttons and television ads, suggesting Lieberman is just too cozy with the President." Then on the CBS Evening News, Regan asserted over the same video: "His campaign has used images like this now infamous kiss."

The primary definition of infamous, according to Merriam-Webster is "having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil". Is there anyone who's not a political junky (in other words, someone who doesn't read a blog like this) and lives in one of 49 states not called Connecticut who's either aware of this moment, or thinks it's "notoriously evil"?

Byron York writes that he's doomed:

If you lose a campaign and then come around two, or four, or six years later to challenge the man who beat you, that’s one thing. If you lose a campaign and keep running as if you hadn’t lost, that’s another. From now on, every day that Lieberman campaigns, he will be reminded that he has already lost to the man he is running against. Lamont’s supporters won’t let him forget it, and Lamont himself will be happy to point it out. In his concession speech, Lieberman said, “Tomorrow is a brand new day” and promised a “new campaign to unite people of Connecticut, GOP, Democrat and independent.” But tomorrow is now today, and the race might look different to Connecticut voters.

Back in 2000, in an entirely different context, Republicans cast the Gore-Lieberman team as “Sore Loserman.” GOP anger was directed at Al Gore, who would not admit that he had lost the presidential election. At least Gore’s loss was excruciatingly, historically close. That’s not the case with Lieberman today. He lost by three and a half percentage points, with no question about the results. This time, it might be Democrats holding those “Sore Loserman” signs.

John McIntyre writes that he's not:

Incredibly, for a sitting three-term Senator who just lost to a political neophyte, in many ways Lieberman is the guy who comes out of the primary with momentum. A month ago it was not unreasonable to assume that Lamont would have received a significant boost from a win, but the polls seem to indicate Lamont peaked near the end of July. Bill Clinton's July 24th visit may have been more of a turning point than was commonly thought at the time. In my pre-election analysis I suggested that Lieberman's distance from 40% would be the best tell on how the three-way would shakeout. With his very solid 48.2%, Lieberman is in an extremely strong position to win in November.

Nationally, the images from last night are a disaster for the Democratic Party. Perched behind Lamont during his victory speech were the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, grinning ear to ear, serenaded by the chant of "Bring Them Home, Bring Them Home." For a party that has a profound public relations and substantive problem on national security, these are not exactly the images you want broadcast to the nation.

Meanwhile, Dean Barnett updates his Lieberman/Lamont FAQs accordingly.

Update: The tie-breaker is in: Dick Morris writes that "Joe Will Rise Again".

And since it's from Dick Morris, the verdict is obvious: Joe's doomed.

Brendan Loy and Dean Barnett are live blogging the returns from the Liberman/Lamont race. Early results favor Lamont, but Barnett is feeding off the intense excitement of the early official results:

According to the Connecticut Secretary of State’s website, right now the voting is deadlocked 0-0.

Can you feel the excitement? This is going to be the best liveblog ever!!

Whoa--way too much election energy for me (especially as I need to head out anyhow), but click over to their sites early and often.

One of the most astonishing exchanges in recent memory from an editor of a political journal, to his counterpart on the other side of the aisle in talk radio and journalism occurred last week. The conversation was between Martin Peretz, the editor of the center-left New Republic, and Hugh Hewitt, his counterpart on the center right, on Hugh's popular radio show:

HH: Do you want the Democrats to win majorities in the House or the Senate, Martin Peretz?

MP: I'm...I'm appalled by some of the people who would become head of Congressional committees.

HH: Is that a no?

MP: Uh, but I'm also appalled by some of the shenanigans...

HH: But is that...I've got five seconds. Is that a no, Martin Peretz?

MP: It's a cowardly refusal to answer.

HH: (laughing) Okay. We'll carry it on, later. Martin Peretz, thanks.

(You can hear the original audio here, if you like.) In The Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal, Peretz clarifies his fears:

If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which is why he is now unsafe.

Now Mr. Lamont's views are also not camouflaged. They are just simpleminded. Here, for instance, is his take on what should be done about Iran's nuclear-weapons venture: "We should work diplomatically and aggressively to give them reasons why they don't need to build a bomb, to give them incentives. We have to engage in very aggressive diplomacy. I'd like to bring in allies when we can. I'd like to use carrots as well as sticks to see if we can change the nature of the debate." Oh, I see. He thinks the problem is that they do not understand, and so we should explain things to them, and then they will do the right thing. It is a fortunate world that Mr. Lamont lives in, but it is not the real one. Anyway, this sort of plying is precisely what has been going on for years, and to no good effect. Mr. Lamont continues that "Lieberman is the one who keeps talking about keeping the military option on the table." And what is so plainly wrong with that? Would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be more agreeable if he thought that we had disposed of the military option in favor of more country club behavior?

Finally, the contest in Connecticut tomorrow is about two views of the world. Mr. Lamont's view is that there are very few antagonists whom we cannot mollify or conciliate. Let's call this process by its correct name: appeasement. The Greenwich entrepreneur might call it "incentivization." Mr. Lieberman's view is that there are actually enemies who, intoxicated by millennial delusions, are not open to rational and reciprocal arbitration. Why should they be? After all, they inhabit a universe of inevitability, rather like Nazis and communists, but with a religious overgloss. Such armed doctrines, in Mr. Lieberman's view, need to be confronted and overwhelmed.
Almost every Democrat feels obliged to offer fraternal solidarity to Israel, and Mr. Lamont is no exception. But here, too, he blithely assumes that the Palestinians could be easily conciliated. All that it would have needed was President Bush's attention. Mr. Lamont has repeated the accusation, disproved by the "road map" and Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza, that Mr. Bush paid little or even no attention to the festering conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. And has Mr. Lamont noticed that the Palestinians are now ruled, and by their own choice, by Hamas? Is Hamas, too, just a few good arguments away from peace?

The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove's dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.

While Karl Rove the strategist may be licking his chops, a Lieberman loss does not sound like it would please Richard H. Shriver, who served both the Ford and Reagan White Houses:

I spent a good portion of my life working to eliminate or replace one-party systems in the world. So it is with mixed emotions I watch the Democratic Party continue to lop off its nose in order to spite its face.

Is it too soon to predict the result will be a one-party system in the US? Not if you are following political events in Connecticut.

The most current evidence of the Democratic Party's self-destruction is the Democratic primary race for the US Senate in Connecticut, pitting 3-term veteran Joseph Lieberman against antiwar candidate Ned Lamont.

According to local polls, Lamont will win the primary forcing into play Lieberman's defensive move of forming his own party to be on the ballot one way or another in November. The token Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, will garner 8% - 15% in the general election, and for a variety of reasons, may even withdraw; Lieberman is expected to win in a three-way (and more-so in a two-way) vote in November, thus depriving the Democrats of an important seat in the Senate.

Lieberman will win because Republicans will vote for this Democrat in droves. Republicans see Lieberman as a statesman, whether or not one agrees with all of his votes. Democrats are turning their backs on one of their few stars. History may elevate Lieberman to the status of "Great American", an elected official who has been remarkably true to his principles and who has a track record of sponsoring, advocating and voting for sensible, responsible US policies on issues that really matter, like national security.

Lamont, on the other hand, is an American made rich via inheritance who, like Sen. Edward Kennedy and some other leaders of the Democratic Party, has turned his back on some of the very institutions that helped make his father (and him) rich in the first place, such as low taxes and a strong defense policy. While his backers claim he is a successful businessman, he will not release his tax returns so there is no way to back up this claim. Meanwhile, Lamont has embarked on futile effort to make a single-issue campaign into a multi-issue campaign by paying lip service to a panoply of liberal causes. This delights his immediate followers and the liberal fringe, but dismays some political realists -- including Bill Clinton who is supporting Lieberman.

As Peretz writes:

The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr. Lamont's will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective. But one fault cannot be attributed to the U.S., and that is that we are on the wrong side. We are at war in a just cause, to protect the vulnerable masses of the country from the helter-skelter ideological and religious mass-murderers in their midst. Our enemies are not progressive peasants as was imagined three and four decades ago.

If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which is why he is now unsafe.

In a post on Friday, National Review editor Rich Lowry paints a grim picture for Lieberman--hopefully, he's wrong; if not this Tuesday, then in November.

Related: "Confirmed: Lieberman campaign didn’t coin the term 'LieberYouth'".

Update (8/8/06): Astonishingly, ABC's Cokie Roberts sounds like she agrees with Peretz.

Meanwhile, guest blogging for Hugh Hewitt, Dean Barnett has the answers to the the Top Ten Lieberman/Lamont questions. And finally, Mickey Kaus steps back from the Lieberman/Lamont race to look at the bigger picture: the future of the Democrats.

More: Brendan Loy explores the apparent denial of service (DoS) attack that took down the Lieberman website--and its email--today.

Attempting to distance himself from yesterday's Joe Lieberman in blackface image on The Huffington Post, Ned Lamont is now claiming:

"I don't know anything about the blogs. I'm not responsible for those. I have no comment on them."

Video proves otherwise.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, two of the most anti-Semitic figures on the American left (and along with Pat Buchanan, certainly amongst recent former presidential candidates) are campaigning against Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. Meanwhile, Lieberman is being portrayed on the Huffington Post (and it's astonishing I'm even typing this word in the 21st century) in blackface.

As I wrote last week:

And remember, the midterms--and their aftermath--are still well over three months away. Meaning that it's only going to get worse, when the rest of the country begins to start paying attention.

Incidentally, Mitt Romney was attacked last week for calling Boston's "Big Dig" project a "tar baby", despite the phrase's recent use by (scroll to bottom) The Boston Globe and Herald, Molly Ivins, and John Kerry. Will a similiar firestorm breakout over Lieberman in blackface?

Nahh, I'm not holding my breath, either.

Update: The Anchoress has some thoughts that are well worth reading:

Hillary loves to talk about - he’s being treated abominably…by people who will proclaim (with straight faces) that they are “tolerant” and “open-minded” and that they believe “people are entitled to their opinions.”

Well…that’s what liberalism was when I was being raised as a liberal, by liberals. Liberalism these days seems to be about doing what you’re told to do, saying what you’re told to say and falling in line.

I’m just astonished. And sickened.

She's not the only one.

Update: Betsy Newmark and The New Republic untangle a Mobius loop of Al Sharpton's creation. Meanwhile, Lieberman responds:

"It's extremely offensive," Lieberman said. "I have been the target of the 'blogs' on a lot of really offensive stuff, stuff I consider lies and smears, but this picture of me with Bill Clinton and me having my face blackened is offensive to people of all races and colors and just doesn't belong."

Well yeah. But sadly, the left has decided that Lieberman himself just doesn't belong. And to paraphrase a quote from Andrew Sullivan back in 2003, they don't know when to stop. There's no controlling mechanism when they go on the attack.

Editor & Publisher writes that Cynthia McKinney is suing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for libel.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes that McKinney might want to pay more attention to her campaign than her lawsuit: Hank Johnson is blowing her out by 15 to 25 percent in the current polls:

This is not to say that Johnson is a conservative's dream. People should check out Johnson's website to see hi s positions on the issues, which correspond very closely to the Democratic Party platform, such as it is these days. His voice will lend itself to increased spending and increased taxes. However, one can expect no less from this particular district, as those policies find great favor among McKinney's constituents. This district will not turn Republican in the next few weeks.

What Johnson will bring to Congress is a responsible voice for that constituency, a voice that will garner attention for the right reasons. I will likely oppose most of what Johnson supports, and vice versa, but Johnson will at least have my respect and that of the rest of Congress. Johnson will not use his office to turn himself into some kind of pop-culture martyr. The voters of his district deserve to have a responsible Representative, and it appears that enough of them agree.

That's good to see.

Update: OK, don't pass the popcorn:

A Democratic congresswoman from Georgia is not suing The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for libel, contrary to a report in [Editor & Publisher] yesterday.

U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney has not in fact filed suit against the Journal-Constitution, according to attorney Tom Clyde, who is representing the paper.

Yesterday, it was incorrectly reported that McKinney filed charges against AJC Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker and Publisher John Mellott for an editorial column that ran in its July 30 edition about the congresswoman's alleged altercation with police.

Rather, McKinney's lawyer, J.M. Raffauf, sent a letter to the newspaper on July 31 saying that the July 30 column by AJC Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker contained material that Raffauf says was "untrue, defamatory and libelous." Raffauf and McKinney have also demanded a retraction, as well as an editorial in which the attorney says the paper should "repudiate its libelous statements."

The letter, obtained by E&P today, details the segments of the AJC column with which McKinney takes issue. In one part, Raffauf says Tucker's suggestion that "When he stopped [McKinney], the officer said, she slugged him with her cellphone" is "a false allegation not supported by any witness or any other evidence," and that Tucker is "maliciously attempting to spin this into a felony by falsely alleging that she assaulted the officer with a deadly weapon."

The letter also refutes the part of Tucker's column that said the congresswoman "suggested that President Bush had known in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks but did nothing to stop them so his friends could profit from the ensuing war." Raffauf states that "The award-winning documentary film 'American Blackout' definitively exposed this statement by Tucker as false, as the Congresswoman never made this statement even though Tucker continues to assert that she did."

Thanks for clearing that up, E&P.

Jonah Goldberg looks at Mark Osterloh of Tucson, Arizona; the bright spark who wants to combine voting with a lottery (as opposed to voting on a lottery):

His idea, which has received undue national attention, is simple: If you vote, you’re automatically entered in a drawing for $1 million — and perhaps some fabulous consolation prizes too! His proposal will be on the November ballot in Arizona, and he hopes it will revolutionize the country by enlisting the lottery-line crowd to fix our democracy. He even has a slogan: “Who wants to be a millionaire? Vote!”

Osterloh, an ophthalmologist and political activist (he ran for governor by bicycling throughout the state a few years ago), is one of those classic American cranks who has the audacity to take our civic clichés seriously. Since the civil-rights era, Americans have been indoctrinated with the message that voting is the essential yardstick of citizenship. Editorialists, civics teachers, and an assortment of deep-thinking movie stars residing in Periclean Hollywood have gone to great lengths to tell Americans that voter apathy is, in and of itself, a terrible evil and that, conversely, high voter turnout is a sign of civic health.

Indeed, for several years, voting-rights activists have been pushing to give prison inmates and younger teenagers the right to vote, presuming that giving rapists, killers, and Justin Timberlake fans a bigger say will improve our democratic process.

* * *

What is surprising about Osterloh’s wacky idea is that the franchise maximizers hate it. The New York Times dubbed it “daft” and “one of the cheesier propositions on the November ballot.” USA Today called it “tawdry.” Fair enough.

But I think part of the reason they’re so scandalized is that Osterloh is taking their logic to its natural conclusion. Advocates of increasing voter turnout already frame the issue in terms of “what’s in it for you.” MTV’s condescending “Choose or Lose” campaign, which aims to get 18- to 30-year-olds to vote, says it all right there in the name; the gravy train is leaving the station and the ballot is your ticket onboard.

Just beneath the surface of much of this voter activism is the assumption that increased turnout would move American politics to the left, by redistributing wealth to the poor and “disenfranchised.” There’s probably some merit here, which explains why so many get-out-the-vote groups are proxies for the Democratic Party. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are trolling for votes among people who don’t appear to take their citizenship very seriously. Osterloh’s bribery scheme merely exposes this motivation in a way that embarrasses voter activists.

Osterloh admits that he’s motivated by more than democracy worship. “One of the goals that I’ve had in my lifetime is to see that all Americans have healthcare like every other major country on Earth. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that everybody votes.” At least he’s honest about it.

Or as Thomas Sowell wrote in October of 2004, "Voting is not a matter of personal expression but a serious responsibility":

If you can't spare the time from watching sit-coms to go check out a few facts one evening at your local library, with the help of your local librarian, then don't pretend that you are a responsible voter, or even a responsible parent.

Dan of GayPatriot looks at Pat Buchanan and dubs him an ex-conservative:

I would say that Pat Buchanan represents the last of the conservative anti-Semites. Except that in 1992, Pat Buchanan made clear that he was no longer a Reagan conservative. As you may recall, in his celebrated speech to the Republican National Convention that summer, not only did he make angry statements, but he spoke far longer than the time allotted to him, thus, delaying the speech of the man who was to speak later that evening, a man whose ideas Buchanan once claimed to have championed — Ronald Wilson Reagan.

By going over his time limit, Pat Buchanan bumped that great American’s speech out of prime time. It would be Ronald Reagan’s last address to a Republican National Convention. Any true Republican, knowing that he was speaking before Ronald Reagan, would, instead of extending his remarks (as Buchanan did), have cut them short, out of respect for the then-octogenarian Gipper. And acknowledged how humbled he was to be on the same platform as that great man.

But, apparently indifferent to delaying Reagan’s speech, Buchanan, in his arrogance, rambled on and on, his angry remarks hurting his party. On that day in 1992, Pat Buchanan, in deed if not in word, abandoned contemporary conservatism and cast himself with those on the extreme fringe, his hateful words contrasting so clearly with Ronald Reagan’s optimistic vision.

So, this month, when Pat Buchanan criticizes Israel, he does so not as a representative of contemporary American conservatism, but of a conservatism long past, whose reactionary attitudes were melted away by the velveteen voice of Ronald Wilson Reagan — and that good man’s appeal to our best hopes and the noble ideals on which this great nation was built.

When the Gipper met David Horowitz shortly after leaving the White House, he confided to Horowitz, "I had second thoughts [about the left] long before you did". (That's a close paraphrase--I don't remember the exact quote from Horowitz's autobiography.) President Reagan was a staunch former supporter of FDR and Harry Truman who famously said:

I started out in the other party. But 40 years ago, I cast my last vote as a Democrat. It was a party in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised the return of power to the States. It was a party where Harry Truman committed a strong and resolute America to preserving freedom. F.D.R. had run on a platform of eliminating useless boards and commissions and returning autonomy and authority to local governments and to the States. That party changed, and it will never be the same. They left me; I didn't leave them.

In contrast, as I noted a year ago, Pat Buchanan has moved in the opposite direction in recent years:

The remaining strain of isolationism on the right are paleoconservatives, of which Pat Buchanan is the most prominent example--and it's not surprising that in the effort to prop up his isolationist beliefs, he's been more than willing to come full circle with the left himself.

Reagan's optimistic, expansive view of conservatism took him to the White House--twice. It's safe to say Pat's brand never will.

Linking to Fred Barnes and Noemie Emery, Betsy Newmark compares the legacies of cold warriors Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan to President Bush:

What is clear is that the Democrats, in propagating these myths about both Reagan and Truman, is that they're depending on people not remembering or knowning enough history to recognize the false comparisons that are being set up. And we know that the media won't correct those myths - even if they actually recognized them for what they were. Once again, we are seeing the importance of knowing history. Those who control our history can control what happens today in politics. And with the sorry state of our education, they may well succeed.

That's a topic that David Gelernter explored in depth last year--and was the subject of the Gipper's farewell address as president.

Rich Lowry writes that "The Democrats' position on the Iraq War has been a muddle", but that muddle "is moving toward a resolution, and the vehicle for it is next month's Democratic Senate primary race in Connecticut" between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont:

As the poet once said, you don't have to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. You only have to be a weather-vane politician sticking his (or her) finger in the wind. John Edwards has repudiated the war and lurched left since his 2004 vice-presidential run. He leads in presidential polls in Iowa. John Kerry regrets his prior support of the war and wants a deadline, any deadline, for exiting Iraq. Even the cautious Hillary Clinton just turned her back on Lieberman by saying she would support Lamont if he wins the primary.

If Lieberman does lose, it will be a sign that Clinton herself is vulnerable to a challenge from the left in the 2008 presidential primaries. Then, she will be under enormous pressure to walk away from her support of the war, too.

The biggest winner is Howard Dean, left for dead after his infamous 2004 Iowa "scream." Lamont is a straight Deaniac, not just in his opposition to the war, but in his demographic profile: white, well-off and highly educated. These are the same people who backed the successful peacenik insurrection of George McGovern in 1972, and now they are bidding to make their control of their party all the more complete. Democratic commentator Marshall Wittmann calls the left-wing bloggers "McGovernites with modems."

Their main issue is the war, but they also represent a general repudiation of the one hiccup in the post-1972 McGovernite dominance of the party, the Clinton administration circa 1994-1998. Clinton was pro-growth, pro-free trade, tonally moderate and willing to use force abroad. Al Gore spurned this winning centrist formula in 2000, but he felt compelled to make a bow to it by picking the moderate Lieberman as his running mate. Now, the Democratic party is on the verge of saying a Lieberman-style hawkish-centrism is utterly anathema.

Lieberman could still win the primary. Even if he loses, he could win the general election as an independent, showing that the party's left wing doesn't have wider appeal. But if Lieberman is ousted from his seat, it will be a decisive victory for the party's haters and anti-war bloggers. The Democrats' muddle on Iraq will finally have ended, and the party will be the poorer for it.

Incidentally, there's a curious element in Lieberman's recent televised debate with Lamont. In The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti notes:

It was a typical irony of this turbulent and uncertain campaign that Lamont, the advocate of opposition, was timid and soft-spoken, while Lieberman, the advocate of compromise, was aggressive, even rude. Lieberman disobeyed the rules governing rebuttals and interrupted Lamont's answers several times. He seemed dismissive of his opponent--"Who is Ned Lamont?" he kept asking--and irritated at the idea of a contested primary. Smarting at the interruptions, Lamont got off his best line of the debate: "This isn't Fox News, Senator."

"Lieberman kept interrupting and rebutting," one of the liberal bloggers at MyDD.com wrote afterward, "but really didn't make any effective points. He started off angry, and ended angry." It is a testament to the new powers rising in the Democratic party and the ongoing polarization of American politics that if Lieberman had behaved toward Bush as he did toward Lamont, the kiss of death might never have happened, and his political career might be secure.

"He started off angry, and ended angry"--so the angry left is angry that Lieberman appeared too angry towards their candidate? Now that's one ironic Mobius loop.

OK, let me get this straight: Jon Corzine, New Jersey's governor, spots a revenue shortage and wants to raise sales taxes. If there's a revenue shortage, why is he doing this?

New Jersey's casinos ushered the last of the gamblers away from slot machines and tables Wednesday, and janitors locked the doors behind them as a state government shutdown claimed its latest victims.

In the first mass closure in the 28-year history of Atlantic City's legalized gambling trade, all 12 casinos were under state orders to lock up.

Atlantic City's casinos are lucrative for New Jersey. They have a $1.1 billion payroll, and the state takes an 8 percent cut - an estimated $1.3 million a day. But as a stalemate over the state budget entered its fifth day Wednesday with no deal in sight, even they had to shut down.

With no state budget, New Jersey can't pay its state employees, meaning the casino inspectors who keep tabs on the money and whose presence is required at casinos are off the job.

State parks and beaches were also closed Wednesday because of the lack of staff.

"It's like last call at a bar. It's a little bit eerie," said Michael Trager, 36, of Cincinnati, was playing a video poker machine at 10 minutes to 8 a.m. when an attendant told him to conclude his bet. "They said, 'That's it, you gotta cash out. We're closing.'"

The doors to the Boardwalk side of Caesar's were locked by janitors. An announcement came over the public address system telling gamblers the casino was closing.

"It's history," said Andy Trechock, 41, of Depford, as he stepped away from a slot machine at Bally's Wild Wild West casino.

The problem started when the Legislature missed its July 1 constitutional deadline to pass the budget amid a fight with Gov. Jon S. Corzine over his proposed boost in the state sales tax.

Without a spending plan, Corzine ordered state offices shut down Saturday and all non-essential state government operations closed, and he furloughed more than half the state's employees. Only about 36,000 people in vital roles such as child welfare, state police and mental hospitals remained on the job, and they were working without pay.

Corzine planned to address all 120 state lawmakers to discuss the impasse Wednesday morning.

The dispute between the governor and his fellow Democrats who control the Legislature centers on his plan to increase the state sales tax from 6 percent to 7 percent to help overcome a $4.5 billion budget deficit in his $31 billion spending plan. Experts say the proposal would cost the average New Jersey family $275 per year.

Atlantic City Police Chief John Mooney worried that the sudden evacuation of the casinos could lead to problems in the streets and to labor unrest. If the shutdown continues, casino workers who aren't being paid could make trouble, he said.

"This is a state-created disaster," Mooney said.

Indeed. In addition to payroll taxes, how much revenue is generated in sales taxes via goods sold in the casinos? How many goods and services are bought in the casinos and nearby shops by high rollers--and just everyday folks on vacation? What about the revenue from their hotel rooms?

And why do liberal politicians only spot revenue shortages that require tax hikes after they get into office? With the exception of Walter Mondale of course. Oh wait, that answers that question!

If you haven't heard it yet, for some thoughts on how New Jersey got to this point, tune into my recent podcast with Steven Malanga, the author of the authoritative City Journal article, "The Mob That Whacked Jersey".

Update: More here. In my podcast with Steven, we discussed New Jersey becoming increasingly like California, with its never-ending fiscal crises and spiraling taxes. Much of what Limbaugh discusses gives that impression as well.

Another Update: In a press release in Adobe Acrobat Format, Americans For Tax Reform notes:

Read More »

Betsy Newmark, linking to a post by Lorie Byrd, has some thoughts that are well worth reading, especially today. And Gates Of Vienna stops for a "Reality Check on the Fourth of July".

Jonah Goldberg writes"Enough with the TR worship!":

There's some good stuff in Karl Rove's piece on TR, but this strikes me as good a moment as any to just say it: Enough with the TR worship! TR was a great man, an amazing man, an inspirational man. But he was no conservative in the sense conservatives should emulate today. As Rove notes, TR said "I like big things." Well one of them was big government. He adored Bismarck's Prussia (as did Wilson). He subscribed to modern Darwinian racism (as did Wilson). He was a Progressive in every sense of the word and his politics are of a piece of the Progressive era, an era — contra many in today's Republican Party — conservatives should be loath to mimic. TR worship is a switchback tactic to glorify the intellectual and political heritage of the pre-Goldwater GOP. There is honor there, to be sure. But better to cherry pick the nice patriotic bits and leave the rest of the pile in the dustbin of history. The Weekly Standard was wrong — and flagrantly so in retrospect — to put TR (and "National Greatness") back on the conservative mantle. In the 1990s post-Cold War conservatives were wrong to speak glowingly of the Progressive era. And they are all wrong today when they try to find an escape clause from conservative skepticism toward big government by slapping the pseudo-intellectual feel-good label "progressive" to whatever it is they're looking to do.

That's something that Jonah explored further in his syndicated column.

One of the most-quoted lines by Charles Krauthammer came from a 2002 column, which began thusly:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Peggy Noonan drafts a variation on this theme:

Democratic leaders in Washington are in a worse position than Republican leaders in Washington. Neither likes their base, really, and both think they are smarter. But the Democrats think, deep down, that their base is barking mad. The Republicans don't. They just think their base is a bore.

For some thoughts on the first half of Noonan's equation, click here.

Update: North Carolina seems to be taking Noonan's Law a bit too seriously, it seems...

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Maxine Waters reveals a bit of the truth", though rather inadvertently, of course:

In the debate yesterday over the House Resolution on the Iraq War and battle against terrorism, Maxine Waters, always entertaining, revealed the real reason why the Democrats were so upset. (Thanks to Laura Ingraham for posting the audio.) She got up on the House floor and said that many Democrats were going to be "trapped" because they would have to vote on this resolution and they don't want to have to pick a side and vote on it.

"And so, many Democrats are going to get trapped. Because they claim that in their districts they have half of their constituents for it, this war and half against it and they don't know what to do."

So in other words, if you add together to majority of the electorate that voted for President Bush in 2004, and the "half of [the] constituents" in Democrat districts that Waters refers to, the 256 in favor, 153 opposed vote yesterday sounds like, if anything, actually a smaller representation of what the national consensus actually is, despite post-voting waffling by Waters and others on the left.

Karl Rove won't be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald causing CNN's Jack Cafferty to reach for the Prozac. Follow the round-up of links here for more details.

Meanwhile, Will Collier is questioning the dismissal's timing...

I interviewed Hugh Hewitt on Friday concerning his new book, Painting The Map Red; it's the subject of my latest podcast. You can click here to listen to it; or tune in via our iTunes page. (No iPod required--virtually any computer can download and play an MP3 file.)

With primaries this past week in California and several other states, as well as the death of Zarqawi, it seemed like a particularly opportune time for an autumnal preview: the midterm elections, the role the Blogosphere will play in them, and the state of the Cleveland Browns, the NFL's perrienial powerhouse...

Despite 2006 being a midterm election, tensions seem to be running hot on the left. It's still five months from election day and we're seeing pranks such as this, which I don't recall appearing on the radar screen until until the fall of 2004.

(And as a much saner professor asks of the state that gave us Ward Churchill, "What is it about academics in Colorado"?)

Update: Michelle Malkin has much more--and of course, she literally wrote the book on this subject.

PBS: We're not liberal, but Republicans have been gunning for us since 1972!

(With apologies to Del Preston.)

Stephen Frank has some thoughts on the California Primary and what it portends for November, including Gov. Schwarzenegger's re-election chances.

In the Wall Street's Journal's "Opinion Journal" spin-off, Jill Stewart writes:

let the reality show begin, starring the chastened movie star politician versus the unpleasant taxer. In a state where entire neighborhoods are rebuilt from the ashes of firestorms and earthquakes, nobody will be shocked if a remade Arnold Schwarzenegger comes roaring back.

Read the whole thing.

This is great news as well, today.

Interesting take on how Z-Man's demise influenced the defeat of this bill:

Things looked very grim at the beginning of the week. What made the difference? Zarqawi didn’t hurt, for sure. If they got cloture in the Senate today, senators would have likely spent the next week debating the Akaka bill instead of the Defense-authorization bill. That would have looked great. Senators aren’t that blind.

Though the bar is set awfully low; as Mark Steyn recently quipped:

The present disenchantment south of the border arises in part because in Washington the alleged greatness of the "great men" has become entirely unmoored from the great questions of the day. It's like watching a sporting fixture where you can no longer tell what game they're playing.

Fizzbin, no doubt.

California Conservative looks at yesterday's race for control of California’s 50th congressional seat; where Republican Brian Bilbray prevailed over Democrat Francine Busby. Busby's campaign will be footnoted by this incident, of which RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman says, "gave everyone a boost...Symbols or symbolic statements come to be what a candidate stands for."

It's one thing when your last minute hit comes from outside (for example, the drunk driving charge unearthed against candidate George W. Bush at the very end of the 2000 presidential race, and the daily October surprises from late 2004 the media threw at him, along with the surprise cameo appearance of Osama bin Laden or his Mini Me), but to shoot yourself in the foot in the last minute of a campaign is just idiotic. On the other hand, to paraphrase George Costanza, it's not a gaffe...when you believe it's true.

The Chicago Tribune notes that the Akaka Bill is back--and is as odious as ever:

Long-stalled legislation to grant Native Hawaiians the same federal recognition and self-governance that most Native American tribes possess is scheduled to make it to the Senate floor amid charges that such a move would intensify racial tensions in the nation's 50th state and further strengthen a growing movement to secede from the United States.

"I have received assurances from the Senate leadership that a motion will finally be filed during the first week of June that would force debate and a vote on my bill," Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) said in an interview last week.

The Native Hawaiian Recognition bill, introduced in 1999 and known colloquially as the Akaka bill after the man who became the first Native Hawaiian to serve in the U.S. Senate, is by no means assured of passing. Indeed, the legislation faces an uphill battle, particularly after a federal civil rights commission recommended this month that the bill be rejected because it would be "discriminatory" to the majority of Hawaii citizens not of Native Hawaiian ancestry.

Gee, ya think?

Mark Steyn's song of the week is "Camelot" by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. As Steyn writes, neither composer asked for the historical freight the song was forced to carry three years after their Broadway show first opened:

And then in November 1963 John F Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. A few days later, the President's widow gave an interview to Life magazine, to another T H White – Theodore White, the political analyst. This is what she said:

When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical. But I’m so ashamed of myself— all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way — if it made him see the heroes — maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

There’ll be great Presidents again — and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me — but there’ll never be another Camelot.

Life came out on Tuesday. On Wednesday afternoon, Alan Jay Lerner, Kennedy’s classmate at Harvard, was crossing the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, past the news stand. In headline letters above the masthead of The Journal-American were those lines from his title song. As he recalled it, “The tragedy of the hour, the astonishment of seeing a lyric I had written in headlines, and the shock of recognition of a relationship between the two that extended far beyond the covers of one magazine, overloaded me with confused emotions. I was so dazed that I did not even buy the newspaper.” At the time, Alan lived on 71st Street. He started to walk home, and was at 83rd Street before he realized he’d passed his block.

In his recent Commentary essay, (which we previously discussed here), James Piereson brilliantly noted that it wasn't just JFK's terrifying assassination that has had repercussions to this day, but how it was historically framed by his survivors:

Significantly, Mrs. Kennedy’s notion of Arthurian heroism derived not from Sir Thomas Mallory’s 15th-century classic Le Morte d’Arthur but from The Once and Future King (1958) by T.H. White (no relation to the journalist), on which the musical was based. White’s telling of the saga pokes fun at the pretensions of knighthood, pointedly criticizes militarism and nationalism, and portrays Arthur as a new kind of hero: an idealistic peacemaker seeking to tame the bellicose passions of his age. This may be one reason why Mrs. Kennedy’s effort to frame her husband’s legacy in this way was widely regarded as a distorted caricature of the real Kennedy and something he himself would have laughed at. Aides and associates reported that they had never heard Kennedy speak either about Camelot the musical or about its theme song. Some of Mrs. Kennedy’s friends said they had never even heard her speak about King Arthur or the play prior to the assassination.

According to Schlesinger, Mrs. Kennedy later thought she may have overdone this theme. Be that as it may, one has to give her credit for quick thinking in the midst of tragedy and grief—and also for injecting a set of ideas into the cultural atmosphere that would have large consequences. For not only did the Camelot reading of heroic public service cut liberalism off from its once-vigorous nationalist impulses but, if one accepted the image of a utopian Kennedy Camelot—and many did—then the best times were now in the past and would not soon be recovered. Life would go on, but America’s future could never match the magical chapter that had been brought to a premature end. Such thinking drew into question the no less canonical liberal assumption of steady historical progress, and compromised the liberal faith in the future.

Without intending to do so, Mrs. Kennedy had put forth an interpretation of her husband’s life and death that undercut mid-century liberalism at its core.

Earlier, Piereson notes how JFK's killer was similarly reshaped in the immediate aftermath of November, 1963:

Hence, when the word spread on November 22 that President Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist—an anti-Communist, perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation went out immediately over the national airwaves, and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”

It therefore came as a shock when the police announced later the same day that a Communist had been arrested for the murder, and when the television networks began to run tapes taken a few months earlier showing the suspected assassin passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.

Informed later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs. Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had apparently been shot by this warped and misguided Communist. To have been killed by such a person, she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been martyred for civil rights and racial justice.

Given her husband’s politics, Mrs. Kennedy’s comment might seem curious. For one thing, he had staked his presidency on mounting an aggressive challenge to Communism; for another, during his brief term in office the cold war had reached its most dangerous point in his confrontation with the Soviet Union over Cuba. From this perspective, it should not have been so jarring to learn that he was a casualty of the cold war. More significantly, however, the remark suggests that Mrs. Kennedy was already thinking about how President Kennedy’s legacy should be framed, and was sensing that the identity of the assassin might prove inconvenient in this regard.

"It is one of the ironies of the era", Piereson writes, "that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald". And perhaps, in order to justify this radical change in worldviews, invented the paranoid fantasies that drove Oliver Stone's 1991 movie, and continue to inspire the farther elements of the left today:

“We’ve been talking about Martin Luther King Jr this night. My son [Casey] was killed the same day he was killed, on April 4th. I don’t believe in any coincidences. Casey was born on John F Kennedy’s birthday. He was born on the day, and died on the day, of 2 people who were assassinated by the war machine in my country. ”

It's probably not entirely surprising that I don't agree with a few of the suppositions that Peter Beinart of The New Republic made when discussing his new book, The Good Fight : Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again in his podcasted conversation today with Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith. But I admire his efforts to try to return the modern left to pre-Camelot liberalism. Will anyone listen?

Because of how easy it is for smart White House press secretaries to look good bouncing off her screeds disguised as questions.

(Via Mary Katharine Ham.)

Update: Sister Toldjah tells you more.

You can win if you bring knife to a gunfight...if you're a Marine.

Related thoughts, here and here.

Update: The video above was simply floating around YouTube, but Michelle Malkin custom-produced her own video tribute, for her Hot Air site.

In his latest Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn views the transformation of Congressional Republicans from their 1994 Contract With America days of holding government accountable to their aloof, elite worldview. Or as Steyn puts it: "Gingrich revolutionaries turn into arrogant elite":

Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite: ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.''

He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and, despite a Democrat-controlled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: Across post-Communist Europe, from Lithuania to Bulgaria to Slovenia, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments.

But it's an important distinction for non-totalitarian states, too. For example, in May 2004 the then-Canadian government proudly announced that in the last month the country had "created" 56,100 new jobs. That's terrific news, isn't it? The old economic engine positively roaring away in top gear. But on closer inspection, of those 56,100 new jobs, 4,200 were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining 43,000 were on the public payroll. That's why they call it "creating jobs": 77 percent of new jobs were government jobs, paid for by the poor schlubs working away in the remaining 23 percent; the "good news" was merely an acceleration of the remorseless transfer from the dynamic sector of the economy to the non-dynamic. For too much of its recent history, Canada has been a government that has a nation. And across the pond the European Union is a government that has a continent.

As Steyn says, the self-imposed rulers of "Incumbistan" are a "government that has a nation".

David Mastio is planning to use his blog to catalog and help counteract the inevitable spread of astro-turfing that's sure to come this fall:

Election season is here and with it will come a flood of fake letters to the editor from “real people” in reality written by political campaigns and activists groups of the right and left.

America’s editorial page editors make a heroic effort to stem this tide every year, but hundreds of professionally-written plagiarized fakes sneak through, polluting one of the most popular features in newspapers. (Incidentally, for Internet triumphalists, letters to the editor are THE original interactive feature.)

Just for a change of pace, I am hoping that the blogosphere can work with the mainstream media to stop the practice this year, or at least raise the price.

Right now, the National Conference of Editorial Writers, uses a members-only list-serv to trade information about astro-turf letters. It serves to keep some letters out, but because it is private, letters fraud perpetrators pay no public cost and editors who aren’t NCEW members -- or don't have time to read the list-serv -- don’t find out about it.

So, here’s what I am proposing:

InOpinion’s blog is going to become a clearinghouse for letters fraud information through this fall’s election (we’ll decide on a permanent home for the Letters Fraud Project after the election). This is going to be a completely non-partisan effort – fake missives that I agree with are just as bad as ones I disagree with.

I am going to invest my own time to report on as many instances of letters fraud as I can. We’ll report on which organizations are doing it and provide links to the online tool they use to help their supporters plagiarize. Most importantly, we’ll provide emails and phone numbers for the leaders of organizations engaged in this deceit as well as the same information for important financial supporters of these organizations. We are also developing information on the technology and consulting companies that make a profit from deceiving readers. We’ll be exposing them as well.

Sounds like a great idea to me; David has some suggestions on how the Blogosphere can help.

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan looked back on the decade which had recently concluded and said, "Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade". Back in January of 2005, I attempted to use Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic as a signpost on the road between the traditional liberalism of FDR, Truman and JFK and the more radical, punitive version that followed and exists to this day. But in Commentary, James Piereson argues that it was Kennedy's assassination and its immediate aftermath, that would cause the momentous shift that would ultimately consign New Deal-style American liberalism to the ash heap:

Liberalism entered the 1960’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.

What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers, from the political to the cultural to the psychological, each seeking to explain the great upheaval summed up in that all-purpose phrase, “the 60’s.” To some, the relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the repressions and pieties of 1950’s conformism. To others, the watershed event was the escalating war in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that itself escalated into widespread disaffection from received political ideas and indeed from larger American purposes. Still others have pointed to the simmering racial tensions that would burst into the open in riots and looting, calling into question underlying assumptions about the course of integration if not the very possibility of social harmony.

No doubt, the combination of these and other events had much to do with driving the nation’s political culture to the Left in the latter half of the decade. But there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960’s—namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself—contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.

It is one of the ironies of the era that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. But why should this have been so? What was it about mid-century liberalism that allowed it to be knocked so badly off balance by a single blow?

Hugh Hewitt once said:

There is a Kennedy dynasty in Massachusetts and vast Kennedy affection in the Democratic Party and among liberal media. But there is no Kennedy dynasty in America, just an interesting family that wished for a dynasty and could never figure out that Jack's politics might have pulled it off, but never Teddy's.

Read the whole essay by Piereson, which is tremendous; he brilliantly diagrams the transformation from one era to the next.

Update: Dr. Sanity has some further thoughts; Jonah Goldberg writes that he'll be exploring some of the same territory in his upcoming book.

Another Update: I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, but after all, it was you and me.

Ordinarily this is VodkaPundit's territory. But Maggie's Farm and John Stephenson are also stepping behind the bar for tonight's speech--which John's discovered a first draft of.

Scott Johnson of Power Line (needless to say, normally considered staunch supporters of President Bush), looks at a (real) draft of the speech and writes, "It strikes me that we are coming perilously close to 'more mush from the wimp' time, though I may well be mistaken".

Michelle Malkin sounds like she concurs with Johnson's initial assessment.

The American Spectator quotes a consulting lobbyist for a broadcast network who says, "This is how poisonous it's gotten in Washington":

"You have Republicans taking money from companies and firms working to end their control of Congress, and even worse, working with outfits like MoveOn.org. And they are taking this money to not only help groups dedicated to defeating Republicans, but also for legislation that would regulate the Internet."

* * *

"You have to wonder when conservatives will wake up and realize what is happening here," says a House Republican leadership aide. "You have this unholy alliance between Google and MoveOn and groups like the Christian Coalition. I mean how is it the Christian Coalition can help a company like Google, which makes money off of online pornography? Conservatives ought to be very concerned about this situation, but they don't seem to get it. And perhaps by the time they do, it will be too late."

Of course, as Mark Steyn quotes (or at least paraphrases) Newt Gingrich, 11 years after the Contract With America, "Well, you must remember Republicans are still pretty new at this, we’re not used to being in the majority".

Keep this up boys, and the pain of leadership will go away.

Update: Speaking of which, "Tonight could be the first fully televised political suicide in history. I don't even want to watch."

Update 5/24/06: On the HuffPost, Eli Pariser of Moveon.org denies the Google connection.

Mark Steyn writes, "there are now two basic templates in terrorism media coverage:

Template A (note to editors: to be used after every terrorist atrocity): "Angry family members, experts and opposition politicians demand to know why complacent government didn't connect the dots."

Template B (note to editors: to be used in the run-up to the next terrorist atrocity): "Shocking new report leaked to New York Times for Pulitzer Prize Leak Of The Year Award nomination reveals that paranoid government officials are trying to connect the dots! See pages 3,4,6,7,8, 13-37."

How do you connect the dots? To take one example of what we're up against, two days before 9/11, a very brave man, the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated in Afghanistan by killers posing as journalists. His murderers were Algerians traveling on Belgian passports who'd arrived in that part of the world on visas issued by the Pakistani High Commission in the United Kingdom. That's three more countries than many Americans have visited. The jihadists are not "primitives". They're part of a sophisticated network: They travel the world, see interesting places, meet interesting people -- and kill them. They're as globalized as McDonald's -- but, on the whole, they fill in less paperwork. They're very good at compartmentalizing operations: They don't leave footprints, just a toeprint in Country A in Time Zone B and another toe in Country E in Time Zone K. You have to sift through millions of dots to discern two that might be worth connecting.

I'm a strong believer in privacy rights. I don't see why Americans are obligated to give the government their bank account details and the holdings therein. Other revenue agencies in other free societies don't require that level of disclosure. But, given that the people of the United States are apparently entirely cool with that, it's hard to see why lists of phone numbers (i.e., your monthly statement) with no identifying information attached to them is of such a vastly different order of magnitude. By definition, "connecting the dots" involves getting to see the dots in the first place

If an enterprising conservative politician wanted to watch a few heads (figuratively) explode, this would be the perfect time to re-introduce discussions of a flat or consumption tax, and when the inevitable shrieks against it are raised, simply reply, "Oh, I'm sorry--I thought you wanted to get the government out of the data collection business. Isn't the IRS as good a place to start as any?"

Found via New Jersey-based Fausta Blog, the Wall Street Journal's Paul Mulshine explores perpetually blighted Newark:

Cory Booker grew up in a North Jersey suburb. The son of a middle-class African-American couple who broke the color barrier, the tall, athletic Mr. Booker played football at Stanford and later studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. And like Richard Florida, he is a disciple of Jane Jacobs.
"She had a very strong belief in creating strong neighborhoods and communities," Mr. Booker told me a couple of days before Tuesday's election for mayor of Newark, which he won in a landslide.

As he talked about his plans for the city, we drove past empty lots and abandoned housing. Mr. Booker was imagining filling those dead blocks with some of the most conveniently located housing in the New York area. "It's quicker to get to the former World Trade Center site on the PATH train than for people on the Upper West Side or Upper East Side to get there." And it's not just Manhattan that's easily accessible. Amtrak will get you to Washington in 2 1/2 hours. Newark also has an airport, a seaport and access to every major highway on the Northeast Corridor.

So why don't builders take advantage of this prime location? "Newark has a notorious reputation in the state of New Jersey for the length of time it takes to get certificates of code compliance or certificates of occupancy for these buildings," Mr. Booker said. One woman had to wait eight months to get approval to open a business, he noted. Meanwhile, one builder found it impossible to get his paperwork approved--even though the work he was doing was for the city housing authority. The guy then hired a "facilitator" to move the project along, but he still got nowhere. The really frightening part, said Mr. Booker, was that the facilitator was the son of the mayor.

That mayor was Sharpe James. In his 20 years of running Newark, Mr. James managed to accumulate a Rolls-Royce, several houses and a yacht. Throughout that time, he openly opposed gentrification. He didn't want newcomers moving to the city. With good reason: They would have voted him out.

When Mr. Booker first challenged Mr. James for the mayoralty in 2002, Mr. James survived only by running what was almost certainly the dirtiest campaign of the century. He accused Mr. Booker of "collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark" and even went so far as to say of Mr. Booker on TV, "He's Jewish." He isn't. He isn't white, either. But Mr. James accused him of that as well.

The tactics won Mr. James enough of a margin in the housing projects and among city workers to beat Mr. Booker. Meanwhile the state's Democratic establishment turned a blind eye to the race-baiting and anti-Semitism. The policy of the political class toward Newark, even in Republican administrations, has been to throw pork-barrel projects at it.

Mr. James looked like he was on a roll. But then he pulled out of this year's mayoral race at the last minute. His reason remains a subject of speculation to those who follow New Jersey politics.

For more on New Jersey's woes, check out our podcast with Steven Malanga of City Journal, on "The Mob That Whacked Jersey", a cautionary tale for residents of all 50 states, not just my place of birth.

Update: Orrin Judd, himself a former Jerseyite, has much more.

Arnold Kling looks at the possible coming of Pelosism:

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi plans to use control of Congress to launch an investigation into the Bush Administration. For those of us who have not been drinking the Kos Kool-Aid, this seems like a questionable enterprise.

In the late 1940's, the Republicans finally took control of Congress. Seething after years of the Roosevelt Administration, one of the things that Republicans did in the late 1940's and early 1950's was launch investigations into the "treason" of the Roosevelt-Truman State Department, as well as former Communists in various professions. When I was three years old, one of the investigating committees decided that my mother, who had joined the Communists in the 1930's and left the Party in the 1940's, was of sufficient national security interest to be hauled before the Grand Inquisition. A few of the people that these committees investigated did turn out to be foreign agents or traitors. However, most of those investigated, like my mother, never did anything wrong.

In the 1950's, the Republican Right saw the investigations into "un-American activities" as a way to righteously smite down the Democratic Party. They wanted to expose their opponents' scandals and treason. Instead, they wound up exposing their own bad judgment, radicalism, and incivility. In the long run, the investigations damaged both parties. Certainly, the Republicans gained nothing. Apart from the war hero Eisenhower, their electoral fortunes sagged -- they lost control of Congress from 1958 until 1994. It seems rather odd that Democrats should want to try a similar strategy today.

The most famous of the inquisitors was Senator Joe McCarthy. In American politics today, McCarthyism is an epithet. I am not sure why the Democrats want to turn Pelosism into its synonym.

Because "America Needs An Audit!"

(Say, is there a subliminal message buried in that?)

Perhaps hearing the not-so-subliminal writing on the wall, Pelosi's spokesman is currently saying, "impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it".

But where could all this partisan rancor lead? A Blue! Red! civil war in 2008!

An often compelling read about a polarized electorate heading to explosion over a contested presidential election in 2008, Blue! Red! nevertheless sometimes veers into the realm of the unintentionally hilarious.

Even though the book begins with the mandatory disclaimer that it "is a work of fiction and that any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental," the plucky Democratic candidate in the book is a female senator ("Sheila Brinton") whose husband was once president of the United States. Senator Brinton shows a lot more intestinal fortitude than the previous Democratic candidates for president who, in the book's retelling, meekly allowed themselves to be cheated out of the presidency.

"I want to keep fighting," Senator Brinton declares. "I want the Presidency with every fiber of my being - I want it for the Party, for our people who've been beaten down . . . I'm afraid that if I concede now, and I run again next time, they'll steal the election again. If they steal election after election, we have no choice but to not accept it. I'll not back down; I'll not concede like those soft men who were candidates before me conceded."

Strangely, Blue! Red! foresees the college football bowl games becoming the site of armed conflict between rabid partisans (with Republicans naturally being the aggressors).

Fortunately, Dean Barnett reminds us, it's unlikely to happen:

Walking around Harvard Yard...Sometimes it must seem like Paris in 1789 with all the politically inspired fury sprouting up among the lattes. But if Harvard professors want to storm the Bastille--or start a civil war--they'll have to do it themselves. And that's not very likely.

After all, they don't even want Army recruiters on campus.

Well, there is that.

Update: A new issue is emerging for the 2008 elections: Stop global demagnetizing!

I'm sure there will be a Daily Degauss blog to focus on it by then...

Another Update: Welcome Real Clear Politics readers; please look around, there's much here you may enjoy.

The Professor looks at the Confederate angle in the George Allen/James Webb race in Virginia.

One of my most popular posts in 2005 (I kept finding people linking to it in the stats throughout the year) was a throwaway item I wrote on Christmas Eve of 2004 on the controversy of the Confederate flag on the top of the General Lee in the 2005 big screen remake of The Dukes of Hazzard. On the surface, it seemed trivial, but as Glenn notes, critics of Senator Allen are complaining about his Confederate Flag pin...that he wore in high school, forty years ago.

In a topic very much related to the previous post, that's the issue du jour over at Cato Unbound.

Jonah Goldberg revives the Dubya As Nixon meme that started gaining traction right around this time four years ago. He makes some great points, especially about our 37th president (whose pesky razor stubble I sympathize with, though not his actual policies):

The economy was a mess toward the end of Nixon's term. It's going gangbusters now. As bad as the Iraq war may be going, it hardly compares to the bloodshed of Vietnam. And as loud as the antiwar movement may be today, it amounts to little more than a historical reenactment of the antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s.

But there is one area where we can make somewhat useful comparisons between Nixon and Bush: their status as liberal Republicans.

Nixon has a fascinating reputation as one of the most right-wing presidents of the 20th century. This impression is largely a product of the fact that few presidents have been more hated by the Left. But simply because the left despises you doesn't mean you're particularly right-wing. If LBJ were alive, you could ask him about this. Or just take a look at poor Joe Lieberman.

The truth is, Nixon was the last of the New Deal-era liberal presidents. He sponsored and signed the legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, the Water Quality Improvement Act and the Endangered Species Act. He oversaw the establishment of Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon created the Philadelphia Plan, the springboard for racial quotas; pushed for Title IX (the women's "equality" law); and hired Leon Panetta (later Bill Clinton's chief of staff) as his director of the office of civil rights.

Nixon pushed aggressively for national health insurance that would cover 100 percent of the nation's poor children. He increased federal spending on health and education programs by more than 50 percent and massively boosted spending on the National Endowment for Humanities. He tried to increase welfare with his Family Assistance Plan and Child Development Act.

Economically, Nixon got along swell with the chamber of commerce crowd, but he was well to the left of almost any leading Democrat today, championing wage and price controls as a legitimate tool of state, and boasting "Now I am a Keynesian in economics."

I could argue that Nixon's amoral foreign policy is today alive and well in many corners of the Left, but that's a distraction from my central point.

Bush is certainly to the right of Nixon on many issues. But at the philosophical level, he shares the Nixonians' supreme confidence in the power of the state. Bush rejects limited government and many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that position.

Read the rest.

Update: It shoudn't be entirely surprising that Orrin Judd has a very different take from Jonah.

Byron York returns from last night's White House Correspondents' Dinner and writes, "Conspiracy theorists, take it away":

And by the way, has anyone commented on what was perhaps the weirdest sight of the night, or maybe of any other night: former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, the former CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson, chatting with Lyndon LaRouche? It happened at the receptions prior to the dinner and left more than one onlooker shaking his head at the strangeness of it all.

It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!

(Of course, maybe the Wilsons were simply chatting LaRouche up for his opinions on the source of the Danish Mohammed cartoons...)

IMAO looks at some of the other Tonys that President Bush could have nominated for press secretary.

(Back from Texas. Watch for regular blogging to resume tomorrow.)

15 or so years ago, back in his lefty days, Dennis Miller used to refer to Dan Quayle as "the Rosetta Stone of comedy".

Given the passage of time and the former veep's low profile these days, it's safe to say that a successor has emerged to the grab the title Quayle once held.

Wrong side of the aisle, but otherwise, this was an easy prediction:

While I think Snow is a great choice myself if he does indeed accept the position, expect an endless amount of "Snow Job" headlines from first leftwing bloggers, and eventually the legacy media.

And here's the first!

Seriously though, assuming all the rumors are true, it's going to fun--I think--watching Snow sparring with the White House press corps. As a journalist himself, hopefully he'll know what not to say, which is half the job's role.

Update: John Hinderaker writes, "It's Tony Snow!":

The White House announced tonight that Fox News radio host Tony Snow will be the new White House press secretary, replacing Scott McClellan.

Tony is one of the world's nice people. He is also a close student of the news, and I think he's been known to read our site from time to time. His congeniality and media background will buy him some popularity with the reporters who cover the White House. But essentially all of them are partisan Democrats, so that good will will last for about a week. What the White House really needs is someone who can push back aggressively against the liberal tilt of the media, and make the administration's case directly to the people. Tony Snow is equipped to do this, I think; the question is, will he?

I think he might. Even a few nice, "You don't really mean that, do you Helen?" sort of jibes of the type that Ari Fleischer was a master at, might be enough to begin to (a) shake up the White House press corps again and (b) make them look even more like highly-partisan fools with a lead pipe tone when they react by sticking their claws into Snow and his classic nice guy Teflon delivery.

Such gestures will also continue, and ideally, accelerate the pattern of The Bush Thesis of legacy media decertification that Jay Rosen first named back in 2004. As Rosen described it, it was a wildly postmodern theory: deliberately turning the rapacious instincts of the press back onto themselves to discredit a hostile liberal media, and provide endless material for conservative pundits and the Blogosphere, all of which--on paper, at least--makes the president look better in the process. (It helps to have coherent, logical policies popular with your base of voters, of course.) And unlike his ineffectual immediate predecessor, Snow seems to be ideally suited to resuming the strategery, increasingly important as mid-term elections loom closer.

Jim Geraghty is right on the money:

Dear Republican lawmakers,

Please take this idea (eliminating the federal tax on gas and diesel for sixty days) and run with it. Take the support of Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and argue that this is bipartisan and make the Democrats vote for or against temporary tax relief for American drivers. If everyone votes for it, then great. Let the Democrats argue that they thought of it first. All the voters will remember in November is that gas prices dropped 18 cents a gallon (unleaded) and 24 cents a gallon (leaded) and that a GOP Congress and a GOP president got it done.

Just some free advice.

Hugh Hewitt also agrees that this is an idea that truly needs to be implemented--let's see the left put their cards on the table.

CNN is reporting that Tony Snow "is likely to accept the job as White House press secretary, succeeding Scott McClellan".

Jay Stephenson has some thoughts. While I think Snow is a great choice myself if he does indeed accept the position, expect an endless amount of "Snow Job" headlines from first leftwing bloggers, and eventually the legacy media.

If Hillary gets in, can we expect Larry King to be offered the same gig in 2009? And while we ponder that, here's an example of staggeringly bad political press management.

This past February, Larry Kudlow wrote:

In case you didn’t see it, Barron’s published a great story called,“Revolution on Wheels”. Basically it makes the point that taxes matter to folks in choosing where to live.

“Quietly, without banners or raised fists, they are packing up their families and belongings and moving from high tax states like California and New York to lower-tax locales like Florida, Nevada and Texas.”

Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder says over the past five years, 1.2 million people moved out of the ten highest taxed states, while an almost equal number, 1.3 million, moved into the low tax states. “It’s a stealth migration, and it’s one of the biggest, most significant yet least recognized movements of the population in American history,” says Vedder. “People are voting with their feet to say that taxes do matter.”

Today, Drudge links to an AP article titled, "Census: Americans Are Fleeing Big Cities":

The Census Bureau measured domestic migration - people moving within the United States - from 1990 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2004. The report provides the number of people moving into and out of each state and the 25 largest metropolitan areas.

The states that attracted the most new residents: Florida, Arizona and Nevada. The states that lost the most: New York, California and Illinois.

Among the 25 largest metropolitan areas, 18 had more people move out than move in from 2000 to 2004. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago - the three biggest metropolitan areas - lost the most residents to domestic moves. The New York metropolitan area had a net loss of more than 210,000 residents a year from 2000 to 2004.

Curiously, the T-word is never used by the author.

McClellan was no Ari Fleischer, but John Hinderaker thinks he's done "a capable job". Hinderaker mentions that Tony Snow is a possible candidate--and given his extensive media background, that certainly makes sense, though like McClellan, I'm not sure how aggressive he'd be at pushing back against the rapacious Washington press corp.

Unlike, say, these fellows, also rumored to be in the running.

Update: An oft-ignored--and for good reason, too--segment of America weighs in, here.

Last year, Hillel Halkin wrote:

The scary thing is that once again, 50 years after the Holocaust, the Jews have so many enemies. And make no mistake about it: They are dangerous.

Nor are all of them primitives out of the Middle Ages. Some are very suave, very cultivated gentlemen. They wear three-piece suits and they speak with Oxonian accents and they say things like "bloody nuisance" and "spot on." Some are even leaders of the Anglican Church.

And at least one is a leftwing former US Senator.

The Transportation Security Administration detained a US Marine last week...because they detected gunpowder on his boots on the flight that took him back into the world from Iraq:

The Transportation Security Administration bagged a terrorist in Los Angeles International Airport Tuesday, or so they thought. Daniel Brown's name came up on their no-fly watchlist, so they dragged him into interrogation and grilled him, despite the protestations of Brown and his fellow travelers, who swore they could vouch for him.

The others in Brown's party went on their Northwest Airlines flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul, where they waited on a bus at the airport. You see, the detained man was Staff Sergeant Daniel Brown, USMC Reserve, and he was traveling with the other members of his Marine Reserve Military Police unit, which was heading home to Minnesota from eight months of combat in Iraq. The Marines were in full uniform and all, including Brown, had travel orders and military identification cards.

After attempts to stonewall under claims of "security," TSA spokesmen finally admitted that Staff Sergeant Daniel Brown was placed on the no-fly list, and ultimately detained, because they had detected gunpowder on his footgear -- not on this flight, but on a prior flight, which earned Brown a permanent place on the TSA's mysterious terrorist lists.

The footgear that had been exposed to gunpowder? Brown's combat boots, and the occasion of that flight was after his return from his first combat tour in Iraq. Gee... a combat Marine in Al-Anbar Province being exposed to gunpowder.

Exposure to gunpowder isn't something the TSA knows a lot about. Hey, who are you gonna believe, this here watchlist or your lyin' eyes?

Ultimately, the TSA screeners figured out that Brown really was a Marine, and no threat to his fellow passengers, and let him board a later flight. When he deplaned at MSP, his unit's bus was waiting -- his fellow Marines in it.

Marine 1st Sgt. Drew Benson explained why. "We don't leave anybody behind. We start together, and we finish together." All 26 Marines waited for Brown -- even though their families were waiting for them at a scheduled welcome-home bash at Fort Snelling.

Brown's mother Terry was glad they did. "They all come back together... no matter what it takes and I think that's very important," she told WCCO-TV.

Frequent TSA critic Richard A. Altomare, Founder and Chairman of the Coalition for Luggage Security -- and a former marine -- said, "I'm proud that Sergeant Dan Brown's Marine unit refused to report to their post until the 'man left behind' was permitted to get on a passenger plane. This TSA's bloated bureaucracy with documented insensitive treatment of countless Americans really rings home a need to dismantle their growing airport agency before all American freedoms are lost -- since now even the United States Marines can't help us."

Back in 2003, the Washington Times' James Bovard explained the origins of the TSA's informal motto:

In the wake of September 11, the federal mentality toward airline customers is best summarized by the informal motto posted at the headquarters of the TSA air marshal training center: "Dominate. Intimidate. Control." But it takes more than browbeating average Americans to make air travel safe. Airline expert Michael Boyd aptly observed: "The TSA is a poorly focused, unaccountable Washington political bureaucracy geared to screen for objects, not for security threats."

And too inept to distinguish a Marine from a terrorist. Maybe some of the seniors at UC Santa Cruz should apply there after graduation.

(Via Mark Steyn.)

Most Monday's are pretty rough, but today--as you're no doubt well aware--is tax day. You can get some idea of where your state taxes are going by listening to my podcast with Steve Malanga of City Journal on New Jersey's fiscal insanity.

It made this week's Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers, where you can find lots more coverage of my old home state.

Referring to the comments that come out of Hollywood about Iraq, John McCain once quipped that if "Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people, Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded." Jonah Goldberg notes that the Deep Thinkers in Hollywood often have a tough time understanding Washington:

A common theme in Hollywood's treatment of politics is the notion that people with "bad" ideas are also bad people (to its credit, West Wing occasionally resisted this cliche, though usually to demonstrate that decent conservatives have the capacity to learn how wrong they are).

Of course, this view is shared by many people outside of Hollywood as well. The problem is that it just doesn't jibe much with reality.

As anyone who's spent time in D.C. can tell you, asininity, egotism, and rudeness are fairly evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. Some of the biggest jerks in Washington can be found spouting progressive nostrums about caring for the poor and the downtrodden. Similarly, some of the conservatives constantly invoking the Christian imperative to love one another can be found figuratively whacking their interns about the head with a hardcover edition of the New Testament for not properly trimming the crusts on their sandwiches.

The thing is, Hollywood already knew that about the religious conservatives. Showing "moral majority" types as closeted bigots, perverts, and hypocrites is a grand cinematic pastime. What seems unfathomable to many liberals in Hollywood is that many religious conservatives are in fact decent, pleasant people and that nastiness is almost an entirely independent variable from ideology. Man-of-the-people Michael Moore is a notoriously nasty boss, while "virtuecrat" Bill Bennett is famously fun to work for.

The refreshing thing about Thank You for Smoking is that the most likable character is the most "evil" — by liberal standards at least. Tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor, played by Aaron Eckhart, is a charming rogue who loves his son and doesn't apologize for his line of work. He never "sees the light" at the end of the movie, as Michael Douglas does in Falling Down when he realizes that, as an angry white male, he actually must be the villain. Rather, Naylor upholds a virtuous distinction Hollywood liberals consider sacrosanct when it comes to sex, but reject out of hand almost everywhere else: Something can be good — in this case, less smoking — without justifying government intrusions.

What's even more difficult for Hollywood to grasp is that government can't simply do whatever it chooses to do. Which is why, in Hollywood's Washington, speeches are usually a substitute for action. Douglas announces in The American President that we're "gonna get the guns" — i.e., all handguns in the United States — and that's supposed to settle the issue right there, hooray! In Dave, Kevin Kline announces he's simply going to give every American a job because having a job is just so darn nice and good. Never mind that government-guaranteed employment is neither a new nor a particularly good idea. You could look it up.

In reality, the reason so little gets done in Washington is not because "bad" people are stopping the good people. It's because different groups of people have different definitions of what's good and what's bad. And even when they finally agree on something, its effect may well be negligible, unforeseen, and slow to materialize. That's dull stuff for a movie, but not a bad way to run a country.

Or as P.J. Rourke once said, "Let us compare Congress to the Justice Department's case against Microsoft. No one is trying to break up the House of Representatives because it's been too succesful".

Steve Green puts Hillary in the White House in 2008 in two easy steps:

So my advice to the Republican Party is this. Do whatever you can, and quickly, to pass some kind of sane immigration reform that Democrats and Independents can all live with. If you don’t, then you’re in trouble. History doesn’t actually ever repeat itself, except when it does. Assuming a Secure Borders guy did no better than Ross Perot in 1992, he could easily tip the entire Southwest, and bits of the South, over to the Democrats. That’s a recipe for defeat.

My advice to the Democrats is this: Obstruct in Congress a very little, and do bunches of nothing a whole lot. Then sit back and watch as the Republicans splinter over security issues.

Read the whole thing.

The American Enterprise magazine reprints a 2000 essay by
John D. Fonte, in which he wrote that America has just big of an assimilation problem as it has with immigration. Which isn't surprising, as the two go hand-in-hand:

At any conference on immigration these days, someone will typically rise and quote Henry James, Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, or some other old Anglo-Saxon fuddy-duddy worrying circa 1900 that immigrants would never assimilate to American life. The speaker will then ridicule the designated Henry, remind us he was wrong, and declare, "We have been through this debate before, but today’s immigrants will Americanize just as they did in the past."

This is good sport, guaranteed to get a few laughs. But it is grossly misleading. For the fact is, today’s assimilating forces are much different than those that prevailed in the early twentieth century. To put things simply: It’s not 1900 anymore.

During our earlier immigration wave one century back, we had self-confident patriotic elites in politics, education, business, religion, and civic associations who insisted that new immigrants Americanize. Now, we have diffident and divided elites who are either actively promoting anti-Americanization policies such as "multiculturalism" or doing little to encourage assimilation. In 1915, Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Theodore Roosevelt explicitly and forcefully called for the "Americanization" of new immigrants. In 2000, Democrats and Republicans alike talk mostly of "diversity," rarely if ever of "assimilation" or "Americanization."

Back then, the federal government promoted Americanism and individual rights. Now it promotes ethnic consciousness and group rights. Group preferences in employment that were originally designed for black Americans who had suffered historical discrimination now include special treatment for most newly arrived immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and for non-citizens as well as citizens.

Back then, the United States had control of its borders. Now the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that every year the number of illegal immigrants grows by 275,000.

And speaking of immigration, Mickey Kaus is all over the action in the House and Senate yesterday.

Steven Malanga paints a grim, but I think accurate portrait of New Jersey's woes:

For more than a century and a half, New Jersey, nestled between New York City and Philadelphia, offered commuters like Thannikary affordable living in pleasant communities. Wall Street tycoons, middle managers fleeing high-priced Gotham once they’d married and had kids, and immigrants who settled first in New York but quickly discovered that they could pursue the American dream more easily across the Hudson—all flocked into the Garden State. Eventually, New Jersey’s congenial living attracted even corporations escaping New York’s rising crime and taxes. The state flourished.

But today Jersey is a cautionary example of how to cripple a thriving state. Increasingly muscular public-sector unions have won billions in outlandish benefits and wages from compliant officeholders. A powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making Jersey among the nation’s biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags. Inept, often corrupt, politicians have squandered yet more billions wrung from suburban taxpayers, supposedly to uplift the poor in the state’s troubled cities, which have nevertheless continued to crumble despite the record spending. To fund this extravagance, the state has relentlessly raised taxes on both residents and businesses, while localities have jacked up property taxes furiously. Jersey’s cost advantage over its free-spending neighbors has vanished: it is now among the nation’s most heavily taxed places. And despite the extra levies, new governor Jon Corzine faces a $4.5 billion deficit and a stagnant economy during a national boom.

Unless Garden State leaders can stand up to entrenched interests—and the signs aren’t promising—the state may find itself permanently relegated to second-class economic status. New Jersey “could become the next California, with budget problems too big to solve without a lot of pain,” warns former Jersey City mayor Bret Schundler. “The old way of raising taxes to solve budget problems has been tried, and it’s done nothing but make things worse.”

It's a long-ish article, but well worth reading in its entirety as a cautionary tale.

Ed Morrissey parses Cynthia McKinney's Durbin-esque "apology" for slugging a Capital Hill police officer, and isn't very impressed:

If that's the complete statement, it falls a little short. She says that the incident should not have resulted in "physical contact," but that became necessary on the part of the police when she refused to stop after blowing through the checkpoint. She should have apologized for striking the officer outright and not hiding behind this weasel-word construction. Nor, do I note, does she apologize for accusing Capitol Hill police of racism and racial profiling. She gave the minimal apology possible to try to get the story off the front pages.

Once again, we have an egotistical blowhard demanding that everyone cater to her whims and smearing people who refuse to submit to her bullying. I suspect that the deafening public silence from the Congressional Black Caucus disguised some pointed advice from them to McKinney to shut the hell up before she undid years of work highlighting real racism in law enforcement.

It shouldn't work, but it probably will; the story will quickly fade unless the grand jury decides to press charges anyway, and at some point we'll hear her colleagues demand that we "move on". I give it three hours.

Meanwhile, appearing on Hugh Hewitt's radio show today, Mark Steyn agrees that McKinney's apology is a "kind of weasel phrasing of words":

This is another thing I joked about, actually, with the border guy yesterday, that basically, she gets asked for I.D., and she slugs the official. And then she accuses him of being a racist. The reality of the situation is that if this is a republic of citizen legislators, then they do not have the right to demand the kind of privileges that ordinary citizens do not have. So if we have to produce cards and I.D., and stand in line, and have the right documentation, then so should Congressmen and Senators, and secretaries of this, and secretaries of that, and ambassadors, and all the fancy pants people. You know, one of the most loathsome and unlikeable things about John Kerry was when he was running for president, was his whole 'don't you know who I am' attitude whenever he met a little person. And I don't think that...unfortunately, there's too many Senators and Congressmen for them all to pull the 'don't you know who I am' routine?

HH: Okay, so we're not expecting her to really get down and apologize. Do you expect her to be prosecuted?

MS: Well, I would hope she's prosecuted. You know, I don't think you have a real legislature unless they are bound by the same rules as us.

HH: Well put.

MS: I remember during the 2000 campaign, standing at the toll booth on I-93 in New Hampshire, as Al Gore's motorcade came roaring through without stopping, and you know, little old ladies jumping out of the way and scattering, because he didn't want to pay the 75 cent toll. Sorry, I don't care if he's the Vice President. You don't legislate laws for us that you're not bound by. And if it's the law that you have to produce I.D. to get into the United States Congress, and to its grounds, and to its buildings, then she has to do it with everybody else.

One would hope.

While Glenn Reynolds scores an impressive coup by podcasting an interview with the Senate Majority Leader, Confederate Yankee is none-too-happy with his performance on illegal immigration. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt puts it simply: "No Fence? No President Frist".

Update: Michelle Malkin adds, "If this is what Sen. Frist thinks Americans 'expect' and 'deserve,' the GOP is in for a very rude awakening in November".

Hugh Hewitt calls it "a home run" for the conservative governor of the very liberal Massachusetts; David Cohen of the Brothers Judd isn't so sure.

Update: Don Singleton fisks a gushing New York Times article on the Romney plan, which notes, "businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed a fee of up to $295 per employee per year". Don replies:

It does not matter whether they can afford to buy health care for their employees or not. I bet we find a lot of small businesses with 10 to 20 part time workers firing half their staff and having nine employees working overtime.

Or converting them into indepedent contractors.

Michelle Malkin has more, although it's still not known if Delay is resigning from his seat immediately, or simply withdrawing from the congressional race in November.

Two books recently arrived which point the way towards November of this year--and beyond.

Hugh Hewitt's Painting The Map Red

Edward J. Feulner and Doug Wilson's Getting America Right

Watch this space for more about both titles.

Today's the day for hard-hitting press conferences from Democrats in the House and Senate: First-up is Iowahawk's transcript of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi's "Operation Steel Gazelle: A Smart, Multi-Slide Plan For Toughening American Security with Smartness".

Next is Cynthia McKinney's defense for punching a DC policeman while he was attempting to keep American security toughly secured.

I'm reasonably sure one of these photo-ops is satire. I'm just not sure which one--and it gets harder and harder to separate reality and fantasy these days when it comes to Washington.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Today the Democrats launched their mission to revamp their image on security and national defense. They have long complained about a national perception of their party as wimpish, but Cynthia McKinney decided to set the record straight -- by slugging a cop:

According to two sources on Capitol Hill, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., walked through a metal detector in a House of Representatives office building. When an officer asked her to stop, McKinney kept walking. The officer followed her and tapped her on the shoulder.

McKinney then allegedly turned around and hit the officer in his chest with her cell phone..

Members of Congress are not required to stop for the metal detectors, but that policy should change soon. Obviously, some members have less emotional stability than others. Cynthia McKinney probably has less than anyone.

Indeed. On the other hand, Cynthia got there first and established her territory early by declaring--way back in 2002, when there was an otherwise brief moratorium on moonbatry, that 9/11 was an inside conspiracy. Her theory has since been endorsed by leading Hollywood intellectuals!

Bill Nienhuis writes:

The Democrats have promised that if they are reelected in 2006, they will ‘eliminate’ Osama bin Laden and ‘ensure’ a responsible redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Bill responds:

Removing bin Laden is a one trick pony approach to fighting terrorism. It’s a law enforcement solution which might work if we’re talking about cleaning up a neighborhood by taking out the guy who runs the crack house down the street. Unfortunately for the Democrats, terrorism can’t be localized like this. There are other neighborhoods and thousands of guys who run crack houses. There are other countries and a million terrorists.

When Democrats talk about a withdrawal from Iraq, its not about bringing troops home and preventing further death. It’s not about freeing the Iraqi people from U.S. occupation. It’s not about “playing nice” in the hopes that the French, Spanish and the Russians like us again. To Democrats, a withdrawal from Iraq is about stopping terrorism. They believe a redeployment of troops to other parts of the world sends a message of peace which will soften the hearts of terrorist groups and lessen the risk of further attacks. By pushing this ‘solution’ the Democrats do nothing to disprove the fact that they completely misunderstand the terrorist mentality.

Meanwhile, Amir Taheri looks at "The Last Helicopter" philosphy of our enemies waiting out American intervention overseas:

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Read the whole thing.

Update: TigerHawk adds:

For the span of a generation -- a longer period than the politically conscious lives of the great majority of people in the Arab and Muslim world -- America has fled from conflict in a part of the world where weakness earns contempt and begets more aggression, not less. On September 11, 2001 we reaped the whirlwind. So, whatever our strategy in the long war -- and you will read no argument here that it cannot be improved upon -- we must end Hassan Abbasi's helicopter metaphor. Helicopters can stand for different things. Let them no longer conjure the image of "fleeing Americans."

Indeed.

Power Line looks at the international legal--and verbal--stylings of Justice Ginsburg.

That's what Ronald Bailey of Reason dubs a virus that gripped America in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and caused several so-so movies to be released as well, including Black Rain and Rising Sun):

Looking back, the most wrong-headed foreign policy phenomenon of the time was Japanophobia. Japanophobia was the unreasoning fear that Japanese companies were about to buy up everything in sight in America. The iconic event that focused the public's fears on an imminent Japanese buyout of America was Mitsubishi's purchase of a majority holding in New York City's Rockefeller Center in 1989.

Bailey demonstrates how easy it was this year for this long-dormant condition to morph into Dubai-aphobia.

Now this is how a Karl Rove sting operation works, when it all comes together!

Update: Welcome Hotline readers; Photoshop contest here.

Mark Steyn's superb obit of Eugene McCarthy, which ran on dead tree in The Atlantic last month is now online. It begins:

If you strike at the king, you have to kill him. And, amazingly, Eugene McCarthy did. On March 12th 1968, the not exactly barnstorming Senator got 42.4% of Democratic votes in the New Hampshire primary and denied the sitting President even a majority of his own party’s supporters: Lyndon Johnson secured just 49.5%. Within three weeks, he was gone: the President announced he would not seek re-election and effectively ended his political career. The king was dead, long live …well, not Senator McCarthy: the man who plunged the dagger in did not take the crown. But his few short weeks stumping the Granite State changed his party, with consequences it lives with to this day. The LBJ diehards who dismissed him as a mere “footnote in history” failed to understand how much damage one footnote can do when he doesn’t mind whose toes he steps on and all the bigfeet turn out to have feet of clay. Thus, the paradox of Gene McCarthy: the revered liberal icon who destroyed the last successful liberal presidency. His act of insouciant regicide was the defining moment in the Democrats’ modern history.

I agree; obviously, read the whole thing.

In an early episode of Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant faced the possibility of being laid off, and quipped, "I'm 45 years old. In politics, I'd be called 'The Kid'".

With 88-year old Robert Byrd and 82-year old Frank Lautenberg in Washington, the age range has only skewed further north. USA Today looks at some other senior citizens who could be joining them in the world's most distinguished--or at least most comfortable--retirement home.

The Anchoress proclaims it "A hand poorly played by everyone".

Mass hysteria, and believing that perception is invariably reality will do that.

Update: Joe Lieberman supported the deal, demonstrating that he is both a voice of common sense, and thus, not at all surprisingly, increasingly a pariah, on the left.

Another Update: Jim Geraghty, who did much in this now-deceased deal's early days to reduce hysteria, has some thoughts:

1) Well, this takes what had been a sucking chest wound of an issue for the Bush White House and makes it go away. Recall that at one point not too long ago, Harriet Miers' withdrawn nomination was supposed to be a sign of an unstoppable GOP crack-up.

2) If this deal had an unrevealed aspect to it, involving intelligence-sharing, I hope we figured out some other quid pro quo to help out the UAE.

3) Those who demagogued this issue and helped organize the campaign of misinformation… got away with it. No consequences. No deterrence from using this tactic again. Expect to see it again in the near future.

Of course: it's not like this was the first attempt at demagoguery by political pundits.

Last week, Jim Geraghty wrote:

Welcome to Post-Tipping Point politics. There is no upside to doing the right thing – which is to emphasize, as one blogger put it, that there is a difference between Dubai and Damascus. There is tremendous political upside to doing the wrong thing, boldly declaring, “I don’t care what the Muslim world thinks, I’m not allowing any Arab country running ports here in America! I don’t care how much President Bush claims these guys are our allies, I don’t trust them, and I’m not going to hand them the keys to the vital entries to our country!”

Which sounds exactly like the mind-set behind this:

The House Appropriations Committee just voted to block the Dubai ports deal by a whopping 62-2 margin. I've come to believe that the deal isn't a threat, though I grant that reasonable people disagree with me. But I can't help but think that this vote isn't driven by reasonable concerns as much as political panic.

The Professor wonders if this is part of the real motive behind the Islamofascist-driven backlash towards "those" cartoons: dividing the West from relatively moderate (and yes, I'm using the term "moderate" very loosely here) Arab/Muslim allies.

Jim Geraghty writes that American politics is in its post-tipping point phase:

In the USA Today poll, when asked, “Which comes closer to your view about Arab and Muslim countries that are allies of the United States?” 45 percent of respondents said, “trust the same as any other ally”; 51 percent said they trust these countries “less than other allies.”

That’s a remarkably honest poll result. Let’s face it, Americans have been told since kindergarten not to judge ethnic and religious groups differently from one another; now slightly more than half are willing to come out and say, “you know, I just don’t trust those guys as much as I trust others.”

Welcome to Post-Tipping Point politics. There is no upside to doing the right thing – which is to emphasize, as one blogger put it, that there is a difference between Dubai and Damascus. There is tremendous political upside to doing the wrong thing, boldly declaring, “I don’t care what the Muslim world thinks, I’m not allowing any Arab country running ports here in America! I don’t care how much President Bush claims these guys are our allies, I don’t trust them, and I’m not going to hand them the keys to the vital entries to our country!”

And more and more, I think Glenn Reynolds had it right; the entire Tipping Point phenomenon can be summed up as action and reaction. The Bush Administration’s reaction to the cartoon riots was comparably milquetoast. The violence and threats committed over the cartoons shocked, frightened and really, really angered Americans. They want somebody to smack the Muslim world back onto its heels and set them straight: “It doesn’t matter how offensive a cartoon is, you’re not allowed to riot, burn down embassies and kill people over it.”

They’re ashamed that Denmark is leading the fight over this.

When the Bush administration’s reaction was mostly equivocating statements and a failure to confront the Muslim world over its insistence of the worldwide applicability of its blasphemy laws, I suspect a lot of folks whose top issue is the war on terror concluded that Bush was going wobbly.

We’ve already seen endless negotiations with Iran, when most Americans who follow the issue are ready to declare Ahmedinijad as a millennial fruitcake aiming to bring about the apocalypse. Most who follow the Iraq war closely suspect Tehran is stirring things up there.

The interesting thing is the post-Tipping Point view on the Muslim world is alien to Bush; I suspect he would find it abhorrent. Unfortunately, that puts him out of step with a large chunk of the public — a vocal, angry chunk that is likely to have plenty of politicians courting it.

As Jim writes, this could lead to some ugly Perot-style third party slugmatches in 2008.

I'm getting ready to fly back to California in a couple of hours, currently stuck in the American Airlines' Admirals Club in Philadelphia. But I wish were at the rally at the Danish Consulate in New York City. Fortunately, Pamela of Atlas Shrugs, the Blogfather, and GOP and the City have lots of photos and coverage.

The rally also highlights the theme of Jonah Goldberg's latest syndicated op-ed: when it comes to civil rights in America post-9/11, the issues are --literally--no longer just black and white.

Update: Roger L. Simon notes that's a lesson Hollywood needs to learn as well.

Another Update: Michelle Malkin writes that San Francisco will have a West Coast equivalent rally next Friday.

Tom McMahon puts it all into perspective: "What I Have Learned In 15 Years".

Daniel Henninger writes that when it comes to politics, it's Tex Avery's world, we just live in it:

Witnessing the political reaction this week to the administration's Dubai ports-management decision, the phrase that insistently called out from memory was the title of a famous essay by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Defining Deviancy Down." One would not have thought it possible, but Washington's political class is defining our politics down.

After nearly seven days of elevating the Cheney bird-hunting accident to the level of a national crisis, now comes this week's flap over managing the ports. To be sure, the matter of secure U.S. ports trumps the hunting of quail as an affaire d'état. But it was the strikingly low quality of the politicians' commentary and behavior that attracted notice.

Within hours, if not minutes, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Rep. Robert Menendez announced "emergency" legislation to "ban foreign governments from controlling operations at our ports." No matter that most of the current operators of our ports are from Denmark, Britain and, uh-oh, China. Chuck Schumer: "It's hard to believe that this administration would be so out of touch with the American people's national security concerns." Yes, that is hard to believe.

Once the match was put to the ports decision in Washington, the bonfire spread quickly to the governors' mansions. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, until recently a U.S. senator, told Ron Insana he was filing a federal lawsuit to thwart the move because the roads near the Port of Newark are "the two most dangerous miles in America." They are? Maybe he should put warning signs on the Jersey Turnpike.

What we have here is the dawn of the new Yosemite Sam school of national politics. Put any news event in front of our politicians now--Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo, Dick Cheney's quail or this week the ports--and like Bugs Bunny's hair-triggered nemesis they'll start spraying the landscape with wild remarks and opinions decoupled from what is knowable about these events. Wait to learn the facts--as almost alone, Sen. John McCain, suggested? Why bother?

As Henninger notes, it's a tripartite issue: Republicans, Democrats, and the media are all responsible for creating the Looney Tune world of Washington.

Henninger writes, "in our jacked-up media age, first impressions--false or true--becomes powerful and hard to alter". And the conventional wisdom is that the Blogosphere has done the most since the development of 24 hour cable news to jack up the speed that first impressions are formed. So it's been quite fascinating to watch the second, and even third opinions form regarding the Dubai port control issue. That's a level of thoughtfulness that's absolutely impossible in, say, television news, and is nearly almost as rare in newspapers as well.

Sometimes an idea is so radical, so out there, that it takes time to wrap your mind around the brilliance that's hidden within it. California Conservative has a thought that's so far from the conventional wisdom that its crystalline logic is actually transparent. But making it happen will test the very limits of Karl Rove's genius:

Hold the 2008 GOP presidential convention in San Francisco.

Now, I know what you're thinking--but just remember what James Taranto wrote a year before the Republican convention was held in Manhattan in 2004:

"In what looked like a mini dress rehearsal for the cacophony of dissent that's expected to hit the streets of New York City during next summer's GOP convention, nearly 3,000 demonstrators gathered on Seventh Avenue to protest President Bush as he presided over a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser inside midtown's Sheraton Hotel on Monday," the Village Voice reports:

The folks on the street seemed to have little trouble connecting the issues. Antiwar placards demanding "Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction?" and "End King Geoge's Reign of Terror!" jostled freely with pro-choice banners and signs denouncing Bush's "War on Women." Many in the crowd said they were outraged that the Republican party continues to invoke the attacks of 9/11 as a rallying cry for Bush's presidency. "I feel like Bush coming to New York is especially hypocritical because he's done nothing for this city," said Sarah Beretczki, a 29-year-old illustrator from Brooklyn who sported a sign that read, "My Bush Sheds Its Own Blood."

We saw some of these people riding the subway Monday night, and it makes us understand why the Republican Party chose New York as the site of its convention. No one pays much attention to protests of a mere fund-raiser, but during the convention TV crews will be unable to resist them--thus treating voters across the country to images of Bush's opposition as a bunch of extremists and freaks.

And the reaction that the GOP actually did receive in New York in 2004 would be doubled if, astonishingly, they really were heading for the 'Frisco bay.

Karl--drop me an email, and let's talk about this...

Jonah Goldberg writes that he's a pro-choice conservative:

Republicans and conservatives aren't the same thing. This distinction seems lost on lots of people, including cable television bark-show bookers and partisan Democrats and Republicans alike. To a principled conservative, it is bad news when the Democrats lurch to the left, even if it makes the Democrats less likely to win elections. Why? Because when the Democrats move left, so do the Republicans.

In American politics, when one party moves left or right, the political center of gravity moves that way too. Bill Clinton, whatever his flaws, moved his party to the right. His triangulation infuriated Republicans because it is always vexing when someone steals your lunch. Democrats despise Bush's compassionate conservatism for similar reasons. A Republican president promising to "leave no child behind" annoys Democrats as much as Clinton's denouncing of Sista Soulja irked Republicans. When the Bush presidency is over, it will be more obvious in hindsight how much he moved the GOP to the left — by making the nanny state bipartisan.

It all boils down to what matters to you most. As a conservative, the extent I root for the GOP depends entirely on how successful it is in moving the political climate of the country toward fiscal restraint, limited government, and cultural decency. Single-issue voters understand this point best: Pro-lifers would dearly love to break the GOP monopoly on opposing abortion, just as abortion-rights supporters dream of the day when both parties are pro-choice. Many conservatives, including yours truly, would have agonized over a choice between a reliably pro-war Democrat and George W. Bush in 2004, particularly if judicial appointments weren't so important.

The point, dear liberals, is that some conservatives who criticize the Democrats or offer them advice do so not solely to salt wounds, but in the hope that someday we will have a real choice on Election Day — and not between the lesser of two evils.

I agree that it's bad news for the country that the left has moved much further to the left than any time since the early 1970s--especially after Bill Clinton made attempts to re-center the party in the 1990s (and paid even more lip-service to the idea). But certainly the last two presidential elections at least offered quite an enormous choice, not an echo.

The headline at the top of the Drudge Report this hour isn't going to make the left happy: "SHERIFF: CHENEY CASE CLOSED".

But then, as Jonah Goldberg wrote earlier today:

Today is the day where the serious Cheney story and the Cheneymentia story split off from each other. The serious story will start to die off as reasonable people move on to other things, while those unable to let go ramp-up the volume and get sillier and sillier. The question is: how many people go the Cheneymentia route? The more who do, the better it will be for Cheney.

Exactly. Somewhat surprisingly, blogger Confederate Yankee is on the case, "determined to be Cheney's Jim Garrison", Jonah notes.

The Wall Street Journal, James Q. Wilson examines the incredibly polarized America in the first decade of a new millenia, with a brief detour to look at life from both sides now:

As summed up by the distinguished social scientist who writes humor columns under the name of Dave Barry, residents of Red states are "ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging Nascar-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks," while Blue-state residents are "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

That about covers it!

In light our comments earlier today about the media's role in L'affaire Cheney, this passage by Wilson is well worth exploring:

Not only are they themselves increasingly polarized, but consumers are well aware of it and act on that awareness. Fewer people now subscribe to newspapers or watch the network evening news. Although some of this decline may be explained by a preference for entertainment over news, some undoubtedly reflects the growing conviction that the mainstream press generally does not tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.

In part, media bias feeds into, and off, an increase in business competition. In the 1950s, television news amounted to a brief 30-minute interlude in the day's programming, and not a very profitable one at that; for the rest of the time, the three networks supplied us with westerns and situation comedies. Today, television news is a vast, growing, and very profitable venture by the many broadcast and cable outlets that supply news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The news we get is not only more omnipresent, it is also more competitive and hence often more adversarial. When there were only three television networks, and radio stations were forbidden by the fairness doctrine from broadcasting controversial views, the media gravitated toward the middle of the ideological spectrum, where the large markets could be found. But now that technology has created cable news and the Internet, and now that the fairness doctrine has by and large been repealed, many media outlets find their markets at the ideological extremes.

Here is where the sharper antagonism among political leaders and their advisers and associates comes in. As one journalist has remarked about the change in his profession, "We don't deal in facts [any longer], but in attributed opinions." Or, these days, in unattributed opinions. And those opinions are more intensely rivalrous than was once the case.

The result is that, through commercial as well as ideological self-interest, the media contribute heavily to polarization. Broadcasters are eager for stories to fill their round-the-clock schedules, and at the same time reluctant to trust the government as a source for those stories. Many media outlets are clearly liberal in their orientation; with the arrival of Fox News and the growth of talk radio, many are now just as clearly conservative.

The evidence of liberal bias in the mainstream media is very strong. The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) has been systematically studying television broadcasts for a quarter-century. In the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry received more favorable mentions than any presidential candidate in CMPA's history, especially during the month before election day. This is not new: since 1980 (and setting aside the recent advent of Fox News), the Democratic candidate has received more favorable mentions than the Republican candidate in every race except the 1988 contest between Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. A similarly clear orientation characterizes weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.

For its part, talk radio is listened to by about one-sixth of the adult public, and that one-sixth is made up mostly of conservatives. National Public Radio has an audience of about the same size; it is disproportionately liberal. The same breakdown affects cable-television news, where the rivalry is between CNN (and MSNBC) and Fox News. Those who watch CNN are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans; the reverse is emphatically true of Fox. As for news and opinion on the Internet, which has become an important source for college graduates in particular, it, too, is largely polarized along political and ideological lines, emphasized even more by the culture that has grown up around news blogs.

At one time, our culture was only weakly affected by the media because news organizations had only a few points of access to us and were largely moderate and audience-maximizing enterprises. Today the media have many lines of access, and reflect both the maximization of controversy and the cultivation of niche markets. Once the media talked to us; now they shout at us.

Of course, as Technorati notes, nearly 28 million of us now have the option to shout back.

Update: Hey, here's entirely phony and Photoshopped proof that maybe Wilson is wrong about the media--it's always been partisan and divisive!

Last December, I looked at Nissan's decision to relocate their headquarters from Los Angeles to Nashville, and wrote:

Beyond Nissan--and the 79 other corporations that have decamped from L.A. alone since 2002, when a company as deeply associated with California as Fender Guitars relocates to neighboring Arizona, you know the state isn't exactly business-friendly. (Just ask my wife, who frequently intercedes on behalf of business owners.) These problems have accumulated over the several decades of California's exponentially growing hard left tilt, and can't be blamed entirely on Governor Schwarzenegger, but what is Arnold doing to help reduce them? Hiring a former aide to Gray "Rolling Blackouts" Davis as his new chief of staff.

Will the last person out of California please turn out the lights?

In a post titled, "Voting With Your Feet", Larry Kudlow writes that it's not just businesses who are relocating out of high-tax states:

In case you didn’t see it, Barron’s published a great story called,“Revolution on Wheels”. Basically it makes the point that taxes matter to folks in choosing where to live.

“Quietly, without banners or raised fists, they are packing up their families and belongings and moving from high tax states like California and New York to lower-tax locales like Florida, Nevada and Texas.”

Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder says over the past five years, 1.2 million people moved out of the ten highest taxed states, while an almost equal number, 1.3 million, moved into the low tax states. “It’s a stealth migration, and it’s one of the biggest, most significant yet least recognized movements of the population in American history,” says Vedder. “People are voting with their feet to say that taxes do matter.”

This trend has been going on for a long time. It has been chronicled by Art Laffer, Victor Canto, Steve Moore as well as Richard Vedder. Among the lowest taxed states are New Hampshire, Delaware, Tennessee, Alabama, both Dakotas, Florida, Texas and Missouri. Among the highest taxed states are Maine, New York, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont, Ohio, Nebraska and Utah, as well as Washington D.C. New York and New Jersey have huge tax bites on estates.

This is why our New York State Tax Reform Commission proposed a “five percent solution” for personal and corporate income taxes, with elimination of taxes on capital gains, estates and dividends. We noted that whether regionally, nationally or internationally, smart money and smart people move to where the tax and business environment is most hospitable.

Which is just common sense--but then that's something that's long been lacking in Sacramento.

Mary Katharine Ham writes that 78-year-old Harry Whittington, Vice President Cheney's hunting partner, suffered a minor heart attack today:

It was what they call an asymptomatic heart attack, meaning he suffered no, um, symptoms. No chest pain, no arm pain. He's conscious and talking to folks.

Good to hear.

Update: Was Paul Begala's appearance on CNN where he dressed up as another Floyd R. Turbo/Dana Milbank clone recorded today? Was it recorded after news broke of Whittington's heart attack? Truly classy stuff, by both Begala and CNN (who allowed him to go on the air in that getup), regardless.

Another Update: Ian Schwartz responds, in the same post linked to above:

Indeed it was. Begala appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room in the 4pm hour. This, of course, was hours after the minor heart attack was announced.

Lovely.

Frank J. examines the long, protracted war, pronounces it unwinnable, and calls for an immediate cease fire.

I normally agree with Jim Geraghty. But when Jim writes, "Seriously, if the Vice President could go on Oprah with his hunting buddy, I would recommend it", all I can do is shake my head and ask why.

If Cheney were planning to run for the president himself in 2008, I'd agree completely. But by all accounts, Cheney is as much of a lame duck as President Bush is. Bush and Cheney's supporters aren't going to abandon either man over this. And for those who think that both men are the Anti-Christ, nothing Cheney could do would alter their opinion that he strangles puppies for fun and eats kittens for breakfast.

And the middle? They only barely follow politics, and then only during the last couple of months before elections. To the extent that Cheney's misfire impacts other Republicans, this gaffe will be old news--or little more than rehashed Letterman riffs--come November in 2006, and especially in 2008.

It may be a blog called Rightwing Nuthouse, but it makes a great point about Ann Coulter:

The most unpredictable mouth in America has once again proved that idiocy is not a mental state confined to the left wing in American politics. Calling Arabs “ragheads” while joking about her “ethical dilemma” regarding whether or not to kill Bill Clinton when she had the chance is simply the latest in a very long line of over the top – some would say out of control – thoughts that have spewed forth from her brilliant, eccentric mind.

In the end, this is Coulter’s dilemma. And the great trap she has set for herself as she has climbed the ladder of success to achieve fame and fortune. In this celebrity, media soaked age where the ravenous appetites of the news nets, “lifestyle” shows, and political talk radio are constantly demanding more and more controversy, more and more outrageous personalities to fill the time and attract more audience, the danger for any one personality like Coulter is that yesterday’s jaw droppers and head shakers can’t be repeated. She must come up with entirely new derogatory sobriquets to call her political opponents and ever more outrageous metaphors to describe her political pet peeves. By definition, she must go “over the top” on nearly a daily basis.

This way lies madness. Once people like Coulter start down this road it can only end in one way; you become a caricature of yourself. The barbs that once zinged your opponents with razor sharp wit causing even your political enemies to chuckle will lose their edge and end up as simple, hurtful, name calling more akin to playground epithets and hardly worthy of approbation except by your most rabid fans.

Hence, jokes about Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades morph into daydreaming about assassinating a President. And spot on, uproariously funny critiques of racialsm and the stupidity of identity politics segues easily into ethnic slurs. She has little choice if she wishes to remain atop the rickety pyramid of notorious celebrity she has carved out for herself. To do less would disappoint her numerous acolytes whose immaturity allows for giving her standing ovations when she casually refers to Arabs in a politically incorrect way.

As I wrote about another woman with a penchant for shock, this was the trap that Madonna fell into, with predictable results: after she deployed the nuclear option with her Sex book, her career has never been the same. See also, O'Connor, Sinead.

Leftwing artists specialized in Epater Les Bourgeois for much of the 19th and 20th century to the point where everyone who could possibly be disgusted is now barely able to simulate the aura of the penumbra of amusement. In her attempt to Epater Les Left, Ann sounds like she's heading into similar, numbing territory.

It may be a blog called Rightwing Nuthouse, but it makes a great point about Ann Coulter:

The most unpredictable mouth in America has once again proved that idiocy is not a mental state confined to the left wing in American politics. Calling Arabs “ragheads” while joking about her “ethical dilemma” regarding whether or not to kill Bill Clinton when she had the chance is simply the latest in a very long line of over the top – some would say out of control – thoughts that have spewed forth from her brilliant, eccentric mind.

In the end, this is Coulter’s dilemma. And the great trap she has set for herself as she has climbed the ladder of success to achieve fame and fortune. In this celebrity, media soaked age where the ravenous appetites of the news nets, “lifestyle” shows, and political talk radio are constantly demanding more and more controversy, more and more outrageous personalities to fill the time and attract more audience, the danger for any one personality like Coulter is that yesterday’s jaw droppers and head shakers can’t be repeated. She must come up with entirely new derogatory sobriquets to call her political opponents and ever more outrageous metaphors to describe her political pet peeves. By definition, she must go “over the top” on nearly a daily basis.

This way lies madness. Once people like Coulter start down this road it can only end in one way; you become a caricature of yourself. The barbs that once zinged your opponents with razor sharp wit causing even your political enemies to chuckle will lose their edge and end up as simple, hurtful, name calling more akin to playground epithets and hardly worthy of approbation except by your most rabid fans.

Hence, jokes about Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades morph into daydreaming about assassinating a President. And spot on, uproariously funny critiques of racialsm and the stupidity of identity politics segues easily into ethnic slurs. She has little choice if she wishes to remain atop the rickety pyramid of notorious celebrity she has carved out for herself. To do less would disappoint her numerous acolytes whose immaturity allows for giving her standing ovations when she casually refers to Arabs in a politically incorrect way.

As I wrote about another woman with a penchant for shock, this was the trap that Madonna fell into, with predictable results: after she deployed the nuclear option with her Sex book, her career has never been the same. See also, O'Connor, Sinead.

Leftwing artists specialized in Epater Les Bourgeois for much of the 19th and 20th century to the point where everyone who could possibly be disgusted is now barely able to simulate the aura of the penumbra of amusement. In her attempt to Epater Les Left, Ann sounds like she's heading into similar, numbing territory.

I picked up a copy of Ann Coulter's How To Talk To A Liberal at an airport newsstand to kill time on a flight last fall; while it probably wouldn't surprise you to read that I concurred with some her ideas, actually reading her book was tough sledding. Unlike say, the beautiful prose of Mark Steyn or James Lileks, she invariably uses H-bombs where a flyswatter would do the job nicely. So sadly, I'm not at all surprised that she used language like this today, while speaking at CPAC:

“Rag-head talks tough, rag-head faces thunderous consequences.”

As Sean Hackbarth writes, "Ann, Thanks for Nothing".

Shapes Of Days, via North American Patriot, puts it succinctly: "Do you ever just wanna say to someone, 'get off my side'?"

Ann Althouse, a self-proclaimed political moderate, compares and contrasts discourse on the left and the right:

I'm just saying that I'm struck by the way the right perceives me as a potential ally and uses positive reinforcement and the left doesn't see me as anything but an opponent -- doesn't even try to engage me with reasoned argument. Maybe the left feels beleaguered these days, but how do they expect to make any progress if they don't see the ways they can include the people in the middle? If you look around and only see opponents and curl up with your little group of insiders, you are putting your efforts into insuring that you remain a political minority.

Or as Glenn Reynolds wrote a few years ago:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

Indeed^TM.

Update: Steve Green, a "Falwell-tweaking, gay-marriage supporting, drug legalizing, pro-abortion, pro-immigration, anti-trade barrier, wary-of-organized-religion kind of guy" adds:

The right seems to love a good debate, and the left seems to love pissing on them for it.

Which is too bad. Jonah Goldberg recently wrote:

Read More »

Lee Harris writes that President Bush's critics have manged to turn the old Soviet "show trial" concept on its head, turning Coretta Scott King's memorial into what Harris calls a "show funeral", in which, "instead of properly honoring the memory of the dead, the occasion is deliberately exploited for its propaganda value":

Carter, for example, used the opportunity to insinuate that Bush's "domestic spying" was like the spying done by the FBI on Dr. King. Carter commiserated with the King family for having been subjected to such an ordeal at the hands of their government, and, by implication, he also commiserated with those Americans who had been subjected to Bush's domestic surveillance. But does this analogy honor the memory of Dr. King and his movement?

Let's make a simple thought experiment to find out.

Suppose al-Qaeda had decided to air its grievances against the United States by holding a massive peaceful "sit in" at the Twin Towers on 9/11. Suppose Islamic terrorists, instead of blowing up innocent human beings, had vowed only to use civil disobedience. Suppose Osama bin Laden, like Dr. King, had struggled with all his might to keep his organization from turning to bloodshed and violence. Would Bush have felt the need to launch a domestic surveillance program on such a pacifistic movement? Maybe; maybe not. But the fact that al-Qaeda embraces violence and celebrates terrorism -- doesn't this small detail destroy the basis of Carter's analogy? If you can equate bin Laden with Martin Luther King, and al-Qaeda to King's non-violent movement, then, by all means, go ahead and draw the same analogy that Mr. Carter drew about Bush's domestic surveillance program. If, on the other hand, you cannot equate the two, then Carter's analogy becomes at best ridiculous and at worst obscene.

If it were actually possible to equate the two, Carter would be the man to do it: As Jay Nordlinger thoroughly documented in his great "Carterpalooza" piece in 2002, from Tito and Ceausescu to Yasser Arafat to Kim Il Sung to Daniel Ortega, Carter's never met a terrorist or dictator he didn't openly admire.

The New York Post sounds as angry at Jimmy Carter, as, well, The Simpsons once were:

Jimmy Carter may or may not have been the worst president of the 20th century — history will have the final word on that — but his disgraceful performance yesterday at Coretta Scott King’s funeral marks him as the most shameless.

Maybe of all time.

There is, after all, a time and place for everything — but not for Carter.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on President Bush's appearance at King's funeral yesterday, along with his relationship with the NAACP.

Michelle Malkin looks at the politicized funeral for Coretta Scott King (complete with video); Lorie Byrd and The Anchoress have some further thoughts.

Interesting take from Glenn Reynolds:

Why does this keep happening? Part of it, I think, is that the Democratic Party is in a state where it finds it hard to get national TV coverage except when someone dies. I think that their behavior reflects another forlorn hope for regeneration. I guess looking at policies is out of the question, though.

Update: Ian Schwartz links to my original post on the Wellstone funeral from three and a half years ago--8,000 or so posts later, to be honest, I completely forgot that I had blogged it.

Another Update: While the article that this post links to isn't about the King funeral, it seems very much related, at least to me.

One More: Glenn Reynolds updates his post with a link to Jay Redding, who asks, "Can we have some dignity, please?" and responds:

Apparently not. And this post by Eric Muller only serves to underline the very point it attempts to refute. The problem with today's Democrats is that they try to invest the naked hunger for power with the dignity of the civil rights movement, a dignity that they no longer possess because it was based on a self-discipline that they no longer possess.

Emphasis mine--because I think that's a spot-on observation. Instead, as Jay Redding wrote:

The Democrats are learning from the worst of the Republican Party during the Clinton Administration. One would think given that they were on the other side that they would do better. Then again the sad state of American politics makes me think that the idea of being able to put partisanship aside for one gorram moment is just too much to ask of some people these days.

Coretta Scott King was the wife of one of the greatest leaders of this century, a man who transformed American society for the better. She herself was a great and dignified woman. She deserved a better send-off than that.

Exactly.

While screedy leftwing dinosaurs like Helen Thomas continue to prowl the halls of power in Washington, bloggers such as Power Line's Paul Mirengoff, pinch-hitting for Pajamas Media, are shaking things up:

A veteran Senate GOP staffer who requested anonymity offered this observation about the significance of the Durbin-Mirengoff exchange:

"The mainstream news media that covers Congress is tightly controlled by the House and Senate press galleries and they would never be so aggressive in pressing a Member of Congress. So this was big, it was unprecedented to have a blogger asking such questions. We need more bloggers up here asking questions because they aren't controlled by the galleries."

I agree, the more bloggers are covering Congress, the more likely it is that Members will be asked and, as Durbin discovered today, have to answer questions they never expect to hear from mainstream journalists.

It is exactly the kind of aggressive, don't-let'em-off-the-hook questioning by Mirengoff that I have long lamented as being a thing of the past among establishment media journalists. They are either afraid to ask the tough questions, or they don't know the tough questions.

So come on up to Capitol Hill, bloggers!

Sounds good to me! Meanwhile, Power Line's John Hinderaker writes:

It occurs to me that in all the years that Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin have stood before microphones on Capitol Hill, answering questions posed by the Washington press corps, they might never have had to answer a question asked by someone who wasn't a fellow Democrat. This may, indeed, have been a watershed moment.

Naturally Durbin attempted to deflect the question with a "where are you from"-style question, which (as we've noted before) is rather silly these days: given how rapidly news disseminates, where it starts off is much less important than its actual content.

Ed Morrissey looks at E.J. Dionne's latest column and writes that "either Dionne has a bad memory or has slipped into uncharacteristic disingenuity" in his recounting Bush #41's raising taxes in 1990:

Dionne leaves out two important points. The first fact omitted is that the tax increase in 1990 resulted in a sudden recession, which the Gulf War made worse by driving up oil costs temporarily. In fact, the increased rates flattened tax receipts; it did not result in any significant increase to the Treasury.

Second and more to the point, the Democrats with whom the President consulted and compromised used his efforts to castigate him as unfaithful to his promises in the 1992 general election. I find it hard to imagine that Dionne cannot recall the "Read My Lips" commercials that the Clinton campaign used to devastating effect in that election, which showed Bush promising to hold the line on taxes -- and blamed him entirely for raising them later. The Democrats stabbed Bush 41 in the back for working with them, and that's the lesson that 43 learned from the experience. Compromise with Democrats, and they will use it to attack at the first opportunity.

Read the rest.

Update: More thoughts on Dionne, here.

Did Pat Leahy really say, on Face The Nation, "The Bush Administration knew the names of the hijackers before 9/11. They did nothing on it. I want to make sure they do it right"? Why, yes he did.

Back in 2004, Joel Mowbray asked, what if, in the summer of 2001, al Qaeda had been hit pre-emptively, before they had a chance to commit their atrocities on America on 9/11?

Mowbray concluded that sadly, the resulting outrage wouldn't be that much different than what the Bush administration is experiencing over Iraq. (Or the furor the Gipper--who would have been 95 today, incidentally--received over how he handled the Cold War, come to think of it).

Update: More on Leahy, here.

On their op-ed page, The Wall Street Journal writes:

President Bush has seen the energy future, and he has two words of advice: wood chips. Somewhere in his cardigan sweater next to a fireplace, Jimmy Carter is smiling.

The Journal sees it as a case of Karl Rove triangulating in anticipation of the November races. But as TCS Daily has been noting for months, it's part of a much larger trend: That '70s Energy Policy.

Back in 1960, the presidential race was fought between two men of nearly identical ages, and with virtually identical values--to the point where the Democrat's Senator Kennedy, the nominal liberal in the race, campaigned to the right of moderate Republican Senator Nixon, via the famous (and imaginary) "missile gap". Kennedy squeaked through, largely on his personality and appearance (youthful viggah!), not because his political ideology captivated voters.

But that period of centrism is gone--if not forever, certainly for the foreseeable future: "The Democrats have abolished the middle, and the Republican middle has discredited itself", Dan Henninger writes:

Many candidates in the off-year election this November will still try to hide from ideology. That will be hard. In his State of the Union message Mr. Bush said, "We've entered a great ideological conflict." His is unavoidably a wartime presidency, and with no respite from politics. There was a time when politics stopped at the water's edge. In our time the Web Democrats' search for an ideology ensures that the president's every move will be subject to challenge. The fact that they're fighting the Bush surveillance policy on hapless legal grounds rather than separation of powers suggests it may take until 2008 to make the primal Web scream ideologically coherent.

People who crave the middle are simply going to be disappointed in 2008. The Democrats have abolished the middle, and the Republican middle has discredited itself. There is a reason John McCain markets himself as more right than center; he knows ideology matters just now. So do George Allen, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback and the rest.
How Hillary Clinton triangulates in the current atmosphere is the Rubik's Cube of our time. But for the Web Democrats and GOP refugees from the Congress they thought they controlled, the puzzling is over. They're looking for candidates "who represent my ideas." Ideologues.

Read the rest.

Peggy Noonan surveys the state of the left, post-SOTU, and post-Alito:

It was the first State of the Union Mr. Bush has given in which Congress seemed utterly pre-9/11 in terms of battle lines drawn. Exactly half the chamber repeatedly leapt to its feet to applaud this banality or that. The other half remained resolutely glued to its widely cushioned seats. It seemed a metaphor for the Democratic Party: We don't know where to stand or what to stand for, and in fact we're not good at standing for anything anyway, but at least we know we can't stand Republicans.

There was only one unforgettable moment, and that was in a cutaway shot, of Hillary Clinton, who simply must do something about her face. When the president joked that two people his father loves are turning 60 this year, himself and Bill Clinton--why does he think constant references to that relationship work for him?--it was Mrs. Clinton's job to look mildly amused, or pleasant, or relatively friendly, or nonhostile. Mrs. Clinton has two natural looks, the first being a dull and sated cynicism, the second the bright-eyed throaty chuckler who greets visiting rubes from Utica. The camera caught the first; by the time she realized she was the shot, she apparently didn't feel she could morph into the second. This canniest of politicians still cannot fake benignity.

Maybe she knew the habitués of the Daily Kos, and other leftwing Web sites, were watching. Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Elder runs the president's State of the Union speech through his patented leftwing disgrontification technology.

Update: James Lileks uses even more advanced technology to distill the tone of the post-SOTU, post-Alito left into one universal sound pattern.

Newsbusters discovers more interesting numerology on the left this week:

As was reported yesterday on NewsBusters, Democratic Senator John Kerry wasn't challenged on the Today show after he claimed that 53% of Americans don't graduate from high school. Well on this morning's Early Show, New Orleans Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin made an equally silly claim, "50% of all residents in the United States live along the Gulf Coast." I listened to the soundbite several times to ensure I heard him correctly.

As Tim Graham writes, "This must be why Louisiana and Mississippi are always picking our presidents".

Jack Kelly writes:

Sen. John Kerry said on the Today Show this morning that 53 percent of Americans don't graduate from high school.

The real figure for high school dropouts -- about 15 percent -- is appalling enough.

Hey, close enough for government work--what's a 38 percent differential among friends?

More here and here.

The prepared text of President Bush's State of the Union address is online, here.

Glenn Reynolds has a list of live bloggers; in a shocking turn of events, Stephen Green is booze blogging the speech, replacing his trademark vodka with "a nicely icy gin martini with my patented 'confetti twist' of lemon".

Michelle Malkin writes, "CNN is reporting that Capitol Police arrested Sheehan after she unfurled an anti-war banner inside the House chamber".

Like Dennis Rodman, Cindy's the consumate self-promoter.

Meanwhile, K-Lo notes two mentions of the phrase "Radical Islam", which means, thankfully, "CAIR didn't write this speech"--much as they wanted to.

And Betsy Newmark writes:

It's so funny to see what lines the Democrats have decided that they won't applaud for. Having military decisions made by the military and not by politicians in Washington is apparently something that they oppose and won't applaud.

Because that worked so well for LBJ and Robert McNamara during Vietnam.

Update: Robert Byers looks at what he called "Zen Politics: The Sound of One Party Clapping".

Update: Mark Steyn writes, "Nancy Pelosi's Not Wrong". Now there's a sentence you won't see me type very often.

One More: Jonathan Last has a round-up of "The Best and Worst of SOTU '06" (subtitled, "Putting the trivial back into politics"--and taking it out of show business, I guess) with this tidbit:

Best Howard Dean moment: Democrats erupting in applause when the president began a sentence saying, "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security . . ."

Michael Graham notes a missed opportunity for Bush to lob one out of the park had he planned for that applause.

Ed Morrissey and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts on Colleen Rowley, a former Time "Person of the Year" who is now running for Congress against Representative John Kline of Minnesota. As Morrissey writes:

She has descended far into the fever swamp during her brief yet notorious campaign to unseat Mr. Kline. When last CQ heard from Ms. Rowley, she had just missed her chance to draft off of Cindy Sheehan's momentum in Crawford, Texas. Rowley had trekked down to her campout just as Sheehan gave up on her protest. Unfortunately, she has resurfaced to start her campaign -- and in doing so, she decided to depict the Marine Corps veteran as a Nazi:

This is the nadir of Democratic demagoguery, referencing anyone with whom they disagree as a Nazi. This slur is especially egregious when directed at a man who served his country faithfully for 25 years in the Marine Corps and then for two terms in Congress. No one disputes anyone's right to disagree with Rep. Kline's positions, but to call the man a Nazi goes beyond political debate and into character assassination.

Rowley later took the picture off the website but never issued an apology or even an acknowledgment that it had been posted. Fortunately, others did a screen grab of the site before the cowards at Rowley's headquarters went into full retreat. If Minnesota Democrats have any sense of honor and respect, they will call for the immediate withdrawal of Rowley from the race. She disgraces not just the Second District but all of Minnesota with this kind of campaigning.

The many violations of Godwin's Law over the last three years or so become numbing: when I first saw the screen grab of Rowley's slanderous Photoshop exercise, I thought "ho-hum, another Republicans are Nazis slur, here we go again". And that same numbing effect works in reverse, making it an ad hominem that becomes all the more easier to use. But as Jonah Goldberg wrote shortly Dick Durbin's Springtime For Gitmo meltdown:

Hitler holds our fascination because of his singular villainy. But this shouldn’t crowd out our ability to make distinctions. Hitler is supposed to define the outer limits of evil, not the lowest threshold.

Exactly.

Update: More here and here.

Judge Alito is now Justice Alito, voted in, as Paul Mirengoff writes, on fairly straight party lines, 58-42.

Ed Whelan of National Review Online's Bench Memos blog has some thoughts on the aftermath of what John Hinderaker dubbed "The Filibust":

By pushing a filibuster vote upon their fellow Democrats, John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy have achieved quite a bit already. Among other things:

1. Absent the filibuster effort, lots of attention would mistakenly have been focused on whether Judge Alito would reach the filibuster-proof level of 60 votes on final confirmation. If he were to fall short of that, the media would proclaim that the vote level sends a warning shot that another nominee like Alito could be filibustered. By forcing an actual vote on cloture, Kerry and Kennedy have deprived the Left of this pretend-filibuster argument. The starting point now for analysis of the politics of any subsequent nomination is that a nominee like Alito can expect to receive more than 70 votes on cloture.

2. Kerry and Kennedy have turned the wrath of the Left against those 19 Democrats (nearly half the caucus) who voted for cloture. (Byron York quotes one angry, obscene diatribe from DailyKos.) I don’t see how this is going to help red-state Democrats. If only Kerry and Kennedy could have been uniters rather than dividers . . . .

3. By using the filibuster weapon against a nominee whom the public rightly recognizes to be superbly qualified, Kerry and Kennedy have undermined Democrats’ future use of that weapon. Crying wolf isn’t a good way to build credibility. (Of course, the Left hopes to show over time that Alito is a real wolf, but I have much greater faith in the public’s ability to recognize good judging.)

As Mirengoff writes, the vote changes the "rules" for confirming Supreme Court Justices:

Under the Alito rule, Senators will vote against highly qualified nominee for no reason other than that they expect the nominee to rule contrary to their preference on major issues. Under the Alito rule, the president's party, in effect, must control the Senate in order for the president to have top-notch nominees of his choice confirmed. When the the president's party doesn't control the Senate, only compromise nominees acceptable to both parties can expect to be confirmed.

It was objectionable for the Democrats to have changed an understanding of the Senate's "advise and consent" role that has worked reasonably well for 200 years, or so. The new approach will probably produce more mediocre Justices, selected not for their intellect, fairness, or other judging skills, but because they haven't offended anyone. But the process is not irrational, and in some ways it makes more sense than its predecessor in a world where the Court exercises as much power as it now does. In any case, the important thing is to have one set of confirmation rules that applies to both parties. Thanks to the Dems, we now have a new set.

If in four, eight or 12 years, there's a Republican minority in the Senate and a Democrat in the White House, it will be interesting to see if another Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be swept in with a 96-3 vote.

Orrin Judd links to this astonishing passage by Michael Kinsley:

Obviously the party that has lost the White House, both houses of Congress, and now the courts needs some new ideas and new energy. But it seems undeniably true to me—though many deny it—that the Republicans simply play the game better. You're not supposed to say that. At Pundit School they teach you: Always go for the deeper explanation, not the shallower one. Never suggest that people (let alone "the" people) can be duped.

OK, it's not all that astonishing. Kate O'Beirne recently noted another example of this phenomenon in her interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez:

Lopez: In 1977, Jean Stapleton, hanging out with Bella Abzug announced that Edith Bunker would support the ERA "if she understood it." Does that pretty much sum up what the feminist establishment thinks of many American women?

O'Beirne: The modern feminist movement has never enjoyed the allegiance of a majority of American women and that condescension represents feminists' explanation when confronted with the evidence. The rest of us are too stupid to recognize our oppression. One of the most celebrated feminists you'll meet in the book dismisses the surveys reporting that married women are happier than single women by attributing their contentment to being "slightly mentally ill."

Or as Orrin writes, "Nothing has served the Democrats worse than their insistence over the last twenty-five years that the rejection of liberalism and return to power of conservatism are a fluke and as soon as people wake up the stars will realign themselves".

In the old days of the Internet (many, many moons ago, my son--'round about, say, 1999), vanity searches ruled the Internet (that's how I ultimately discovered InstaPundit, and ultimately, the then-budding Blogosphere, back in 2001, just before 9/11). These days, vanity editing is apparently the in-thing among the really cutting-edge digerati:

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, said he authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.

The change deleted a reference to Meehan's campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years, a pledge Meehan later eschewed. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan's campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million, according to the latest data available from the Federal Election Commission.

Betsy Newmark and Will Collier have further thoughts.

Hugh Hewitt had Karl Rove on his show today, who said:

We have had two strains in American politics. We've had the strain of bipartisanship in foreign affairs, particularly in the decades of the 40's and the 50's, and 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. That has obviously frayed somewhat. We've also had a tradition of internationalist strong Democrats: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy. You know, the hyperventilation by some Democrats can be chalked up to having lost an election or political aspirations. But I'm at a loss to explain why so many Democrats seem intent upon focusing their energies and efforts upon hatred of this president, rather than staying focused on the principal responsibility that all in government, and all in the public life of our country have, and that is to sustain the country in a time of war.

In February of 2004, just as the election year was gathering steam, I wrote:

Arguably beginning with Hillary Clinton's "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" quip in early 1998, why have so many conspiracy theories been coming from the left?

Dr. Sanity answers the question in the first of a two-part post titled, "The Political Paranoia of the Left":

Even if, hypothetically, every single justification for the war would be eventually proven not to have any basis ( and this is already demonstrably impossible); it would still not validate the absurd claims on the part of the left who, in characteristic paranoid fashion, have come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies that connect dots in a much more irrational and delusional manner than what they accuse the President of doing.

The President simply acted on facts that were accepted at the time (even by the people now accusing him of lying); and responded appropriately to a real threat that had materialized on his watch and resulted in the murder of 3000 American citizens. The paranoia of the left can be seen in their attempts to undermine his actions by resorting to ridiculous connections that simply don't compute-- just as fluoridation being a plot of the communists didn't resonate with reality; neither does Michael Moore's fictional documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, make the paranoid case for some underlying conspiracy.

While there is merit in debating how best to go about achieving our objectives in the war in Iraq and the GWOT; believing that terrorism is a conspiracy cooked up by Bush and Co. to consolidate power and institute (take your pick) a fascist state; a theocracy; or both; is simply a paranoid fantasy that consoles those of the liberal left who cannot cope with their loss of power and influence.

The hallmark of the paranoid individual and the paranoid style is constant anticipation or expectation of either attack or personal betrayal. Paranoia finds causal connections everywhere and in everything; for them, nothing is coincidental. They can develop complicated conspiracies about innocuous behaviors and seemingly irrelevant events. Their paranoia makes them constantly on guard, searching for hidden motives and meanings in everyone else's behavior. (Just go check out the Democratic Underground, where these fantasies on every action or inaction on the part of the Bush administration are immediately converted into conspiracies and plots). The tragic death of a reporter -- Bush et al had him killed because he knew too much. Osama's most recent tape -- a Rovian plot to show how frightened we should be. And so on.

Paranoia can be conceptualized as "rationality in the service of the irrational." Once fixed on a particular idea or explanation -- no matter how bizarre or irrational; the paranoid person looks for evidence to validate their prejudices. It is almost impossible to change their minds. Their entire concept of themselves is tied up with the paranoid idea or conspiracy. If it did not exist, or was proven to be untrue or false-- then they would need to question their underlying assumptions and ideas--and those are what usually form the foundation of who they believe themselves to be.

For example, a belief that one is important enough to be the subject of a determined (and often vague) FBI or CIA plot may be frightening, but is likely to be vastly superior to accepting that you have a severe and lifelong psychiatric disorder.

It is far easier to disregard reality; and/or to simply incorporate the person who tries to disabuse you of your idea or conspiracy into the complex paranoid fantasy itself, rather than deal with the trauma of a disintegrating self.

When setbacks occur, or when something goes wrong in the life of the paranoid, they will prefer to believe that another person or group is to blame, rather than accept any personal responsibility.

Needless to say, be sure and read the rest (including Part II)--if the voices in your head allow it, of course.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts about that mindset, here. (Don't miss the punchline!)

Senator Kerry calls for fillbustering Alito--apparently after Senate minority leader Harry Reid said there would be no fillibuster.

On the other hand, John Podhoretz says: Bring. It. On.:

That's what I want to see. A filibuster. Led by John Kerry. Standing there. On the Senate floor. Talking for 22 hours, like Mr. Smith. Except that Mr. Smith was played by James Stewart and John Kerry will be played by John Kerry. Even before his voice gives out, there will be mass suicides on the floor of the Senate. Kind of like when Ted Stryker talked about his breakup with his girlfriend Elaine.

Surely he can't be serious!

The atomized culture giveth and taketh away. While it's allowed M-For-Fake hucksters such as Michael Moore, James Frey and Ward Churchill to hawk their wares, it's greatly diminished the power of the mass media as a whole, and thus greatly diminished the power of hucksters such as Mary Mapes and Jayson Blair.

Peggy Noonan has a great essay titled, "Not a Bad Time to Take Stock", coming on the 25th anniversary of the Gipper's first inauguration, 11 years of GOP control of Congress, and since then, an increasing diminution of the power of the liberal media. But one of the paragraphs rang especially true for me:

We are in a time when the very diminution of the importance of network news leaves some old news hands to drop their guard and announce what they are: liberal Democrats. Nothing wrong with that, but they might have told us when they were in power. The very existence of conservative media--of Rush Limbaugh, of Fox, of the Internet sites--has become an excuse by previously "I call 'em as I see 'em/I try to be impartial" journalists to advance their biases. Actually, it's more Fox than anything. The existence of a respected cable network that is nonliberal and non-Democratic (or that is conservative, or Republican, or neoconservative--people on the right have polite disagreements about this) is more and more freeing news outlets, encouraging them actually, as a potential business model, to be more and more what they are. Is this good? Well, it's clearer.

This is something I wrote about several times over the past two years, beginning in February of 2004 with a post that collected several media figures going on the record about their biases, and in April of 2004, when I first interviewed Bernard Goldberg for TCS Daily:

in the past, media elites denounced any claims of a liberal bias in the news with a shrug and a "who, us? We're not liberals. We're not leftwing. We're objective and neutral. No biases here!" More and more, as we'll shortly see, the media are going on the record (Brock, Gore and Franken, notwithstanding) that it leans pretty heavily towards the left.

This new topsy-turvy world may have been ushered in by Bernard Goldberg, the author of two best-selling books, Bias and Arrogance. Goldberg built on the still ongoing spadework by the Media Research Center to document the leftward tilt of the media. Then the Blogosphere essentially had its grand opening on September 11th, when several million Americans who couldn't log onto the Websites of CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post, instead began checking out alternatives whose servers weren't blown out from too much traffic. These newcomers to the Blogosphere stayed there, and often put down roots themselves, as the media trotted out its clichés of Quagmire! Failure! Evil imperialism! The brutal Afghan winter! Remember the Soviets!

Shortly thereafter, in December of 2001, Goldberg released his first book, Bias. When I spoke to him in early April of 2004, he told me, that coming from a liberal journalist who had been in the media since 1967, first with CBS, and now HBO, "I think that Bias made the issue far more mainstream than it was before. I think that before that, the complaints came from almost exclusively from conservative places, like talk radio and the Media Research Center."

EdDriscoll.com: following tomorrow's trends today, and only occasionally referring to ourselves in the third person in the process.

(Via Mary Katharine Ham.)

Orrin Judd links to Martin Luther King's epochal December 5th 1955 speech to the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and writes:

Dr. King's peculiarly American genius [was his] appealing to the democratic and Judeo-Christian ideals of his countrymen, summoning them to finally fulfill the promises of the Constitution and the Bible. The simple demand that Americans act more American and more Christian was simply brilliant.

Indeed. Happy MLK Day.

Update: Michelle Malkin and Debbie Schlussel note that many elites seem to have forgotten key details of Dr. King's message.

Another Update: More here, including video.

David Brooks explains how the Democrats slowly went off the rails in his latest New York Times column. On the Times' Website, It's hidden behind the self-defeating TimesSelect firewall, but the whole text can be found on the New London, CT Day (found with about five minutes worth of Googling). Growing up about 20 minutes south of Judge Alito's hometown of Trenton New Jersey, there's much here I can relate to:

Read More »

Decision '08 has free advice for any potential Supreme Court nominee who will invariably have to respond to Teddy Kennedy, the left's answer to Terry Gilliam's Bridgekeeper character (in more ways than one...) from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Jonah Goldberg writes that Senate hearings to approve conservative Supreme Court nominees have "a whiff of a show trial" to them:

Amid all the country club decorum, there's a whiff of a show trial to these proceedings. The aim isn't to illuminate; it's to catch Alito saying something that will sound damning in an endlessly replayed sound bite. Hence the relentless campaign to get nominees to spill their guts on hot-button issues. When Justice John Roberts was in the hot seat, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., declared into every camera in the USA — including the security cams above ATMs — that Roberts' lack of a paper trail required he divulge his views more. Now, Schumer argues that Alito's enormous paper trail obliges him to be even more responsive than Roberts was.

The reason behind all this lies in a greater deceit: the idea that the court is primarily a legal institution at all. That notion is as outré as leather piano-key neckties. Sure, it still does the wonky stuff, but the court's primary mission has been transformed. Americans have grown comfortable with the idea of judges deciding not merely tough legal questions but the tough moral and political issues as well. Why so many people think a bunch of lawyers are the best qualified professionals to answer profound moral questions is beyond me. Is it really the case that lawyers are better qualified to decide when human life begins or when it should end than are legislators or, for that matter, bus drivers?

In a sense, the no-holds-barred approach is entirely justified because we've invested judges with so much power. And with the stakes so high, politics alone determines who sits on the bench. Having lost at the polls, liberals are desperate to keep the courts on their side. This is why they are touting Sandra Day O'Connor as Babylonian King Hammurabi reincarnated, though her rulings were widely recognized as intellectually incoherent and inconsistent. Who cares about that, so long as you come out "right" on abortion and affirmative action?

Indeed, liberal jurisprudence is driven by results. The judges on the left side of the Supreme Court regularly scan around the globe to find precedents where they can't find them at home. The "living constitution" is just a fancy phrase for "making it up as you go along."

In one area, however, liberals are right (though they will change their position when a liberal is nominated). Alito, like all nominees, should be more forthcoming about his views. If we're going to have judges rule like unelected monarchs, we should at least know what they think before they get on the throne. But in a better system, the bench wouldn't be a throne in the first place.

Meanwhile, a reader of NRO's Corner suggests that "Mrs. A crying was the little Jackie Roberts moment of Alito's confirmation process. He gave his dad instant credibility, and Mrs. Alito put her husband over the top".

If that's the case, the left will no doubt complain about emotion over substance. But which side has consistently championed emotions as the driving force of their politics?

Don't want to seem caught in a Tule Fog? Then stop by Mondo Alito, where it's all Alito, Alito the time!

(I know...I know.)

Hugh Hewitt proposes some excellent questions to be asked of any would-be majority leaders and whips.

Last June, I dubbed Arnold Schwarzenegger, "Gray Davis With Better Pecs" after Arnold went RINO with his global warming rhetoric.

With his latest budget-busting intiatives, Carol Platt Liebau writes that Arnold is aping an even earlier Democrat governor of California--Pat Brown:

If he keeps it up, every big spender in the state will be thrilled; once again, the taxpayers will be left holding the bag. As Arnold Schwarzenegger discards his “ersatz Reagan” identity and morphs into an “ersatz Brown,” it’s worth remembering that when his new political role model left office, only 2.2 percent of the state’s general fund was devoted to debt service.

But for the new Arnold, the history is immaterial. It’s always been clear that the governor wants to do something “big” — but last night it became apparent that, if the plans are ambitious enough, the particulars (and the principles) don’t really matter.

No wonder Hugh Hewitt uses Dylan's "I used to care, but things have changed" as his Arnold lead-in tune.

We've written a few times about the left's stuck-in-the-1970s Mobius Loop-like state. Two posts today help illustrate just how pervasive it is.

First up is Roger L. Simon, who looks at the tens of thousands of gallons of ink the media spilt over an isolated incident such as Abu Ghraib, or inventing similar incidents out of whole cloth where none exist, while virtually ignoring the hundreds of "honor murders" committed each year by Muslims in the Middle East:

There is a deep psychological disturbance in our mainstream media, a kind of willed need to ignore the world around them. It probably was, more or less, forever thus, but modern communications, specifically the internet, have brought this willed ignorance to the surface as never before. And yet the MSM continues in the same direction, even in the face of seeming economic failure.

Sheryl and I were discussing this phenomenon this afternoon with our friend Gerard who reminded us of the obvious. Many of these media outlets that keep ignoring what is happening in the world while trumpeting every US failure are increasingly playing to niche audiences in our society. They have no real interest, financial or otherwise, in the truth - or in the future of humanity, really (that last is my observation).

Meanwhile, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line asks, "Who will be the last Democrat to lose for a mistaken narrative?"

Vietnam and Watergate are seminal events for almost all liberals my age. Vietnam taught them to distrust the use of force by our military, and to despise leaders who aggressively use military force in the name of the national interest. Watergate confirmed that a leader who projects military force overseas for that purpose can be expected to usurp power at home.

These "lessons" were rejected by most baby-boomers even at the time of Vietnam and Watergate. And despite the dominance of Vietnam and Watergate-obsessed boomers in academia, subsequent generations have found the lessons even less worth learning.

The Democratic party, however, has not just learned the lessons, it has internalized them. And to its great detriment. The electoral tide turned against the Democrats during the Vietnam era, and hasn't turned back. One can argue that the Vietnam/Watergate syndrome -- fear of the exercise of American power based on profound distrust of our military, our government, and our motives -- is the main cause of the decline of the Democrats.

Many liberals seem not to dispute this. In fact, they acknowledge the "failure" of most Americans to embrace "harsh truths," and see this as further evidence that something is wrong with our country ("what's wrong with Kansas?"). We witnessed this phenomenon quite vividly last November following the defeat of John Kerry -- perhaps the purest messenger of the Vietnam/Watergate lessons. Like some conservatives of the past, many liberals seem to relish their minority status as a badge of intellectual superiority.

At the same time, most liberals long to be vindicated in the public mind. If Americans were belatedly to embrace the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, this would simultaneously confirm liberal superiority and restore liberal dominance.

Liberals look at Iraq, "torture," and now domestic spying, and can taste full public vindication. And therein lies their problem. If Iraq is Vietnam, it will soon enough confer great political advantage on the Democrats. But the Democrats (Hillary Clinton aside) are psychologically incapable, after so long in the wilderness, of "letting the game come to them." Or perhaps they understand that Iraq is not Vietnam. Thus, they overreach -- being too quick to compare Iraq to Vietnam, to eager to insist that we are failing there, and too quick to cry foul over domestic spying that targets mass murderers, not Larry O'Brien and Daniel Ellsberg. And the public recoils.

It's not surprising that the failure of many liberals to have learned anything truly new since 1974 constitutes a huge political disadvantage. But I'm fascinated by the ways in which this failure continues to confound them.

It was President Clinton who promised a bridge to the 21st century, and Bob Dole who countered--unsuccessfully, of course--with his own "bridge to the past". And yet, as I wrote at the start of the month, it's now the left who finds themselves living 30 years in the past. What does that hold for their future? Here's but one possible scenario. Here's another, more shorter-term look.

DoctorZin of Regime Change Iran writes:

Last Friday, the day after millions of Iraqi's voted in an historic election, the US Senate passed a resolution condemning the recent alarming statements by Iran's President. Surprisingly, the mainstream media ignored the resolution while the international press has been avidly covering similar resolutions adopted by countries around the world. Unfortunately, the story behind the resolution revealed a disturbing lack of conviction by some in the US Senate.

Read the rest.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey illustrates the ineffective leadership of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (did you know he's a doctor? No seriously, he's a physician! Did you know that?) in the most damning way possible: Frist's own words.

Power Line asks:

It's a funny thing: when the Democrats are in the majority, the Democrats run Congress. When the Republicans are in the majority, the Democrats still run Congress. How does that work?

Residual Stockholm Syndrome?

After Tookie Williams began his well-deserved Big Sleep, officials in Austria whined that they just might take Gov. Schwarzenegger's name off the eponymously named stadium in his hometown in protest.

Arnold's response? Take it off, pal!

SACRAMENTO – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in his hometown in Austria to remove his name from a sports stadium and stop using his name to promote the city.

The governor's request came after politicians in Graz began a petition drive to rename the stadium, reacting to Schwarzenegger's decision last week to deny clemency to condemned inmate Stanley Tookie Williams. Opposition to the death penalty is strong in Austria. [SNIP]

"In all likelihood, during my term as governor, I will have to make similar and equally difficult decisions," Schwarzenegger said in the letter. "In order to spare the responsible politicians of the city of Graz further concern, I withdraw from them as of this day the right to use my name in association with the Liebenauer Stadium."

The stadium had been renamed for the former Hollywood star in 1997. He said he wanted the lettering removed by year's end. [SNIP]

In [the letter to the officials of Graz, Austria] Schwarzenegger also said he would no longer permit the use of his name "to advertise or promote the city of Graz in any way" and would return the city's "ring of honor."

The ring was given to him in a ceremony in Graz in 1999. At the time, Schwarzenegger said he considered it "a token of sincere friendship between my hometown and me.

"Since, however, the official Graz appears to no longer accept me as one of their own, this ring has lost its meaning and value to me. It is already in the mail," the governor wrote.

The letter notes that city officials will receive a follow-up letter from Schwarzenegger's attorney.

As Baldilocks writes, "Done like a true American".

Something tells me the Gipper is smiling at the moment.

The Professor writes:

BUSH DOUBLES DOWN: I just watched Bush's speech. Nothing new there for anyone who's been paying attention to the speeches he's been giving over the past couple of weeks. But one big thing struck me: In this national televised speech, Bush went out of his way to take responsibility for the war. He repeatedly talked about "my decision to invade Iraq," even though, of course, it was also Congress's decision. He made very clear that, ultimately, this was his war, and the decisions were his.

Why did he do that? Because he thinks we're winning, and he wants credit. By November 2006, and especially November 2008, he thinks that'll be obvious, and he wants to lay down his marker now on what he believed -- and what the other side did. That's my guess, anyway.

Hmmm....a Republican president, popular with his base, if occasionally frustrating to them at times, crucified endlessly by the opposition party and the press (but I repeat myself), who is ultimately proven by history.

I've seen this story before.

Update: Michelle Malkin has plenty of links to additional coverage. This post by Real Clear Politics on "The Media's Incurable Myopia" is a must-read.

Another Update: I've seen this one before as well. C'mon folks--think of a new rebuttal!

One More: Gateway Pundit explores the timeline of The Thousand Day War.

Ten days ago, I wrote that the mindset of the American left seemed permanently trapped in 1972 inside of a causality loop set on 1972. Michael Barone agrees:

What are the lessons of the past 25 years?

First, that American military power can advance freedom and democracy to all corners of the world. Under Reagan and his three successors, America has played a lead role in extending freedom and democracy to most of Latin America, to the Philippines and Indonesia and almost all of East Asia, and, most recently, to Afghanistan and Iraq, with reverberations spreading through the Middle East. Area experts said, often plausibly, those countries' cultures were incompatible with democracy. Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and brave men and women in those nations proved them wrong.

Second, that markets work and that lower taxes and less onerous government produce more economic growth than the alternative. About 43 million jobs have been created in the United States since December 1980, while the number in the more statist nations of western Europe is on the order of 4 million. Markets are creating millions of jobs in nominally Communist China and once socialist India.

Third, that politics and effective government can, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, change the culture. The crime-control methods pioneered by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the welfare reforms pioneered by Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, imitated around the country and followed up by federal legislation, resulted in huge decreases in crime and welfare dependency.

These lessons have been widely learned and widely applied by George W. Bush and also to a large extent by Bill Clinton. But not, curiously enough, by those who see themselves as the best and the brightest, our university and media elites. They would still like to see America's power reined in, as it was in the 1970s. They are insouciant about the costs that larger and more intrusive government and higher taxes impose on the economy. They think that leniency and subsidy are the appropriate responses to deviant and self-destructive behavior. They think our most important right is a right to kill our unborn children. You have to be awfully smart, someone once said, to believe something so stupid. And to be so blind to the clear lessons of the past quarter century of history.

As Barone notes, Bill Clinton offered--at least at times--a reprieve from the 1970s mindset. But since losing in 2000, and especially after the 9/11 time out of the culture war ended in 2003, the left has reverted back to the seventies.

What will it take to break the cycle?

Update: Certainly not this!

Glenn Reynolds examines the Cory Maye case over at his MSNBC blog. In a follow-up post, he writes:

Meanwhile, a number of people wonder why the Tookie Williams case has gotten so much more attention than the case of a quite-likely innocent man on death row. I can only speculate: Williams was from Los Angeles, where celebrities abound, and his case gave media folks who wanted to put California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a tight spot an opportunity. Also, Cory Maye was defending his home and family with a handgun, something the celebrity media types tend not to favor. (Plus, there's no fear of riots.)

Whatever the reasons, Cory Maye hasn't gotten the attention his case deserves. I hope that will change.

Speaking of Tookie, Jonah Goldberg looks at those "celebrity media types" his story attracted and writes:

I find it revealing that a significant number of conservatives I know (and even work with) either oppose the death penalty on moral grounds or are inclined to. But they are consistently put off by the radical chic crowd, which has grown deceitful, narcissistic, and married to agendas no conservative would ever sign on to.

Exactly.

Dan of Gay Patriot compares and contrasts 9/11 Democrats and 12/12 Democrats.

What is a 12/12 Democrat? Read the whole thing, as many 9/11 Democrats are wont to say. And Charles Krauthammer's "Pressure Cooker Theory" essay is well-worth revisiting for additional insight on this topic.

Immediately preceding a long, detailed post about key documents of the Saddam Hussein regime that the Pentagon refuses to release to the Weekly Standard, Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on Joe Lieberman, currently a "new prize to be claimed -- or shunned" in Washington, as Ed describes him:

When [Democrat Congressman Jack Murtha] went specific, the Republicans finally took the initiative and forced a vote in the House on immediate withdrawal. Murtha complained that he didn't mean "immediate" -- at least at that time -- but the logistics of disengaging 150,000 troops on active missions and evacuating them and their equipment and support from the theater of battle would take at least that long under the most expedited of schedules. That folly resulted in the abandonment of Murtha and the notion of retreat on a devastating 403-3 vote, or at least so we thought. We thought the Democratic leadership would finally act responsibly out of sheer survival instinct, but instead they became more unhinged -- forcing voices of reason within their own ranks to publicly oppose the defeatism they espouse so passionately.

That brings us to Joe Lieberman, a tough man to love. He has long been a voice of conscience in the Democratic Party. He was the first to officially denounce Bill Clinton's activities with Monica Lewinsky, making his stinging rebuke on the Senate floor while still speaking against impeachment. That led to his partnership with Al Gore for the 2000 election, and the resulting mess when Gore tried to sue his way into the White House. (Yes, it started with an Al Gore lawsuit because he wanted to change the rules for recounts; you can look it up. They lost the initial lawsuit, too.) Instead of acting as a conscience, Lieberman silently assented to this bald attempt to take through the courts what the Democrats failed to take at the polling stations, a verdict eventually reached in three separate recounts, the last conducted by the media themselves.

How did the Democrats repay Lieberman for his loyalty? They shunned him in 2004, when he should have been the leading candidate for the presidency. He waited too long, perhaps, to announce his candidacy, wanting to give Gore another shot at running so he could endorse the former VP. Gore then shivved Lieberman by endorsing Howard Dean instead of his own former running mate -- just three weeks before Dean's campaign completely collapsed. The Democrats could have waltzed into the White House on a Lieberman-led ticket, but instead chose John Kerry and ignominious defeat at the hands of their most hated enemy.

One has to wonder why, under the circumstances, Lieberman hasn't left the party that so obviously has left him. His dogged loyalty probably explains that, and that makes his latest stand all the more remarkable. Lieberman is no babe in the political woods; he understands perfectly what his statements did to the Democrats. Instead of openly wondering what motivated Lieberman to take this kind of action, Reid and other Democrats in party leadership should ask themselves why they made it necessary for him to do so.

In the meantime, the Bush administration should continue to show Lieberman respect -- not just as an ally on Iraq war strategy, but also the respect due an honorable and formidable political opponent. Lieberman is not and will not be a Republican if he hasn't switched by now, and the GOP should remember that.

I'm not sure if Ed's right that "The Democrats could have waltzed into the White House on a Lieberman-led ticket"--it still would have been a brutal, bruising battle, but it would have been a fought against a very different media landscape. For one, the MSM would have had to tone down their relentless assault in 2004 on progress in Iraq, as it would have affected both candidates. But on the other side of the equation, there would have been no Swift Vets to sink Lieberman, either.

But hey, what-ifs are certainly fun to argue.

Over at HughHewitt.com, Mary Katharine Ham looks at Howard Dean in words and pictures.

Meanwhile, in his syndicated column, James Lileks writes:

A recent poll indicates seven of 10 Americans think Democrats' attacks on our illegal, incompetent, Halliburton torture-rama oil war depress the morale of troops. The survey, reported by that wild-eyed intemperate rag The Washington Post, also found the majority of Americans think the Dems' 24/7 gloom-gab isn't intended to win the war, but to "gain a partisan political advantage."

Power over principle? In Washington? Clutch your heart and find a fainting couch. Still, it must baffle the true believers. Dissent is patriotic, you know.

George W. Bush lied, Saddam Hussein was in a box labeled Secular He-Man al-Qaida Haters' Club, Israel is the problem, and American troops are either hapless bomb-fodder or sadistic torturers. Building a democracy in the heart of the Arab world is a distraction from finding Osama, the death of whom will cause the entire radical Islamist movement to stop fighting and take up Amway.

Everything is going wrong, the world hates us, and if you vote for us we will give every terrorist in a secret CIA jail a lawyer, fresh underwear, urine-proof holy books and a Powerball ticket.

To say that's not inspiring would be a misunderestimation, as the president might note. That doesn't mean the Dems are wrong; just because Cassandra didn't set her predictions to an Andrew Lloyd Webber show tune doesn't mean she wasn't right. But the message appears to have had the opposite of its intended effect.

The Democrats have convinced most Americans that they'd have left Saddam chuckling in his palaces after 9/11, that they'd oppose any war against a sworn enemy of the United States unless Richard Clarke personally saw its president give a ticking nuke to terrorists and lead them in a stirring rendition of "New York, New York."

Worst of all, they seem to want it to be 1973 again -- as if the nation yearned to bob for horse-apples in the vat of shame.

Granted, the loss of Vietnam was great for the Democrats. But it really wasn't very good for the rest of the country, to say nothing of the Vietnamese.

There's a curious nostalgia for the '70s among the old-guard institutional left; America had been humbled, which was good for humanity, and we were facing a future of scarcity and decline, which was good for the planet.

Beneath it all runs a rushing river of adolescent nihilism, roiling with contempt for that vast human stain known as Western Civilization. If it hasn't given us universal health care, gay marriage and the replacement of Wal-Marts with local co-ops by 2007, well, to hell with it. And those co-ops had better offer reusable bags for our groceries. Hemp bags.

This strain of American defeatism never died; it just slank away and chewed its tongue until the time was right. And that's now!

According to a Drudge Report story on the TV season-in-planning, we can expect several post-apocalyptic shows about the End of America, either by plague or societal collapse. This isn't a case of Hollywood mirroring a nationwide sense of malaise and decline; this is the collective depression of L.A. liberals longing for the good old days when Robert Redford could bring down a president and people cheered -- or at least bought tickets to watch.

I remember in the late 1970s, when Ronald Reagan began his second (and ultimately spectacularly successful) campaign for the White House, the knock against conservatives was that they were going to take America back 25 years to the 1950s.

But these days, look who's nostalgic for an era that is now even further in the past than the 1950s were in 1979.

Update: Related thoughts, here, and here.

In National Review's 50th anniversary issue, Charles Murray reviews Thomas Sowell's 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions (link to Murray's article requires subscription):

One mark of a great book is a thesis so powerful that after a few years people take it for granted. Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions (1987) is such a book. Its thesis: The policy arguments between liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians, do not arise just from differences in priorities regarding freedom, equality, and security. At root, they draw from different conceptions of the nature of man. The Left holds an unconstrained vision: Given the right political and economic arrangements, human beings can be improved, even perfected. Success is defined by what people have the potential of becoming, not by people as they are. The Right holds a constrained vision: People come to society with innate characteristics that cannot be reshaped and must instead be accommodated. Success in political and economic policy must be defined in light of those innate characteristics.

Once you have this framework in your head, the history of the great political debates of the 20th century coheres in a new way. The expansion of the welfare state, how to deal with crime, how to conduct the Cold War, the feminist revolution, colorblind policies versus affirmative action, who should control the schools — whatever the topic, the positions held by Left and Right make sense in terms of each side’s underlying vision of the nature of man.

A second mark of a great book is that it clarifies events that occur after its publication. Sowell wrote A Conflict of Visions during the 1980s, when the modern-liberal vision still had life and the influence of the classical-liberal vision was at its height. People on both sides still knew why they were so passionate about their political beliefs. Now we have the passion, but no why. The political climate is more partisan and bitter than ever, but what are we fighting over? Sowell’s thesis is useful in understanding this new environment.

Start with the Left. The difference between the Left of the 1960s and that of 2005 is that the politicians of the Left no longer believe in human malleability. The last two decades have refuted every basis for that belief, from the failure of Communism to the accumulating science of innate human nature. And so we end up with a politics of the Left stripped of the idealism that used to dignify even its most wrongheaded positions. The Left used to say that people were driven to crime by poverty and that the real crime was to punish them. Now the Left complains about too many people in prison, but it’s a cost/efficiency issue. The Left used to say that greater equality of income would lead to a happier society for everyone. Now the Left tries to play the envy card, but without the egalitarian idealism. On issue after issue, mainstream politicians of the Left no longer even try to appeal to the prospect of changing human beings for the better. Liberalism has become reactionary, trying to hold on to terrain it occupied in the Thirties and Sixties. Using Sowell’s language, we are watching what happens when Democrats have lost faith in the unconstrained vision of the nature of man and have not found anything to replace it.

Hey, that point rings a bell.

More Murray:

Now apply Sowell’s explanatory template to the Right. From the founding of National Review — an opening date that I nominate without fear or favor — through the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the intellectual vigor of the constrained vision grew. Then, during the 1990s, we discovered how much the vigor of the constrained vision depended on competition. With the Left intellectually moribund, politicians of the Right began to take the easy way out. It is understandable, because advocating the policies of limited government is psychologically uncomfortable. It requires a politician to say he wants to do things that will cause pain — cut benefits for young women with babies, scrub regulations that putatively protect the environment, or end affirmative action. A decent person can endorse such actions only if he believes that they are essential for the ultimate good, and that means being steeped in the wisdom of the constrained vision of the nature of man. In the aftermath of the Reagan ascendancy, when running and winning as a Republican became so much easier, we got more and more Republicans who wanted to be nice guys. George W. Bush is their leader. And so we have watched a Republican-controlled government take a giant step toward federalizing public education through the No Child Left Behind Act; add a major new unfunded entitlement to Medicare; and, last summer, demonstrate that Republicans in power love pork as much as the Democrats ever did. We are watching what happens when Republicans have forgotten the constrained vision of the nature of man and replaced it with a fuzzy desire to do good.

We recently covered that topic as well.

Update: Speaking of Sowell, he has a brief list of recommended books for Christmas presents at TownHall.com.

John Fund looks at Gov. Schwarzenegger's "Harriet Miers Moment".

When I live-blogged Republican Senators last month for Pajamas, I noticed a lot of big government bureaucratic lingo and a distinct lack of conservatism from guys who advertise themselves as, you know, conservatives. In an essay titled, "Republicanism In Decline", Tony Snow writes that this lack of spark began only months after Republicans won back the House and Senate in November of 1994:

Within months of seizing power in 1995, Republicans began backing away from Big Ideas, from tort reform to the necessary overhaul of the Social Security system. They started consulting pollsters to assay "correct" issues and positions. They played it safe -- or so they thought.

Of course, while the Republicans have been playing the prevent defense, Democrats haven't exactly had a hard-charging offense on the other side:

This helps explain one of the great ironies of the age. We live in what ought to be an era of Republican triumphalism. The president's one reliable bit of domestic-policy conservatism, his tax-cut agenda, has succeeded brilliantly. The most recent Commerce Department figures peg the third quarter economic growth rate at a sizzling 4.3 percent -- despite the ravages of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the oil shocks that followed.

Republicans have won the battle over whether centralized bureaucracies can eradicate poverty, or perform social services more efficiently than private or volunteer operations. Throughout the country, the same patterns appear: Where elected officials govern with a light touch and without imposing onerous tax and regulatory burdens, prosperity flourishes -- and people flock to the scene. "progressive" states, on the other hand, are becoming empty husks, with more rigid class distinctions than in any other section of the country.

The GOP also wins big on values. Virtually every time the ACLU files a lawsuit, Democrats lose supporters. Despite these advantages, however, the GOP founders. Its Washington potentates simply refuse to embrace the party's ideals or successes (including the war). They have forgotten the most important rule of political survival: If you want to remain an incumbent for long, you don't jettison your principles. You act on them.

When House Speaker Denny Hastert broke arms to secure votes for a pork-packed highway bill, calling the legislation a "jobs bill," it was an embarrassment. When the president signed a campaign-finance bill he called unconstitutional, he seemed to lack not only conviction, but vision.

Fortunately, irate constituents roused some conservatives from their dogmatic slumbers. Young Republicans rebelled against the apostasy of their elders, especially in the matter of the federal budget, and state parties seized the initiative on everything from spending limitations to school choice.

Capitol Hill Republicans now admit their Democratic colleagues don't want peace -- they want the Alamo. So the GOP is fighting back. Hastert approved calling the bluff of anti-victory Democrats last week by demanding a floor vote on the idea of vamoosing Iraq immediately. He scored another triumph this week by restoring the good name of the National Christmas Tree.

Who knows, he may even figure out the Paradox of Incumbency. Politicians who run just to protect incumbency may save their seats, but only by destroying their party's heart and soul. If you really want to build lasting power in politics, you need to forget about mere incumbency -- and remember the principles that got you elected in the first place.

The Gipper understood that since you're going to be crucified by the left and the media (but I repeat myself), you might as well try to implement your vision, rather than making nice and getting along. Somehow, that lesson keeps getting forgotten by a bunch of guys who seem to want to play nice with their opponents, rather than playing to win.

Update: Hugh Hewitt has a look at Republican inertia as well.

Earlier this month, I uploaded a bunch of photos I shot of the new Air Force One exhibit at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. SoCalPundit has also photoblogged the exhibit--it looks like the weather cooperated with him much better than it did with me!

He also has some fine shots of the library itself. (It's tricky to shoot in there, since the library curators don't permit flash.)

Some short personal random takes beyond the OSM piece, which was primarily focused on the new media aspects of the event:

It's amazing, in an odd sort of way, how politicians practically think and breathe in speeches. It's a bit like a salesman memorizing his patter (something I did for a few years) or a radio interviewee (something I've also done) knowing his. As James Lileks recently wrote, the trick is making the patter sound fresh each time you fire it off--because you know you'll be firing the riffs off all the time.

Some politicians go beyond that of course, to talk purely in soundbites. Bill Frist managed to work his medical background into just about every other sentence: I'm a physician. I'm a surgeon. As a doctor... And that was in the first minute of his speech to us.

Say Bill, you're not a doctor by any chance, are you? If Frist runs for the White House, these lines have a very good chance of being his equivalent of another senator's cliche: a haughty, French-looking fellow from Massachusetts--who, by the way, served in Vietnam.

Speaking of Frist, Betsy Newmark is spot-on when she writes

:

Right Side Redux has the video of Senator Frist's response to a question that starts off with Harry Potter and ends up asking when the GOP in the Senate is going to get some backbone. It's a cute question and Frist answers it with boilerplate about being a leader of a conservative movement, yadda, yadda, yadda. He doesn't have an answer for the part about getting some backbone because he so obviously is finding his weakened more and more each week.

It's gotten to the point that, in a week when Democrats and some Republicans have launched an all-out attack on the conduct of the war in Iraq and the GOP's domestic agenda is stalled in both houses, Frist is out there stating that asbestos legislation will be the "Senate's top priority" in 2006. We're at war; Congressmen and Senators are talking about deadlines for pulling out and this guy's top priority is asbestos? Geesh!

Indeed, to coin an adverb.

Jonathan Rauch was dead-on in "The Accidental Radical": traditional Buckley/Reagan/Gingrich style conservatism is either dead, or on long-term hiatus, when one Republican senator (I forget who) can say in back-to-back sentences, "We've expanded Medicare and health insurance access for all. And we need to keep looking for ways to trim the budget." Doubleplusgood use of newspeak, old boy! Hello--why not stop trying expand entitlements and "free" goodies for everyone? That's where the bulk of the spending is increasing.

It's kind of a shame a hardcore libertarian like Radley Balko or one of the Reason boys wasn't present yesterday. When George Allen--who is guaranteed to be perceived as a conservative if he runs for the White House in '08 can praise opening commuter lanes to electric cars as one of his home state's solutions to energy efficiency, and not get that it's the commuter lanes themselves that bog down highways and make them less efficient, that's a huge stolen base for the anti-automobile segment of the far left.

As I noted in my post about the OSM launch, New York Times fashion contributor Elizabeth Hayt thinks we're in midst of a conservative theocracy. But it's been ten years since the GOP took control of Congress, they've held the Senate for most of that period, and January will mark five years of President Bush in office. Meantime, the gift shop inside that theocratic GOP-controlled Senate sells festive "Holiday" ornaments. To place on your non-demoninational winter solstitial temporary interior tree.

That's a theocracy? Only to a woman who just knows she's this close to being fitted for a burka with GOP elephants printed on it. (Probably made of polyester, too.)

Speaking of Hollywood, Warren Beatty's stalking of Gov. Schwarzenegger in the run-up to last week's botched special election makes it almost too easy for Mark Steyn in his latest column:

I don't want to run for governor," [Beatty] said the other day, making it sound like he's interested in the role but he won't audition. He's certainly in the right party: The Democrats have already taken on most of the characteristics of a bad Hollywood project -- no ideas, script full of ancient cliches, but if you can get the right star to commit to it we just might make this thing fly. And, though he's never run for office before, Beatty has the crucial ingredient: name recognition. All over California, women are going: "Warren Beatty? Oh, yeah, right, now I remember. That guy I had sex with in the late '60s."

The ''will Warren run?" story crops up every other election cycle. Last time it was back in 2000, when Al Gore was felt by some (about 300 million or so) to lack charisma and there was talk of Beatty throwing his hat into the presidential ring. He wanted to run because he believed American politics was turning into a plutocracy in which the highest office in the land was put up for sale to a handful of privileged sons of wealthy men, like Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Beatty, by contrast, has come up the hard way, working his way through the long, hard daily grind of Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Brigitte Bardot, Cher, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Isabelle Adjani . . . He can sympathize with the underclass: He knows how it feels to hit rock bottom -- apparently, it was Madonna's in ''Dick Tracy.'' He understands what it's like to try to make ends meet. Crucially for California, he's sensitive to the needs of immigrants: He appreciates the difficulties European art-house actresses have in finding bankable Hollywood stars prepared to go to bed with them.

In 2003, you'll recall, the Los Angeles Times assigned a special team to look into Arnold's sexual background. If they do Warren in the same way, it'll be the biggest hiring bonanza in U.S. journalism for a century. Usually, when his magnificent track record of famous conquests is brought up, Beatty indignantly points out that he's had sex with a lot of very obscure women, too. This is true. He has dallied not just with Natalie Wood, but also with her less celebrated sister, Lana Wood.

Lana, who played Plenty O'Toole in the James Bond film ''Diamonds Are Forever,'' subsequently fell on hard times and found herself with little money and no work. Warren was touched by her predicament and considerately invited her to share his bed. As Miss Wood wrote in her memoirs: "Whatever his motives were, he gave me shelter and my self-esteem back -- and for that I was grateful."

Whether this hands-on approach to tackling the problems of the unemployed can be applied statewide is doubtful. No governor can have sex with every struggling woman in California, though, of course, Beatty does have the advantage of an impressive head start.

Do I even have to say, read the rest?

Back in September 2003, I toured the Reagan Library and was surprised to see a 707-sized aircraft wrapped in plastic protective sheathing, which happened to be Air Force One number 27000. As I wrote back then for Tech Central Station:

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley California hosts a 3.5 by ten foot segment of the Berlin Wall. If all goes according to schedule, in mid-2004 it will open a pavilion that houses the Air Force One that flew President Reagan into Berlin, where he gave his legendary "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech. The aircraft, sporting tail number 27000, was Reagan's primary Air Force One, in which he logged 631,640 miles and 1,288 hours of flying time. It also flew Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter to Cairo in 1981, to represent the US at the funeral of Anwar Sadat. In 1986, #27000 was used to take Reagan to Reykjavik for his summit meeting with Gorbachev, in which Reagan refused to bargain away SDI, and in so doing, began the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

When the two modified Boeing 707s that served as Air Force One were replaced by a pair of even more heavily modified 747s in 1989, the 707s eventually became backups, and used for jaunts to runways where the much larger 747 couldn't land.

Eventually, #27000 was decommissioned in the summer of 2001. "In July of 2001, word got out that the US Air Force Museum was going to get the retired aircraft," Melissa Giller, the library's director of communication says. "The Air Force Museum already has #26000 on display, and they were looking to see if someone else might perhaps want #27000. They were looking at both us and the Smithsonian, and when we got word of that, we actively sought after it.

"The story goes that President Reagan once said that he wished that his library could have his main Air Force One. So with that, and since we had the room, and the Smithsonian didn't, the US Air Force thought it would be a great fit for us."

And it is.

It took a year longer than expected to complete, but the giant exhibit designed to house Air Force One finally opened in late October (with President Bush cutting the ribbon) at the library--a fitting final resting place for the Air Force One most used by President Reagan.

Here a few photos of the plane and the exhibit that houses it. (Full disclosure: It was terribly overcast yesterday. and the library doesn't permit the use of flash. So to avoid uploading a bunch of dark muddy images, I've color-corrected and/or pushed the exposure on the photos.)

The entry hall to the "hangar"; only the nose of the plane is initially visible, in an impressive--and seductive--bit of stagecraft and composition.

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