Right Wing Nut House

It was almost as if the clock had been turned back to a different time, a more civil time in our political life.

There stood George Allen, soon to be ex-Senator from Virginia, his Presidential hopes in tatters, his political career probably ended. With measured tones and quiet voice, he showed everyone, in what almost certainly was the most disappointing moment of his life, the right way to lose:

Allen said the “owners of government have spoken and I respect their decision.”

“The Bible teaches us there is a time and place for everything, and today I called and congratulated Jim Webb,” he said.

Webb, a former Republican and Navy secretary under President Reagan, claimed victory early Wednesday after election returns showed him with a narrow lead of about 7,200 votes out of 2.37 million ballots cast.

Allen chose not to demand a recount after initial canvassing of the results failed to significantly alter Webb’s lead.

“I do not wish to cause more litigation that would not alter the results,” Allen said, adding that he saw “no good purpose being served by continuously and needlessly expending money and causing any more personal animosity.”

Not a word about rigged voting machines or Diebold. No conspiracy mongering. Simple, elegant, and heartfelt.

I remember when politics was like this. Even the worst negative campaigns would end with the loser, the microphones, the tears, but the acknowledgement that the people had spoken and their decision was final.

Sure he had little or no hope that a recount was going to alter the result. But under Virginia law, he was entitled to one. And given the chicanery that lawyers are capable of, challenge after challenge could have kept Virginia without a Senator for months next year.

Contrast Allen’s words and spirit with those of Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats before the election where they all but said a Republican victory would mean that the GOP cheated, that they hacked the voting machines or barred people from voting. Funny that there isn’t much concern about hackers now that the Democrats have won. Our democracy has been “restored”. The “people have spoken.”

And given how close the dozens of House races and several Senate races were (most of them lost by Republicans), I hope this finally gives the lie and buries forever the notion that the Republicans stole any election by hacking voting machines. Not one shred of evidence was ever presented anywhere that even hinted at GOP operatives changing vote totals in electronic machines. Not. One. Shred. Of evidence. All the Democrats accomplished by their whining, their caterwauling, the cavalier way in which they announced to the world that elections were stolen was to denigrate American democracy abroad and cause people to lose faith in it at home.

I hope they’re satisfied. Because Allen showed them all what grace under fire is all about. Let the difference between Allen and the Democrats be the glory of American democracy.

UPDATE

Allah has the video. He says the football was a “bit much” and I agree. But a fine speech, nonetheless.

You can see from the headline how cocksure I am of my new-found freedom of action.

Truth is, for months I have swallowed many of my misgivings about this President, the party, and even conservatives in general. I did so for rather cowardly reasons. Part of it was to protect my ego (no one likes being called vile names by those whose support and approval are sought) while another reason was almost certainly the desire not to give any of my lefty friends unnecessary ammunition to use against conservatives who don’t agree with me.

Another even more cowardly reason for my reticence has been a fear that my criticisms would distance me from the rest of the conservative blogosphere. This, perhaps the most unforgivable transgression in that it involves not being true to my inner muse as well as betraying the trust of my readers, all for the sake of giving into my fears of losing much of what I have worked for these past two years. This has caused me much discomfort, at times leaving a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. And while I never lied, I pulled my punches on many of my criticisms of Iraq, the President, and other conservative personalities and issues.

No more.

All this may come as a surprise to my regular readers who are used to me bashing Republicans and the President. But the fact is, I was taking it easy on the bastards. More than one post over the past year has fallen victim to the “delete” button on my blog because I realized that my intemperate and bitter remarks about something Bush or the Republicans were doing would cause many of my long time readers (and other bloggers) to tip toe away, unable or unwilling to face the consequences of the failed policies in Iraq, the fiscal irresponsibility, the unbelievable dereliction of duty in adequately protecting our borders, our ports, our airlines, our chemical and nuclear plants, and other targets more than 5 years after the worst terrorist attack in our history.

There has been a failure of leadership too. I have pointed out on more than one occasion that this President has failed in his basic duty as a wartime President. He preferred to try and fight this war on the cheap - not raising taxes to pay for it, not abandoning some of his cherished domestic agenda, not calling upon Americans to support our efforts in any coherent or consistent manner. Is it any wonder that support for the war is so low when the Commander in Chief has allowed his political and ideological opponents an open field to define the reasons we went to war, to substitute evil intent for noble goals, and to posit the most calumnious, outrageously stupid conspiracy theories about why we fight and what we are fighting for?

I don’t blame the press for the lack of support for the war among the people. I don’t blame bad luck or the exigencies of war. I don’t blame Clinton holdovers at State, or the intelligence community, or at the Department of Defense. Other Presidents have learned to overcome or deal with the press and the backstabbing bureaucracies in Washington that have, after all, been operating in this manner for generations. I blame the President and his team. Bush has the biggest megaphone in the history of civilized man; the American Presidential bully pulpit. Every word he utters is listened to around the world. Every thought he imparts is dissected, analyzed, re-dissected and then analyzed further by friend and foe alike.

He has wasted this precious resource. His defense of the war and his policies (what defense is possible) has been marked by an inconsistency bordering on negligence. He has left this vital chore to surrogates like Tony Blair, John Howard, his Vice President and other cabinet officials while his own efforts have been haphazard and marked by long periods of almost total silence. Only the President of the United States can command the attention of the American people when he asks for it. No underling, no matter how articulate or passionate, is a substitute for a President demanding that the press carry his words. Ronald Reagan understood this. Bill Clinton even understood the uses of the bully pulpit. Bush treats it as another prop in the White House PR effort, to be used when he and his political handlers feel that it was time to bring the war front and center again.

We have seen this constantly since the 2004 election. Every once and a while, the President would embark on a highly publicized 10 day or 2 week “campaign” to raise the visibility of the war and highlight his policies. It failed miserably. While his ringing defense of the rationale for war and what we are trying to accomplish was always well thought out and fairly well delivered, the words disappeared into the cacophony of background noise that makes up the American media environment. Too little, too late, and in the end, people simply stopped listening.

The opposing narrative of the war, formed and disseminated by his enemies while the President was off doing something else, dominated the national discussion on Iraq until the President’s silence coupled with his Administration’s continuing inability to accept responsibility for mistakes and an almost pathological attempt to gloss over problems by highlighting only the positive, widened the credibility gap between what was actually happening in Iraq and what his Administration spokespeople were saying. While truth may be the first casualty of war (FDR vastly underreported the damage to our fleet at Pearl Harbor), playing public relations games while Iraqis are slaughtering each other to the tune of 20,000 dead since February does not inspire confidence that anything the Administration says about Iraq has any basis in reality.

Credibility lost, policies that have failed, strategies implemented that have not dampened the enthusiasm of Iraqis to murder each other, an insurgency that refuses to either shrink in numbers or lessen the ferocity of their attacks on Americans and Iraqis - welcome to the Presidency of George W. Bush. Yes things go south during wartime on occasion. But when the arrow of progress has been pointing down for so long and we look to the future and see only more of the same, one begins to wonder when any upturn in our fortunes will be possible.

Do I sound bitter and betrayed? You betchya. I still believe that going to war in Iraq was the right course of action, the next logical step in the War on Terror. Those who point to how things have turned out as “proof” that it was an incorrect or immoral decision are idiots. That is pure Monday morning quarterbacking and I’m having none of it. My concern is whether there is anything that can realistically be done to turn things around at this point and, more importantly, whether there is any fight left in this Administration to stand behind their original decision to go to war and bring self government to the Middle East. If both questions are answered in the negative then for God’s sake tell Prime Minister Maliki to take a flying leap and start pulling our people out of there - not according to any artificial timetable but the same way they came in; fast and with purposeful intent.

No more rosy pronouncements about illusory “progress.” No more ass covering by generals and Pentagon policy wonks whose responsibility for where we are in Iraq will be carefully documented by historians and on display for future generations to criticize. No more using the lives of our troops in a futile effort to prop up a government that can’t decide whether to support the American presence or to prance and preen before the Iraqi people, demonstrating their “independence” from our occupation.

The firing of Rumsfeld is a harbinger.The President stood before the American people less than two weeks ago and assured us that the Secretary of Defense would be there when he left office. How can we now believe him when he says that he is committed to further efforts to bring about a tolerable conclusion to our mission in Iraq? And if he lacks this committment, will he live up to another statement he made about quitting Iraq if he thought there was no hope of “victory?” For if he has already decided to leave Iraq short of any outcome that could be considered advantageous to American interests, then every day that passes, every life lost, is a wasted effort in a losing cause and he should bring our people home now.

I don’t subscribe to this President being the worst or most incompetent in history. Those who make such political judgements have never heard of Millard Fillmore or James Buchanan or Ulysses Grant, or any of a half dozen other fools who occupied the White House. Bush isn’t even the worst since World War II - not as long as the chapter on Jimmy Carter’s presidency remains in the history books. But Bush has certainly demonstrated incompetence on Iraq and has failed miserably in other areas of Presidential leadership. For that, history will not remember him well.

From here on out, gentle readers, I will call ‘em as I see ‘em. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead! I will not hesitate to take on anyone and everyone. If you disagree, fine. That’s what the damn comments section is for. But there will be no more trimming here at The House.

Years of living in Chicago with a baseball team like the Chicago Cubs has given me the gift of eternal hope. When spring rolls around, the entire city with one voice breathes the words “This could be the year.” And even when it isn’t, we know that there will always be another spring, another chance to make good the promise that springtime brings.

Two years is not that long to wait for renewal. It should start now with some hard and brutal introspection by GOP leaders and an acknowledgement of their total and complete failure - failure as public servants and as honorable men and women. And that introspection should extend to us, the rank and file. What are we asking of the party? More importantly, what are we asking of government?

Tough days ahead. But we’ll be all the better for it if we learn the right lessons and apply the right prescriptions for change. That’s what adults do about defeat. Not whine about “stolen elections” or “rigged machines.” Let’s take our medicine and participate in the birth of a better, more responsible, more responsive Republican party.

And that new party will not look much like the old one - or at least it shouldn’t. If we try to refashion the old majority, we will continue to lose or, in a best case scenario, win enough seats to be in a majority but not enough to enact the kinds of legislation (and start repealing others) that would bring true conservative governance to Washington.

If there is one thing exit polls are good for, it is breaking down the vote by age, income, religion, ideology, and other important indices. Here’s the bad news from exit polls taken for House races nationwide:

* Republicans saw their advantage with white men diminish from 62-37 in 2004 to 53-45 Their advantage with white women dropped from 55-44 in 2004 to a 49-49 tie. For the first time in memory, Republicans lost American males to the Democrats 51-47 compared to 55-44 advantage in 2004.

* In 2004, Bush lost the 18-29 age group but won in the 30-44, 45-59, and 60 and older. No age group voted in the majority for the GOP in 2006.

* The GOP has lost the middle class. In 2004, all income brackets above $50,000 voted in the majority for the GOP (those making $30-50,000 split their vote evenly). In 2006, only those making more than $100,000 and above voted Republican.

* In 2004, Republicans garnered majorities in all education groups except high school graduates and Post Doc grads. In 2006, the GOP failed to win any education group.

* Bush barely lost Independents to Kerry 49-48 in 2004. In 2006, indies went Dem 57-39.

* For the first time since 1976, the Republicans lost the Catholic vote 55-44. GOP won the Catholic vote 52-47 in 2004.

* The GOP lost 2/3 of the unmarried vote. Given that this demographic is growing and is now bigger than married couples, that is a huge stumbling block to majority status.

(Here’s a link to the 2004 exit polls and the 2006 exit polls.)

I could go on and on. The fact of the matter is that the GOP majority, cobbled together after the Reagan majority fell apart, was never really a true ideological coalition. That Reagan coalition had anti-communism as a powerful glue that held northeastern urban ethnics, blue collar rust belters, “Boll Weevil” Democrats, and Main Street Republicans together through good times and bad. The ex-Republican majority, made up of evangelical Christians and other social conservatives as well as a pastiche of libertarians, hawks, anti-immigration advocates, and fiscal conservatives had no ideological coherence. It was bound to crack when things went south.

In a large way, what was holding this coalition together was support for the President. But once Bush proved himself a weak sister on fiscal restraint, immigration, and even the war, there was nothing to keep the majority together except blind loyalty to Bush and the Presidency. And enough conservatives (20%) actually got so disgusted with the President and the GOP that they crossed over and voted Democratic.

We can’t just abandon Bush - not when the Democrats are sharpening their knives to come after him, the Presidency, the war, tax cuts, and the entire conservative agenda. The opposition to the President will be relentless as will the investigations into Iraq, war reconstruction, internal security, Katrina, energy policy, and anything else that strikes the fancy of a Democratic Committee or Sub-Committee chairman. Some of those investigations will no doubt reveal shocking waste, fraud, and abuse. Criminal charges will be forthcoming. Impeachment, demanded by the netnuts from day one, will almost certainly be on the table. And there will be much witch hunting as well as fishing expeditions into White House activities.

But Bush himself is going to have to change his way of governance if he is going to survive the next two years. I hold out little hope that he will do so. Already he is talking about reviving his flawed “guest worker” initiative, thinking he can pass it now that he has a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate. And I believe that he will take the “out” offered by the Iraq Study Group (Baker Commission) to leave Iraq before the job is done. If he does these things and if he continues to preside over the fiscal mess we find ourselves in, he will score no points with Democrats and lose the rest of his base, leaving him dangling, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind as the Democrats flay what’s left of his presidency to shreds.

There is much serious thought to be given to where the party is today and where it should be headed in the future. I anticipate that conservative blogs will play a role in redefining the party and refashioning a viable, coherent coalition that will bring the GOP back from the depths we are in today. There will be clashes of ideas. There will probably be a certain amount of fingerpointing. But blogs will be able to cull and synthesize the blizzard of ideas that will bubble up from the grass roots and present them for discussion to those who lead the party. And with any number of candidates for President waiting in the wings, many of these ideas have a real shot at being incorporated into a winning strategy that would bring the GOP victory in 2008.

We are standing on the crest of a bluff overlooking a vast undiscovered country of ideas and solutions. Let’s hope that we have the courage and the will to seize the opportunity and conquer that country for our party, ourselves, and our country.

I feel an overwhelming urge to apologize this morning.

That’s because I harbored fears that if the Democrats took control of one or both Houses of Congress that the left would erupt with a string of bloodcurdling threats and juvenile “I told you so’s” which would sour the post-election atmosphere and contribute to partisan warfare.

I am so glad my fears were unfounded…mostly:

Suck it, Reich Wingers!! Cos now that means we’ll have some real honest-to-god oversight in Washington. Subpoena powers! Go, John Conyers!! Give em hell!!

In case you missed the significance of John Conyers being cheered on, the ultra liberal conspiracy mongering Congressman from Michigan will begin hearings leading the impeachment of President Bush in January.

Oh he won’t call them “impeachment” hearings. That would be breaking his promise to Republicans and the American people not to hold those kind of hearings. He will call them something like “Hearings to Determine How Much Money Was Made By Bush And Cheney When They Started The War In Iraq To Enrich Their Friends At Haliburton.”

Or perhaps he will call them “Hearings on the President’s Role In The 9/11 Attacks.” That one sounds sexier.

Nancy Pelosi sure sounded all sweet and grandmotherly, didn’t she?

“Tonight is a great victory for the American people,” said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to become the first female speaker of the House. “The American people voted for a new direction.”

She vowed “civility and bipartisanship” but confronted the president over his Iraq policy: “Mr. President, we need a new direction in Iraq.”

That kind of “bi-partisan” feeling was on display here:

YOU LOSE, JERKS!! YOU LIGGITY, LIGGITY, LIGGITY LOOOOOOOOOSE!! L-O-S-E, LOSE, LOSE, LOSE! L-O-S-E, LOSE, LOSE, LOSE!!

And here:

Our Depression-era grandparents could have told us this was coming. After all, the GOP has driven us into precisely the same ditch it ran them into in 1929, fueled by the same ignorance and graft, flaunting the same blatant disregard for any sense of the common good, pillaging our vast accumulated social capital for its members’ own private enrichment. Now that the devastating results are coming clear to all but that last deluded 30%, we need to make the words “conservative” and “Republican” forever synonymous with this mess.

We need to teach it in our history classes, and tell the tales to our own grandchildren. This, children, is what happens when you abandon liberalism. This is what’s happened every damned time we’ve ever handed conservatives the keys and let them drive. Don’t let them kid you. It’s not about two different views of democracy; it’s about whether your democracy lives or dies.

Uh…don’t worry Davey. When the time comes, all of us conservatives will march meekly and in a nice, neat line to the re-education camps and gas chambers. Just don’t tell us they’re “showers.” That’s been done before.

Or if you’re lucky, maybe some real attractive authoritarian figure (you know how much we conservatives adore authoritarian figures) will come along and fill our glasses with Kool Aid (the real stuff) and conservatives will happily drink so that we can all go to heaven, sing songs, and play with Jesus.

All defeats have silver linings. But I think this moonbat (or “Moonchild”) might be a wee bit too relieved for her own good:

That’s right. Something extraordinary happened tonight. A nation voted and decisively halted the Fascist juggernaut in tracks.

But stopping an authoritarian machine in its tracks is just one battle in the long struggle we face ahead.

Sieg Heil, baby. Just don’t mess with my Hitler doll or I’ll brain ya.

And let’s make sure we promote unity across the nation this election night. Sectionalism has no place in America, right? RIGHT?

What we talked about earlier this week is holding up: the Old Confederacy is the big loser tonight, relegated to the minority in the House. There is no reason, none, nada, zilch, to allow legislation in the House to be held hostage to Southern authoritarian Theocrats and racists anymore. Buh-bye.

Does this mean I can’t fly “The Stars and Bars” on Jefferson Davis’ birthday?

To my fellow conservatives, I say fear not. First of all, most of these brand spanking new Democratic Congressmen are not wine and Brie cheese liberals. Most of them - the overwhelming majority of them - are actual moderates who espouse some conservative positions. Many hold conservative values. They are the future of the Democratic party - not the idiots, the drunkards, the insufferable louts who populate the liberal blogosphere and much of Congress.

Secondly, many of the seats the GOP lost tonight are still in very red territory. If the Republicans can go out and do what the Democrats did this time - recruit outstanding, 1st tier candidates to challenge these extremely vulnerable newcomers, a switch of 20 seats in 2008 would be very doable.

Two years will pass before you know it. Let’s make the best of the time to reform the party and renew our commitment to core conservative principles.

I’ll be liveblogging results along with every other blogger in Christendom. But rather than have you, my beloved readers, troll through the internet looking for different insights, I will do that for you.

I will be keeping an eye on a few blogs:

Hot Air - Allah always has the best roundups
Captains Quarters - Ed and a few others are in DC blogging for CNN
Wizbang - Alex McClure et al are some of the best on the web.
Polipundit - He’s still a great analyst even without the old gang.
Kim Priestap - Kim is smart, savvy, and sexy. ‘Nuff said.
Pollster.com - They should have some interesting info on exit polls.

Coverage here will start at 6:00PM central time with updates every half hour or so.

If there’s a site you want me to keep an eye on, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

If, as seems more and more likely, the Democrats take control of the House, we will hear much crowing on the left about the part that the War in Iraq played in the GOP’s downfall. They will demand that the President now come up with a plan that would bring the troops home in a specified period of time.

Democrats will tell you that they will tie that timetable to real progress by the Iraqi government and military in getting a handle on the security situation and other benchmarks. The problem is a simple one:

DOES ANYONE REALLY BELIEVE THAT IF ONE OF THOSE BENCHMARKS HASN’T BEEN ACHIEVED THAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL ALLOW THE TIMETABLE TO SLIP?

They will argue that the timetable is more important than any “artificial” measurement of progress and agitate for the withdrawal anyway. In fact, I would fully expect the Democrats to use the published timetable as a political club, constantly beating the Republicans over the head with the fact that the war is not going according to the schedule they so carefully set down. At the very least, they’ll have one more thing about which to Blame Bush and, because wars tend not to cooperate when politicians set down arbitrary conditions for its ending, the Dems will have a field day until November of 2008 at the Republican’s expense.

The problem with this “anti-war mandate” that we will be hearing so much about over the next few days and weeks is that it only seems to exist in the minds of of war opponents. That’s because, from where I sit, there is no talk from the candidates here in Illinois about leaving Iraq at all or any kind of “anti-war” sentiment whatsoever.

Melissa Bean (Ill eight), a freshman Democrat running in a marginally red district and considered extremely vulnerable hasn’t even mentioned the war in her ads which effectively skewer her opponent as a right wing extremist. (That’s okay because, well, he is.) And perhaps most surprisingly, Democratic candidate Tammie Duckworth, an Iraq War vet and double amputee running in the hotly contested sixth district of Illinois, is running an ad that, if I were in her district, would make me comfortable with voting for her. Nowhere does she express an iota of anti-war sentiment in the ads. Instead, she concentrates on trying to get the President to “change course” as well as make sure our troops have everything they need.

I have a theory about what’s going on in the country with people’s ambivalent feelings toward the war. And to illustrate it, allow me to pose a counterfactual for you.

Suppose D-Day had failed and the allies had been thrown back into the sea. Most of our airborne troops dead or captured. The assault waves decimated. Instead of the more than 2,000 men who sacrificed their lives on the beaches of Normandy, the number of dead could have approached ten times that.

Even worse, Hitler would have been able to transfer the bulk of his western armies to the east and possibly defeat Stalin’s Russia given that another invasion was out of the question for at least a year. And an extended war in Europe would have meant a possible delay in throwing our best at Japan.

What would the American people have done when they went to the polls in November of 1944?

If Wendell Wilkie and the Republicans could have framed the election around the idea that they could do a better job in running the war and bringing victory, I daresay FDR and the Democrats would have been in enormous trouble.

But we don’t have that situation today because the Democrats refuse to acknowledge anything but defeat in Iraq. They have set parameters that don’t even define victory, only withdrawal and, given what is happening in Iraq at the moment, a humiliating defeat as we retreat and leave the battlefield to al-Qaeda.

Bush/Rummy/Cheney have made every mistake that was possible to make in Iraq and then blundered some more. But this is not Viet Nam. The American people are not resigned to stalemate and defeat. If you were to ask 100 Americans “If there were a way to win the War in Iraq, would you support our staying there until the job was done?”… my guess would be a very healthy percentage would answer in the affirmative.

This is why Democrats are not running “anti-war” ads - except true blue liberals like Ned Lamont. And look what’s happening to him.

All of this brings up the point that there is not going to be an “anti-war mandate” despite what you may hear from the left after the election. The American people want victory. And at this point, given the alternatives, even a timetable sounds like it could be spun as a win.

Try another counterfactual, this one more recent: Suppose the Democrats had run on a platform that they had a plan that could bring us victory in Iraq. Suppose they were willing to raise troop levels, get serious about training the Iraqi military, tell Maliki to shove it and take off after Mookie and his militia and finish the job that should have been done 2 years ago - kill the bastard and destroy his ability to make trouble.

I don’t think the Republicans would have had a prayer. They would have been steamrolled.

At bottom, when given the choice between victory and defeat, the American people choose to win. And if, by some miracle, the Republicans hold onto the House tomorrow, it won’t be because they deserve it or because they’ve managed the legislative branch so expertly. It will be because in the end, the American people made this election a referendum on who best would pursue victory in Iraq. And that just might be the most shocking surprise of all.

Somebody better take that glass of kool aid away from Dean Barnett before he does irreperable damage to the synapses of his brain:

So what’s it all mean? In the tied races, the Republican will win. In the close races, the Republican will win. It adds up to Republicans running the table in the Senate. That’s right – running the table. Montana, Virginia, Missouri, Tennessee, New Jersey, Rhode Island (whoopee), and Maryland will all send or re-send Republicans to the Senate. But wait, there’s more! Michigan will send Sheriff Michael Bouchard to the Senate. And in Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum is in striking distance.

In the House, the same holds true. Republican Joe Negron will take Foley’s seat. New Mexico’s Heather Wilson will return to Congress. So, too, will Connecticut’s Chris Shays. We’ll lose a handful of seats for the individual failures of certain Congressmen (hello, Curt Weldon), but we will retain control of the House.

Okay, I’m officially out on the limb. But I’m comfortable here. The paradigm has shifted. People like Stu Rothenberg are like old generals re-fighting the last war; they’re re-analyzing the last election without realizing that certain key facts on the ground have changed.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Dean Barnett. He’s witty, smart, shrewd, and usually level headed in his analysis. That’s why his pre-election departure from planet earth should be considered cause for alarm - or more likely the product of blogging in close proximity to the most relentlessly optimistic man I have ever seen.

Hugh Hewitt has never lost faith that Tuesday will not see the end of the Republican majority in Congress. That kind of enthusiasm is necessary and vital in any political movement. One might point to it as the major difference between left and right, liberals and conservatives. Especially since they’ve been out of power, there has been little in the way of optimism from the left - even about their own party. Instead, the Democrats have been doing a slow burn for a decade with constant recriminations against one faction or another. The Clintonian Democratic Leadership Council has come in for some scathing criticism for trying to be “Republican lite” in their policy prescriptions - despite the fact that they proved to be the most politically successful Democrats in a generation.

But Dean and Hugh - while I believe wildly off base in their predictions for Tuesday - are two good reasons why the Republicans will not be left out in the political wilderness for long. Positive people will succeed a helluva lot more often than the contrarians, the curmudgeons, the sourpusses, the angry, bitter, relentlessly negative partisans who make up much of the leadership of the Democratic party.

As for throwing some cold water on Dean’s victory party, a couple of quick observations are in order.

A week ago, I couldn’t have imagined that Burns (MT), Steele (MD), Corker (TN), and Allen (VA) would be victorious on Tuesday. Now it appears a distinct possibility. Corker and Steele appear to have tremendous momentum while Kerry’s gaffe may very well have doomed Tester in Montana and McCaskill in Missouri. I am convinced we won’t know the results of the Allen-Webb cage match until at least Wednesday and probably beyond that but given the redness of Virginia, the incumbent may very well squeak by.

But Rhode Island? New Jersey? I think that we’ll find that the GOTV machines in both parties will be working in tip top condition. And, like the redness of Virginia helping Allen, I think the very blue states of New Jersey and Rhode Island will give Menendez and Whitehouse a GOTV edge so that you can bank their wins on Tuesday night.

Along with almost certain losses by Santorum in PA and DeWine in OH, that would mean a net loss for the GOP in the Senate of 3 seats -a testament to the power of incumbency rather than any victory for conservative principles or acknowledgement of Republican competency in running the legislative branch.

In fact, that will be the hallmark of this election even if, as expected, the Democrats take control in the House. The only overarching issue that seems to be on voters minds is Iraq. The left will try to spin their victory as an anti-war mandate when in fact, what the American people want is someone to define victory in a rational way. Americans don’t like to lose wars. But since the Democrats failed to offer any kind of coherent message on Iraq - except that the war has been badly botched - they’ll settle for a party that will force the President to change course.

But where Dean and Hugh and the other Republican Rebeccas of Sunnybrook Farms allow their enthusiasm to get the better of them is in believing that 1) the polls are a crock; and 2) the GOP GOTV machine will carry them through to victory.

I have no doubt the polls are skewed toward Democrats; in some cases badly. But polls are scientific endeavors and to dismiss their findings so cavalierly flies in the face of rationality. Many of the concerns expressed by Dean in his article are addressed in the statistical model used by the pollster. That’s why polls are much, much more than simply counting noses.

As for the GOP’s GOTV edge, this excellent article in The Hill magazine shows why Republicans who are hanging their hopes on turnout may end up being hugely disappointed:

How likely is a 20 percent increase in turnout based on a GOTV effort? The best serious academic estimate is that all the GOTV work in the presidential campaign of 2004 increased turnout not by 20 percent, but by about 3 percent.

Experiments on turnout by Alan Gerber and Donald Green suggest that the most effective means of increasing turnout raise it by less than 10 percent — and that’s for people who get canvassed in person. None of this is to suggest that GOTV efforts are not valuable. When 2000 or 200 votes decide an election there is no question that GOTV efforts can make all the difference in the world. But again, that is simply not the case that is being argued by GOP operatives.

Can’t micro-targeting help them achieve spectacular successes? Anyone who has ever modeled data knows there is much more salesmanship than science in Republican claims about these efforts. Our firm and others on the Democratic side have been using these models for half a dozen years or more and we know they can make our efforts much more efficient; expand our GOTV and persuasion universes; and provide message guidance. So when races are otherwise marginal, the lift models provide can make all the difference between winning and losing. But no model is going to turn what would otherwise be a 5-point loss into a victory.

There are about 20 Republican incumbents or open Republican held seats where candidates are losing by 5 points or more according to RealClear Politics. Blumenthal’s Pollster.Com has even more GOP seats at risk. If, as Mellman suggests in the article, GOTV efforts will only affect many of these races at the margins, it seems virtually certain that the combination of scandal and voter dissatisfaction will mean a Democratic takeover the House.

My own estimate (more on my methodology on Monday) is that the GOP will lose between 18-23 seats. The low end of that estimate is if the GOP can pull out some tough races here in the Midwest, specifically in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. But no amount of enthusiasm will help the GOP in the wild blue states of the northeast. In fact, New York and Connecticut are shaping up to be GOP disaster areas on Tuesday night with Pennsyvania not far behind. It’s hard to see how GOTV efforts will have much of an effect in many of those races.

So I would say to Dean, Hugh, and the rest of you who have been so up-beat and enthusiastic, no matter what happens on Tuesday, your attitude will almost certainly mean that the GOP wil retake the House in 2008 - all things considered. By then the American people will have tired of the never ending witch hunts carried out by Democrats in Congress against a Republican Administration and perhaps, a chastened and reformed GOP will give the voters a reason to trust them again.

UPDATE

Don’t miss AJ Strata’s superior piece on the elections. Nice round up and some good points about predictions.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for wishful thinking, I have no doubt the New York Times would win hands down.

Here we are 3 days before the election and, right on cue, the Times pulls a journalistic stunt that, if we didn’t know how partisan and biased they truly are, would be remarkable for its blatant attempt to plant a horrifically negative spin on one of the Republican’s only major pluses going into Tuesday’s vote; the relative economic health of the country.

First, the set up. In a front page story, the Times reveals that many Republicans are running on the economic record for the last 6 years and are buoyed by the Labor Department’s report of a significant drop in the unemployment rate:

Republicans seized on a drop in the unemployment rate to assert on Friday that tax cuts were invigorating the economy, highlighting just four days before the election an issue that party strategists are counting on to offset bad news about the war.

The Labor Department announced Friday morning that the unemployment rate had fallen to 4.4 percent in October — down from 4.6 percent in September and the lowest rate since May 2001, when it was 4.3 percent.

Within hours, President Bush mocked Democrats for predicting that the administration’s tax and spending policies would wreck the economy.

In fact, by most indices, the Bush economy is at least as good as the Clinton economy from 1998 during that off year election. Unemployment, income, GDP growth, and other broad markers are as good or better than when the Times and other media were talking about the Clinton “miracle” economy. That’s not to say that there aren’t enormous problems, largely created by Republicans, that we must address down the road. But the current state of the economy is, in fact, fairly good.

But never let it be said that the New York Times let any positive news for Republicans be allowed to speak for itself. In an almost comical juxtaposition, the Times’ editors run an editorial that cuts the legs out from underneath any salutary news about unemployment by telling us that layoffs are coming - you just wait:

The latest information about the economy leaves no question that it has slowed down by just about every measure — housing and manufacturing, retail sales and job growth, and others.

Even the recent increase in compensation is generally believed to be a sign of coming layoffs, not a harbinger of wage inflation. When business dries up at firms and factories, employers don’t cut back immediately. So for a time, pay and benefits hang in there. As for the recent improvement in the unemployment rate, sorry to say, it’s an aberration. The job market won’t turn up in any meaningful way when the overall direction of the economy is down.

In fact, the “overall direction of the economy” is still going up although at a slower rate than the frenetic pace of the previous 2 1/2 years when the Times never missed a chance to, well, miss a chance to prominently report the fantastic rates of GDP growth (never in the news section; always in the business section).

To the editors, it’s not a question of if but when the slowdown will occur and whether it will be a recession or not:

All of this information has fed the debate on the dominant economic question of the day: Is the United States economy headed toward the longed-for soft landing, in which it cools without contracting. Or is another recession inevitable? It’s an interesting question, but in many ways it also is a diversion.

Most Americans are ill prepared for an economic deceleration, even if it ends in a soft landing. When economic basics like income and insurance coverage are taken into account, most working families are no better off now than they were when the economic expansion began in late 2001.

Some Americans are always unprepared for bad times. Those that live on borrowed money end up paying for it when the economy goes south. The fact that people borrow against the future should not surprise us. The government has been doing it for more than 6 years and when that bill comes due, true economic pain will be involved.

The Republicans and Bush have done more damage to the long term economic prospects of the United States than any two Administrations before them. The debt burden, extending out as far as they eye can see, is almost unbelievable. This AP piece on our economic future is one of the more frightening things I’ve read in quite awhile.

Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That’s almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.

A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.

And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

People who remember Ross Perot’s rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn’t grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.

But that’s about to change, thanks to the country’s three big entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.

My beef with the Times isn’t that the Republicans haven’t been lousy stewards of the economy per se. It’s the rank partisanship they exhibit with a regularity that makes them poster boys for Metamucil. For such an established and respected name in journalism, they have demonstrated that they are little better than shills for the Democratic party - and bad ones at that. At least a shill will make an effort to hide their partisanship. The Times doesn’t even bother anymore.

As for the future, taxes will have to be raised. Spending will have to be cut. And somewhere, somehow, we have to find the money to keep fighting an enemy that wishes to destroy us. Will we be forced by economic circumstance to curtail our efforts in the War on Terror? I don’t think so. But we are almost certainly going to be forced to fight smarter. A smaller armed forces with more emphasis on “asymmetrical warfare” and an even greater reliance on our technological advantages will probably be in the offing.

These problems are not going to solve themselves. It will involve real statesmanship at the top and a cooperation in Congress between the two parties that would almost be unprecedented. And we, the American people, must somehow wean ourselves from dependence on government for some things that today we might find convenient or even helpful.

A tall order all of that. And the hell of it is, there doesn’t seem to be the leadership in Congress now in either party that is good for anything except jostling for power and position.

The levels of irony on display with the “revelation” by the New York Times that some of the Saddam documents dealing with Hussein’s drive for nuclear weapons may constitute a dangerous release of classified info on how to build them is so perfect, so exquisitely delightful that it’s at times like these I wish I was a poet.

Only The Bard himself could do justice to the smorgasbord of delectable incongruities, tasty paradoxes, and bitterly sardonic idiocies that the New York Times, the left, our intelligence agencies, and yes - even those of us who pined for the release of this historic treasure trove of data have ultimately fallen into.

The New York Times, a news organ that has on many occasions revealed the existence of some of the most classified intelligence programs the government uses to protect American citizens, in violation of the law, of common sense, and (my own opinion) of their patriotic duty during a time of war, now implicitly criticizes the Bush Administration for (wait for it)…releasing classified information!

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Michelle Malkin:

“The NYTimes blabbermouths are accusing the Bush administration of being careless with national security data?

Ouch. Stop. Sides. Splitting.

There really isn’t anything else one can say. Words are inadequate to the task of describing the poetic blindness evinced by The Times as they blithely empty the remaining arrows from their quiver of political barbs flung toward Bush and the Republicans in the lead up to Tuesday’s election. But to prove my point about this particular story being full of a particularly tasty brand of ironic disposition, in the process of trying to hurt the Republicans, they actually make their case about Saddam’s pre-war ties to terrorists for them.

Ed Morrissey:

This is apparently the Times’ November surprise, but it’s a surprising one indeed. The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq’s ties to Osama bin Laden.

Ed points to this excerpt that seems to explode a few cherished myths of the left about how close Saddam was to building an atomic bomb:

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.

The New York Times - A Shill for Republicans? Who woulda thunkit?

Speaking of the left, it’s not surprising that they obediently took up the cudgel handed them by The Times to immediately bash Bush, the GOP Congress, and most notably, those of us who agitated for the release of the Saddam documents in the first place. Alas, in this season of ironic transposition and in their gleeful haste to score political points, they neglected to recall their previous position regarding the relative danger of Iran.

Even if some of the documents revealed secrets that might be helpful to a country’s nuclear program, how could it help a country like Iran who, according to legions of lefties, was not interested in building a bomb and was no threat to the United States in the first place?

To avoid this logical fallacy, the left does as it always does; they ignore the reality of any previous position they’ve taken and substitute an alternative narrative that begins, for all practical purposes, in medias res:

John Avarosis:

I’ve got a question for every Republican member of Congress on the campaign trail. Were you involved in this plan to propagandize to the American people that was so shoddy, so forced, so haphazardly thrown together that you gave al Qaeda and every other bad guy the plans for how to nuke New York?

Of course, we won’t ever have any hearings on this issue, or find out what went wrong, because the Republicans control Congress and they don’t hold the Bush administration accountable. They simply pressure Bush to literally hand Al Qaeda and Iran the plans for making a nuclear bomb.

Forgoing irony for the moment to highlight ignorance, here’s an expert’s opinion of whether or not al-Qaeda could use the information from the leaked web pages to build a bomb:

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues said the documents showed “where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures.” The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official, who requested anonymity because of his agency’s rules against public comment, called the papers “a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car.”

I would suggest Mr. Aravosis stick with outing gays, which is something his personality and intelligence is perfectly suited - that of a grub crawling out from under a rock to “out” the slug as a multi-sexual mollusk. His powers of analysis - as in warning of an imminent attack by Evil George on Iran before the election next Tuesday - leave much to be desired.

For true irony (rather than blatant stupidity) Booman fills the bill nicely:

[T]he Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has completely f*cked up. You see, Peter Hoekstra just couldn’t believe Saddam Hussein has no WMD and thus posed no threat to the U.S. or his neighbors. So he threw a tantrum and insisted that our intelligence agencies put all the documents we seized in Iraq on the Internet where citizen wingnuts, fluent in Arabic, could discover evidence that our trained professional had missed. How did that work out?

[snip]

Hoekstra is supposed to be safe, but he is a total idiot that has endangered the safety of all 300 million Americans. There is no way he should be able to survive this, but Kotos doesn’t have much time to get the message out. Give him ten bucks so he can run some quick radio ads and maybe we’ll get a real progressive in a comservative (sic) western Michigan seat.

Leaving aside the laughably amateurish notion that a Dennis Kucinich liberal would have a ghost of a chance to win even if Hoekstra were to keel over and die, note first the title of Mr. Booman’s piece; “Peter Hoekstra Handed Our Enemies the Bomb.”

When has anyone on the left referred to any nation in the world as “our enemy” recently? Certainly not the Yankee Doodle minutemen killing our soldiers in Iraq. Those cuddly mullahs in Iran? The Laughing Goat in Venezuela? The inscrutable Mr. Kim in North Korea?

For the life of me, I can’t recall “enemy” being used by the left in any other context except when referring to the President of the United States. It would be delicious irony indeed if, in their haste to skewer Republicans over this story that the left discovered there are, in fact, nations who wish us ill and would destroy us if they could.

But I expect this eye-opening experience for the left to be a short lived fad - sort of like Hula Hoops or Davey Crockett hats but without the enormous collectible value attached. Once ensconced comfortably in power, the left will return to the moral blindness and suicidal ignorance about our enemies that has been their hallmark since 9/11.

In the end, I can’t let this ironic digression from the real world of a vitally important election go without reference to my own part and the part played by many conservatives in this Shakespearean interlude. We asked for it and we got it. And yes, as Ed Morrissey points out, many documents have surfaced (unreported by the Times and other mainstream news outlets) that prove if not conclusively than certainly circumstantially that Saddam Hussien had ties to terrorists and terrorist organizations - even al-Qaeda - that went far beyond what our intelligence agencies were telling the executive branch or the American people prior to the war.

But in our haste to discover the truth and in the Administration’s zeal to participate in this experimental program of unprecedented citizen-government cooperation, some respected experts believe we have damaged our own cause and given valuable information to those who wish to destroy us. This is perhaps the greatest and least palatable irony of all.

And in the increasingly dangerous world in which we live that will soon require decisions of monumental historical import regarding war and peace, the only laughter we may hear will be the bitter cackling of the Angel of Death, circling above bleached bones and rubble - remnants of a war that irony forgot.

Here we are 5 days before the election and some of my fellow conservatives still seem to think it’s Halloween. On more than one conservative site today I’ve read what will happen if the Democrats take over Congress next Tuesday, an event that judging by the blood curdling horror stories being told around GOP campfires, will be a cross between a Freddy Krueger nightmare and Michael Meyers gore splattering killing spree.

C’mon people! Get a grip! How bad can it really get?

Impeachment? Hey, who knows? We may come to like it. Sure would be a hedge against writers block anyway. And just imagine all the chances to fisk columnists, lefty bloggers, inane lefty twits, conspiracy loons, and the rest of the liberal cuckoos who will be controlling the government by the time its all over. You don’t think they wouldn’t impeach both Bush and Cheney now, do you? After all, if you think it’s easy to sit back now and pontificate how noble you are for staying home on election day and “teaching the Republicans a lesson,” think how much fun it will be to write about the decapitation of the United States government! Now that’s history. Always gives us a feeling of importance when we write about the great events that change the world.

I can just imagine the White House bathroom jokes about President Pelosi. They’ll be all the rage this time next year.

Tax increases? Who needs money? My own personal belief is that money is the root of all evil and the less of it we have the better off we’ll be. Think of all the problems in society that could be solved if we had less money to spend. There would be less obesity because we’d have fewer dollars to waste on snack food - if potato chips are still legal anyway once the liberal nannies get through with picking through our national grocery basket to make sure we’re all eating right.

And less money would mean fewer movies to see at the theater or rent at the video store. This would have an enormously salutary effect on Hollywood as we may finally get rid of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, and a few other deadbeat celebrities who would probably move out of the United States anyway to dodge the hefty tax increases their liberal friends in Congress would impose on their gigantic, overbloated incomes. If Bono can do it, anyone should be able to.

Don’t forget what having less disposable income would mean to Wal-Mart. Sales of that giant, union busting, small business devouring, employee health care denying monstrosity would plummet, its profits dropping like a brick falling from one of the few houses still being built under liberal Democratic stewardship of the economy.

As for the “War on Terror,” at least we’ll finally be able to drop the quotation marks that are placed around the term every time it appears in print. Now don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean that liberals are actually going to do something about terrorism, per se. We’ll see a lot more attention paid to Muslim “grievances” that’s for sure - like their grievance against our having life and breath on this planet.

But with liberals in charge, I’m sure we’ll start addressing those “root causes” of terrorism right quick. Poverty in the Middle East? Maybe we could come up with some kind of “Marshall Plan” for all those countries so fat and bloated with petro-dollars that their corrupt, kleptocratic royal families can’t spend it fast enough on drugs, white slaves, and other debauched extravagances. We shouldn’t ask them to spend their own money to pull their people out of poverty - not when the left is so desperate to spend our money on their behalf.

Oh…and a short note to Israel. Duck.

Of course, we’ll have to leave Iraq but Bush was ready to leave anyway so there won’t be such a big difference there - except I can’t wait to see the liberals dancing in the streets with the jihadis as the last American helicopter takes off from the multi-billion dollar unfinished American embassy and the left’s wet dream of reliving their glory days of Viet Nam comes true. That’s what it’s been about all along - recapturing the glory of youth in the protest era when sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll was more than just an advertising slogan for hedonism. Yes the sex is a little harder at our age and the drug we use is more likely to be Viagra than LSD (although there’s a combination I’m dying to try). But rock ‘n roll will always be rock ‘n roll - even if the arthritis in our knees keeps us from dancing quite the way we did the last time liberalism reigned supreme and it was cool to be anti-American.