Happy Birthday

Harry Tyson Moore
Novermber 18, 1905--December 25, 1951

Moore, a school teacher, founded the NAACP branch in Brevard County and later ran the state organization for Florida. (Both he and his wife Harriette were blacklisted from their teaching jobs for their efforts.) In 1949 Moore had protested the beating of the Groveland Four after they were jailed (that is, of the three who were jailed, as the fourth was shot while "resisting arrest"). In 1951 Moore called for the indictment and suspension of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who shot two of the three while they were shackled and in his custody. Six weeks later, on Christmas Day, the Moores were blown up in their home. Harry died almost immediately; Harriette survived for nine days. Christmas day was also their 25th wedding anniversary.

It's almost superfluous to mention that no one was ever convicted of the crime, which was part of a wave of bombing terror directed at African-Americans across the South in 1951-52.

So tell us, Mr. Goldberg, and honestly, if that's possible: ever hear of the Moores before? Ever hear of the Groveland Four? Care to explain to us who's been blown to bits over affirmative action, or what act of reverse discrimination stands with this single example among thousands of the organized and legalized terror campaign that enforced genuine racism, you pathetic twit?

Spot the Fake Headline

#1 Publisher Calls Book a Confession by O. J. Simpson

#2 Riley Calls Judith Regan 'The O.J. of Literacy'

Republican Humor: Sometimes It's Five Years Between Set-Up And Punchline, Sometimes It's Only A Matter Of Weeks.

Five years:

Nuclear Deal With India Wins Senate Backing

By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 — The Senate gave overwhelming approval late Thursday to President Bush’s deal for nuclear cooperation with India , a vote expressing that a goal of nurturing India as an ally outweighed concerns over the risks of spreading nuclear skills and bomb-making materials.

By a vote of 85 to 12, senators agreed to a program that would allow the United States to send nuclear fuel and technology to India, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The agreement, negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India in March, calls for the United States to end a long moratorium on sales of nuclear fuel and reactor components. For its part, India would divide its reactor facilities into civilian and military nuclear programs, with civilian facilities open to international inspections.

So, public notice of our payoff to India for sitting quietly while we played footsie with Musharraf, resulting in the capture of bin Laden and the eradication of the Taliban, finally arrives. And now the world's number one mutual nuclear threat is about to become seriously unbalanced courtesy of the US of A. I know, the other night on the Daily Show Ted Koppel was hammering George W. (Too Little--I believe you know Too Late?), but he was there promoting his new Discovery special, "Iran--The Most Dangerous Nation". Can't wait for the follow up, "Drew Bledsoe--The NFL's Most Respected Passer".

Aw, well, now that we've shattered our commitment to non-proliferation I suppose we can just even things up with Pakistan before long. No downside there.

Matter of Weeks:

Senator Richard G. Lugar , the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, hailed the measure’s passage as “one more important step toward a vibrant and exciting relationship between our two great democracies.”

His endorsement was significant, coming from a senator respected for efforts in nonproliferation and whose name is part of a sweeping program to secure nuclear bomb-making materials in the former Soviet Union. He also expressed “thanks for a truly bipartisan effort” to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat set to become Foreign Relations chairman in the new Congress.

Oh yeah, the significant participation of Dick "Foreign Affairs" Lugar. Just like when he wrote that letter before the Iraq war warning about being too hasty, then voted for the Resolution like he was told. That's an endorsement that should make all of us rest easier.

Lugar just won reelection for his forty-seventh term in the Senate; Democrats didn't even nominate anyone to run against him. His campaign ads--I'm not making this up--featured little vidclips of his involvement in securing the former Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

Erratum

Thanks to Olbermann, where they have Lexis/Nexis, we learned last evening that the hallucinatory portion of Rich Lowry's piece (see yesterday) was self-administered: the part about 55% of the public supporting troop increases in Iraq according to a Times poll, seems to have, uh, misstated the poll result. Sixteen percent supported increasing troop numbers in Iraq. That 55% was the number who said they'd support increasing troop numbers "if that could be shown to get the situation in Baghdad under control". Or something like that; I wasn't taking notes. Say this for the NRO gang: they never let you down. If you think about it, it's really too bad you'll never share a foxhole with any of them.

"Dems Use Embryonic Stem-Cells To Reanimate Neville Chamberlain; Will Serve as Hilary's Secretary of Defense"

I was already running late yesterday afternoon when I sat down at my keyboard, letting myself air dry for a few minutes--it was one of those events that required a second, midday shower, and no, "meeting a hooker" is not it--and I dialed up Roy, where I tried to leave a quick comment, and something was fucking it up, and while I waited I started clicking on links within links, and pretty soon I'm not only thoroughly dry but even more late, and my comment never did show up. But I did wind up reading this refreshing new take:

In 1968, the Tet Offensive led many in the media to believe that the war in Vietnam was failing. The most famous pronouncement was Walter Cronkite's declaration that the war was a stalemate. Lost in the media defeatism was the fact that American and South Vietnamese troops won the battle, and had delivered a crippling blow to the Viet Cong.

This is subjective, but it seems to me that the rewriting of the history of the Vietnam War has come in two stages, or maybe that's spasms, roughly corresponding to the Reagan and Bush II eras. In the former the jumpy, psycho, drug-addled Vietnam vet of the 60s and 70s became the poor, spat-upon, loner hero, the decent American guy with the bad memories of a bad war buried just below the surface, occasionally breaking through in a sweat-soaked dream sequence for Magnum, P.I. or Airwolf.

It's not as if one never heard the "Uncle Walter and his Lyin' Band of Librul Traitors" refrain in those days, but the debate was among people who'd lived through it. And while the results of Tet (the ultimate repulse and destruction of the so-called Viet Cong as a cohesive force) were freely acknowledged, it's really with this second wave, the arguments made by or for a group whose only experience of Vietnam lies in growing up with the historical revisionism going on and Chuck Norris rewinning the war that Tet has become a major operational victory traitorously sold to an unsuspecting public as a defeat. As so often these days we're forced to decide whether this represents a calculated lie or a prolonged, public case of mental illness; it is simply not possible that anyone even moderately versed in military history mistakes tactical success for automatic, capital-V Victory.

In 1968, the Tet Offensive led many in the media to believe that the war in Vietnam was failing. Well, no. By 1968 most honest observers had already concluded that. It's probably more accurate to say that after Tet we could establish that--as in Iraq forty years later--there was a significant segment of the population which would simply deny things ever could go poorly where the US military was involved. And so that segment would begin casting around for a scapegoat, and that they'd find one so much to their liking in "the media" they'd freeze-dry it and keep it on hand, apparently forever. The story of US involvement in Vietnam is the story of a war that was failing from day one. Johnson understood this pretty much all along. Sheesh, the Secretary of Freakin' Defense was publicly at odds with our strategy in Vietnam as early as 1966. No one who'd been paying attention needed Walter Cronkite to explain what a mess Vietnam was by 1968.

Anyone who'd been listening intently had been hearing we were about to turn the corner since 1962, at which time "the end is six months away" became a semi-annual announcement; I was pretty young, but I think you could buy greeting cards. By 1965 this was no longer tenable, and Westmoreland issued a three-year plan which was supposed to have Hanoi ready for surrender by '67, or face an all-out twelve-to-eighteen month final push if they didn't. This as US troop involvement rose from the 16,000 who were supposed to have won the war in 1964, to the half-million in theatre at the time of Tet--with Westmoreland's request for an additional 200,000 sitting on Johnson's desk. Congressional hawks like Mendel Rivers and Scoop Jackson were leaving the reservation. Small wonder that the public--and perhaps some in The Media as well--which had been fed a steady diet of body counts and an enemy on his last legs viewed a sudden series of mass offensives aimed at large cities as something less than a stirring victory for our side and something more like, well, like stalemate.

We'll leave alone the idea that crippling the "Viet Cong" meant much in the overall conduct of the war. Anybody watching Iraq, which had not been at war for fifteen years before we jumped in, knows it's fairly easy to generate an insurgency against a foreign occupier. The PAVN was still there, still pretty well equipped, still tenacious, as we'd continue to see.

The real story here is not that people lie or fantasize about Vietnam a generation later. It's that this leftover notion of WWII glory, that creating a killing machine and turning it loose in enemy territory leads to automatic victory, provided no teleprompter reader ever says anything negative about the effort, apparently will never die. Just as its proponents apparently will never learn.

Stranger Things Have Happened

Rich Lowry, "The myths of '06", Townhall, November 15

Elections produce two things -- new elected officials and bogus conventional wisdom. Once they gain widespread circulation, erroneous beliefs about elections are difficult to reverse and can be nearly as important as who won or lost.

Okay, so right away you may be thinking what I was thinking, and I think we're both blameless. It's Rich Lowry, whose official title (I think; I didn't bother to look it up) is Some Guy at What's Left of the National Review. So we're both thinking, "Twenty-five years, not one but two "Republican Revolutions" which have produced several landfillsworth of hype and no legislation whatever that means anything, does anything, or accomplishes anything, and we're about to hear how Democrats really didn't win." But Rich is full of surprises here, perhaps befitting his position as America's Oldest Political Wunderkind.

Here are seven myths rapidly gaining acceptance among conservatives, liberals or both:

--Republican losses were in keeping with typical setbacks for a party holding the White House in the sixth year of a presidency. Conservatives reassure themselves that the "six-year itch" has cost the party in power roughly 30 seats on average since World War II, so this year's losses aren't remarkable. But as liberal blogger Kevin Drum points out, most of the big "itches" came prior to the past 20 years when gerrymandering got more sophisticated. Reagan lost only five seats in his sixth year, and Clinton gained five (although he had already suffered a wipeout in 1994). For Democrats to win 29 seats despite all the advantages of incumbency enjoyed by the GOP is a big deal.

Okay.

--The conservative base, discouraged by the GOP's doctrinal impurity, didn't show up at the polls. This is the bedtime story conservatives are telling themselves to show that whatever ails the party will be cured simply by becoming more conservative. In 2004, however, conservatives were 34 percent of the electorate and liberals 21 percent. In 2006, the numbers were almost indistinguishable -- conservatives were 32 percent of the electorate and liberals 20 percent. The GOP didn't lose the election with its base, but with independents, who broke against them 57 percent to 39 percent.

Um, all right. I think we need to take that whole self-identification bit with a shaker of salt, since our elections have been close to 50/50 for some time, but, okay.

--Republicans lost because they weren't fiscally conservative enough. Another conservative illusion. A thought experiment: Which cuts in government would have, in and of themselves, increased the party's popularity?

Now, this is sorta the neck hair of your agenda peeking out over the Oxford collar of analysis, Rich. I heard plenty of complaints that Republicans weren't conservative enough, but I haven't really heard it limited to their fiscal conservatism, just their reckless spending. Which is really not a conservative issue at all, except for those of you who take "conservative" to mean "Double Super Plus Good With Chocolate Syrup", where I take it to mean "conservative", or at least it used to mean that. However, your response is acceptable, writ large: there wasn't much more fiscal conservatism to be had out there and still pay for all those wars we're winning.

--The GOP was too socially conservative for voters. This chestnut is trotted out every time Republicans lose an election. This time it is even less plausible than usual. Seven out of eight constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed this year, often outperforming Republican candidates. That Democrats went out of their way not to antagonize social-conservative voters this year was one of the keys to their success.

South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Idaho and South Dakota. Really, that's something less than a convincing cross-section of the country, and gay marriage bans have been notoriously easy to pass. You add the homophobe vote to the This Is My Side of the Culture War vote, and throw in the general hesitation to vote for sweeping changes in the legal landscape and you're home free. Equating that with "social conservatism" is an exaggeration. The Republican party is Jes' Right for the social "conservative" end of the political spectrum, but they're much to the right of most folks here in the Heartland. Come visit, sometime, Rich. Might learn something.

--The election was a great victory for conservative and moderate Democrats. If Democratic leaders gave their candidates leeway to take socially conservative positions, this year's new crop of Democrats still isn't a departure from the party's overwhelming liberalism. A few attention-grabbing, successful Democratic House candidates, Health Shuler of North Carolina and Brad Ellsworth of Indiana, are truly conservative. But only about five of the 29 Democratic winners in the House can be considered social conservatives. They will be lonely.

Correct as to the numbers. But I suggest that the social conservatives will feel all warm an' welcomed. You don't have to support draconian, hate-filled, intolerant legislation just because you're socially conservative. As opposed to being socially "conservative".

--The election was a decisive ideological rejection of conservatism. Liberal opinion writers love this one.

Bzzzzttt! I suppose we should have expected this, but could you possibly name one? Who said it was a decisive ideological rejection of conservatism? And so far as you know, did he eat all the mushrooms, or are there still some left?

--President Bush now must give up on the Iraq War. The rebuke to Bush was unquestionably an expression of voters' frustration with the progress of the war, but they are not ready to give up yet. According to pollster Whit Ayers, less than one-third of voters favor withdrawal. A late-October New York Times poll found that 55 percent of the public favors sending more troops to Iraq, a position now endorsed by the paper's liberal editorial board. Bush still has a window to take decisive action to reverse the downward slide in Iraq.

Ah, well, back to full-bore hallucination at last. I'm glad he saved that for the end. Still, at least partial credit on five of seven, which is pretty damned impressive.

I Too Have A Dream

Kathy inadvertently reminds me to share my mall story with the unsuspecting.

I had to go to the Don't Miss The Fact That We're The Upscale Mall two nights ago (I'm embarrassed to admit it's just five minutes away) because Williams-Sonoma is the only place that sells canel knives. A canel knife is a zester with a single slot about the size of the sharpened end of a pencil, and you can use it to make long strips of citrus or to turn lemons and oranges into festive, edible barber-pole-looking deals. Pretty cool, and I'm always losing mine, and I need one for the holidays. So off I go, and the friggin' place is crowded, which, among the Quality, does not mean you're in danger of actually rubbing elbows with anyone. It just means there's no parking.

So I had to park way the hell away from the place, which was no real problem, but because I had to enter through an unaccustomed door I got thoroughly lost and had to wander around for ten minutes. (I don't go there often, reader, and I generally head straight for one of three stores which are all in the same general vicinity.) The goddam place covers four city blocks and it's connected in the middle by a crosswalk, and I had to find my way over that before I could get my bearings.

Anyway, the place is pumping something like eight different varieties of cheap cologne through the ventilation system, either simultaneously or on a region by region basis which amounts to the same thing. I finally stopped off and asked the concierge--yes, they have a concierge!--if they had any complimentary oxygen available. While I was at it I was gonna ask her if she'd be good enough to ring the footman and have him bring the cabriolet around to the nearest exit, but I figured that would have been lost on her, plus I honestly didn't know how much breathable air I had left.

The other thing about Snootland Mall is that the way to two of those three stores I patronize on occasion is blocked by the massive viral infection of an Abercrombie & Fitch, and if you've ever owned property in a neighborhood where one house was owned by toothless inbreds, and watched your resale value plummet on a monthly basis as more automotive parts found their permanent resting place in the front yard you have some idea how I feel every time I try to pass the place with my good humor intact. At some point they decided to light the place solely with the power indicator lights of the cash registers, and they replaced the 100 decibel crap-rock soundtrack with 110 decibel Eurotrash disco. This time through I found the windows had all been covered by enormous flat-black louvres originally designed as props for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and the single opening to the store buffered by a six-foot Wall Street Journal gravure print of a topless ambisexual young man lit by a couple of appliance bulbs, which made it stand out like a beacon by comparison. No merchandise whatsoever visible from the outside of the store. How hip. How inside. Just you, and I, and fifty million other Americans are in on the secret merchandise A&F has for us, back there in the Dark.

So now I'm not just nauseated by the fumes and deafened by some German woman with a two-note vocal range telling me she wants me, or vants me, I've got transient global cultural vertigo as well, and I'm gonna have to pass back by that way if I ever hope to find my way out again.

I think it must have come to me in the restive sleep that followed, but it took until this morning for the plan to crystalize. I'm gonna gain about 80 pounds, like DeNiro in Raging Bull, pull on some really tight clothing, unbuttoned to the navel, a bad toupee, and some earplugs, and yell, "Do you have this in XXXXL?" and "Wow, could you tell me who's singing this? I really like it!" at all the clerks until they quit en masse. Which, by my calculations, should take about ten minutes.

Though Based On Real Events, The Following Column Is Purely Fictional

John M. Broder, "In Call for More Troops, McCain Places His Bet on Iraq", New York Times November 14

Senator John McCain is accustomed to staking out a lonely piece of ground, but on Iraq he is virtually an army of one. Nearly alone among major political figures in calling for an increase in American forces in Iraq, Mr. McCain is either taking a principled stand or a huge political gamble. Or both.

One: so what do you suppose it would take to eradicate--hell, to dent--the cherished notion of "Maverick" McCain? He's got an 83% lifetime rating from the ACU. Remind me: what, exactly, was the last limb he crawled out onto? Campaign finance reform? Pfui. Might have made him unpopular with some of the guys in the cloakroom. Talking political financial reform is not exactly going to have you ducking rotten vegetables on the campaign trail. Where, besides in the slack-jawed admiration of PR verities in the Times coverage, is it that John McCain is a maverick?

Two: principled stand or huge political gamble, or both? Oddly enough, we can answer that, provided we're willing to do a little reporting. The answer is: neither. It's a calculated bit of pandering to the GOP base that began about a year and a half ago with his call for an additional 10,000 troops, now bumped to 20,000. Neither number would change things in Iraq, but both have the benefit of being small enough that McCain can trot the numbers out while insisting no conscription program would be needed to achieve them. 10-20,000 troops sound like a drop in the bucket to a public which hasn't been paying attention and hasn't had anyone explain to it that those troops are simply not there, that we have worn out the Army's manpower and matériel equations. The public can be excused for not understanding that. New York Times political reporters, not so much. Second-ranking majority members on the Senate Armed Services Committee? Lying. See how easy that was?

The alternative, he said, is humiliation for the United States and disaster for Iraq.

“We’re paying a price for the failure of our policy in the past,” Mr. McCain said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, “and the question, then, before the American people is, are we ready to quit? And I believe the consequences of failure are chaos in the region, which will spread.”

Oh, jeez, I hadn't thought of that. There might be chaos in the region.

So who got us there, if not John McCain? Who thought nothing about the consequences of failure beforehand?

Let's ask the question the Timesmen are too proper to ask, namely: Th' fuck? Are we supposed to believe that the Republican leadership, its most senior and respected military affairs experts, never even considered the possibility things might go other than perfectly? It's one thing to claim, however accurately, that you and the whole world believed Saddam Hussein possessed a powerful Note Somewhere on Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Event Planning Occurance. It's another to suggest that justified losing your fucking mind. How could it have not occurred to you that Americans would still be in harm's way four years later, no matter how well things went? How could it escape your field of vision that the population, and the troops, would beign to tire of losing people for longer than it took to win World War II?

Talk about humiliating.

Y'know, Senator, it's not like we just stepped off the path for one second and found ourselves in a morass. There were signs all along the way, beginning with the screw-up with Turkey before the war--avoidable, reversible, and the product of hubris alone. There was the week or more the Brits took to secure Basra, the supposed center of anti-Baathist sentiment. They were supposed to be fighting off truckloads of flowers, not an ad hoc militia, remember? Then the looting and chaos. It didn't take a genius to figure out what was going on, and it shouldn't have taken the five or six months before we started losing two or three soldiers a day before the straight-shootin' experts called for correction, certainly not until after the 2004 election was over. All you had to do was stand up on one of your weekly co-hosting gigs on Meet the Press and explained that we needed more troops, and things would have changed. But then, so too would have public perception changed. This is part of the problem, and the chaos, and the humiliation: that so many public people did nothing except look out for their own sinecures, that we dove into this thing with no debate, led by a man with no discernable abilities, cheered by a Free Press which abandoned its responsibilities as ratings anathema. We don't need a rerun of your military acumen, Senator, thanks for asking. But you are in a unique position to help explain why.


You picked the wrong horse, Johnny boy. You hopped into that beaker of warm bathwater, and now you're a boiled frog. (The irony, Mr. Maverick, is that if there's anything left that'll get you that Presidential nomination it's your ability to raise money.) Now, for godssakes, for the sake of what's left of decency and honesty and the young men and women who serve their country, give this bullshit, calculating "program" of yours up before it screws up more lives, reclaim your manhood and whatever you can find of your integrity, and get th' fuck outta the way.

Phony as a Lieberman Concession Speech, and Ten Times More Dangerous than a Lieberman Victory Speech

John "Maverick" McCain, Presidential candidate John McCain, holder of the Barry Goldwater Chair of Undeserved Moderate Reputation, member of the Senate Armed Services Committee--that John McCain--has staked out another claim in "maverick" land, namely, that the solution to the Iraq disaster is to send 20,000 more US troops, a move which, while of questionable value in Iraq, is likely to unleash the awe-inspiring power of the Republican base in time for primary season.

McCain knows as well as anybody that we don't have 20,000 troops to send; he has acknowledged such a move would require expanding our standing army. He has publicly stated his opposition to a draft, and suggested that the solution is to simply explain to the youth of the nation how important it is to enlist in the quagmire John McCain did nothing whatever to prevent when he had the chance.

And John McCain knows that even if the Democracy Fairy put 100,000 eager young men and women on the recruiting office doorstep this very night, it would be eighteen months before they'd be trained, assuming we could find enough trainers, and god knows where the money is coming from to equip them. John McCain knows this. And he knows their sacrifice would be utterly useless.

What many of them do not know is that they are being asked for that sacrifice to save, not the Planet, not the Middle East, not a chance for Global Peace, World-Wide Democracy, or Marshmallow Hearts, Moons, Stars, and Clover, but to save the ass of John McCain and all the other responsible elected officials who still have a hold on the public teat. That McCain held that position before the election is merely evidence that his reputation as something other than a scheming politician is a large fiction; that he holds it today, after the defeat of his party, is an affront.

It's not just about promoting delusional and dangerous positions to curry favor with a needed voting bloc. It's about the fact that the people telling the truth about Iraq (notably the maligned John Murtha) are not capable of calling him on this bullshit because to do so would threaten national security in a way that debating our proper passage out of this mess would not. Open discussion of the deplorable state of our military is unthinkable; as such, vote pandering which takes advantage of that fact trades temporal advantage for continued trivialization of our most serious problem. McCain has chosen to work the issue for personal gain, and that ought to be common. knowledge.

Happy Birthday

Mort Shuman
November 12, 1936--November 2, 1991

Happy Birthday

Daisy Lee Gaston Bates
November 11, 1914--November 4, 1999

Load, Meet Pants

Jonah: "Blame the Politicians, Not the Ideology," Wherever, Nov. 9

Through its own crapulence, jobbery, and malfeasance, the Grand Old Party lost the House of Representatives, the jewel of the Republican revolution, the engine of conservative policy reform and home to the much-maligned freedom fries.

Okay, I'm a fair man. The freedom fries line is pretty good. Assuming he meant it as a joke, which I'm not 100% convinced of.

But the rest is even funnier: "engine of conservative policy reform"?? That amounts to (I've been keeping score): tax cuts, tax cuts, more tax cuts, additional tax cuts, supplimental tax cuts, pork, pork, pork, pork rinds, corruption, giveaways, and a biennial flag-burning amendment with no chance of passing. Someone will have to tell me how this constitutes policy reform. Someone other than Jonah, I mean.

Because, as much as I'd love to saddle American "conservatism" with him, Jonah Goldberg is not an ideologue. He's a performing magpie.

It's certainly possible to make his argument. In fact, it's hard to dispute it, seeing as how the electorate understands ideology about as well as it does foreign languages or world history. American elections are the Pepsi challenge, but without the impartial judging. Which means that the "Republican revolution" is as much a crock as any claims of ideological sea-change from the 2006 midterms.

So that's the deal. As of Thursday, January 4, 2007, either acknowledge it's a new day, or stop talking about the Reagan and Gingrich Revolutions, both of which "became a thumbs up or thumbs down on one man", whatever that's supposed to mean.

The GOP once had the reputation of being able to run government like a business and wars like a finely tuned machine.

The locus of this reputation being...where? Between yo' mama's ears?

But under compassionate conservatism, government became a faith-based charity.

"Under compassionate conservatism?" When was that? What the fug is "government became a faith-based charity" supposed to mean?

As for the war(s), the finely tuned machine is now clogged with Iraqi sand. The Democrats think the only solution is to "redeploy" the whole kit and caboodle out of there for repairs. To Bush's credit, he understands that wars, particularly this one, need to be won. But, alas, the Democrats won the argument at the polls.

What the hell am I doing here? Didn't I leave my drink right there a minute ago? Do you think it ever, ever occurs to Jonah just how stupid his arguments would sound even if they were presented by someone halfway intelligent?

Look, there are people in my (default) party who think I and other hippies ruined it by voting for McGovern, and I think they ruined it running and hiding from an imaginary Revolution. That's what losing does to you. But far more cutting has been what winning did to the Republican party which, since making minor gains post-Goldwater in the 1966 midterms has produced two generations that believe they're right 100% of the time, and that any and all objections to their plans are the result of perversity. Their only complaints about Bush over the past two years--until it became increasingly obvious that a major defeat was looming--concerned Harriet Miers and the Dubai port deal, and those were accompanied by howls. Meanwhile, the few Rightists who left the farm on Iraq continued to insist they'd been right all along, merely done in by poor execution.

I think the former is preferable. It may not be the best way to win elections, but wandering in the desert is philosophically a lot more healthy than walking around muttering to yourself. You may manage to put the Raw Meat Coalition back together again, though I doubt it, but if so it will be just to commit the same mistakes all over again until the whole thing's unrecoverable.

For chrissakes, you've got major idiots like Limbaugh and Hewitt claiming, now, that they've been covering up for the GOP for the past few years. The voters dumped the pols for you. It's time for you to dump morons like Rush and Hugh.

Now, let's get back to the important business of pointing fingers and assigning blame.

Let's. Bill Clinton? Is it Bill Clinton?

Conservatives have been sharpening their bayonets for months, waiting to inaugurate the first great intramural bloodletting of the new millennium. Libertarian types think the fault lies in too much social conservatism. Social conservatives see too much worldliness. Both see too much compromise, while moderates, squishes, and other RINOs (Republicans in name only) see too little. Realists and isolationists see too much war. Neoconservatives and other hawks see, if not too little war, certainly too little commitment to do everything it takes to win the ones we're in.

The only explanation for Jonah being able to type that last sentence without his head exploding is, simply, that his head is not involved in the typing process.

Republicans keep insisting there is all this diversity in the party, but if that's so how come Jonah can only really come up with two? Okay, three if you acknowledge there are moderates worthy of the name in the Republican party, and not just some Republicans whose desire to dominate the universe in the name of Exxon Mobil or the Lord Jesus is something less than all consuming. Outside the odd, and suddenly endangered, Northeast Liberal Republican, and the shape-shifting Governor of Califor...excuse me a minute...

WHAT TH' FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE IN CALIFORNIA?

...I'm not sure exactly who's supposed to be representing moderate Republicans, or who qualifies as a RINO, what distinguishes them from moderates, or what sized closet you'd need to house a national squishee convention. I'm sure there are people who vote GOP who fit the bill, and some who blog, but there sure aren't any forming any part of this "debate", which so far seems to involve blaming Democrats.

Of all these arguments, the only two you are likely to hear ad nauseam are: too much social conservatism and too much war.

Why? Because that's the view of the liberal establishment that for 40 years has been arguing that if only conservatives were more liberal they'd be more successful, even as the conservative movement has been the most successful political enterprise of the last half-century.

2006-50=1956. Hmmm. By what measure, other than for whom the greatest number of public airports and unnecessary aircraft carriers have been named, is this true? It's seven or eight Republican presidencies, depending on exactly when you want to start counting, and five Democratic, but if you give 2000 to the man who got the votes it's a dead heat. And Nixon, aside from his paranoid hatred of everyone else on the planet, wouldn't qualify as much more than a RINO these days. It's twelve years of Republican rule in the Congress (oh, sorry, too soon to remind you of that?) but I'd even be willing to grant another ten of effective "conservative" control; still a dead heat. Let's let the "conservatives" break the tie. They've been complaining about how liberal everything is for the past twenty-five years, so I guess "most successful" goes Left.

1956. The second year of the Montgomery bus boycott. The year the last French soldier left Vietnam, and the year the US blocked the Geneva-mandated national elections because our side was going to lose. You couldn't get an abortion even if you were raped, and your husband, even if legally separated from you, could force you to have sexual relations. Loving v. Virginia, which overturned the ban on interracial marriage, was 11 years away. It was not advisable in much of the country to even suggest interracial romance in public. Emmett Till could have explained that to you, but he wasn't talking any more.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, Fanny Hill, and Tropic of Cancer were contraband. The third degree was still practiced in many police stations across the country, and a confession obtained that way could be used against you even if you'd been denied access to a lawyer, or, for that matter, food or sleep. Elvis' hips were subject to blackout. The names of Dalton Trumbo and Albert Maltz had been removed from movies they wrote because they might or might not have had Communist sympathies twenty years earlier and refused to reveal them to Congressional witch hunters. The Senate investigation on the all-important link between comic books and juvenile delinquency had been completed less than a year before. The Tuskegee Experiment was in the 24th year of its 40 year run; this was nine years after penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis. Had you, Jonah Goldberg, attended my public elementary school in those days you would have been required to recite the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the school day.

But then I guess all those changes all small potatoes compared to the reduction of effective tax rates and the insertion of "Under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance, huh? What a half-century it's been. How the hell could voters have failed to realize that?