THIS MODERN WORLD

One thing about realignment elections like the one we had last week is that the “moderates” in the loser party start looking even better to the mainstream. The religious lunatics aren’t likely to be running the GOP asylum for much longer. After all, if their homophobic GOTV strategy didn’t stop the Democratic landslide, we probably can’t write off the Giuliani campaign as doomed to fail in the primary as we once could. McCain’s a phony and Rudy’s a douche, but they’re both working overtime to stick a shiv in the back of the GOP leadership for which they’ve spent their careers being the moderate front-men. As Atrios notes, the media is in love with their carefully manufactured personas and will happily reinforce any “maverick” posturing they use to market themselves. If we don’t take their 2008 campaigns seriously, Rudy & John could benefit from the anti-GOP backlash as much as Dems.

Tierney:

Democrats and Republicans keep making noises about working together to accomplish great things. But that’s not what Americans voted for. They voted for gridlock.

* * *

Whatever they do the next two years, I won’t be here to kick them around. This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. I’m returning full time to the subject and the city closest to my heart: science and New York. I’ll be writing a column and a blog for the Science Times section.

I hate to abandon my libertarian comrades here fighting in the belly of the beast, but this is the right moment to leave. After six years of libertarians reluctantly electing Republicans as the lesser of two evils, we’ve finally had enough. We’ve voted out big-government conservatism, and the result is the happy state of gridlock. For now, our work is done. See you in January in a new column on a new page.

Uh, could someone sit Tierney down and gently explain to him that while libertarians are disproportionately represented online, in reality they represent a miniscule fraction of the voting population and have about as much impact on the outcome of elections as the LaRouchies or the Socialist Workers Party?

Also, how far up your ass does your head have to be to believe that this election was about “gridlock” as opposed to, say, THE IRAQ WAR?

What a moron. Good riddance.

(First paragraph of Tierney column added for clarity.)

Dennis Kucinich says:

KUCINICH: We need to have hearings on Iraq again. We need to go over again why we went there. We need to review the statements and all the errors that were made, and from that we bring the country together to take a new direction. It’s all fact-based. And then we start to heal our nation. But we cannot heal America if we continue with policies that are based on lies. We’ll never be able to bring closure to this Iraq matter unless we tell the truth about what happened. So America needs a new approach of truth and reconciliation. This isn’t a Democratic or Republican matter. This is a matter that relates to the conscience of this country. This is a matter of the heart—the heart of democracy itself. This is a matter of whether we’re going to a sober reflection about the events that have transpired since 9/11, with respect to Iraq. And until we do this, we will be trapped not only physically in Iraq, we’ll be trapped emotionally and spiritually in Iraq. We may never get out of Iraq if we don’t tell the truth.

Read it all.

There is about to be a big fight within the Democratic party about this. Some, like Kucinich, really do want to drag the whole hideous nightmare of how we got into Iraq out into the light. Others either want to let the coverup stand, or don’t understand why it matters. What we should be doing now is generating as much pressure as possible to help those like Kucinich.

Why? From the least abstract reasons to the most:

1. As Kucinich says, the only hope we have for a less-bad outcome in Iraq is if the people responsible are held accountable for their lies.
2. If these people are allowed to continue lying and control the national narrative, the hopes for any further progressive change in America will be dead.
3. If these people aren’t held accountable now, they will be back in 2013 with a scheme to invade the underwater kingdom of Atlantis.
4. The truth is a good thing.

Let’s go.

With the report by the Baker-Hamilton Commission coming out soon, let me just go on record as saying that the newly-emboldened Democrats should treat the whole spectacle like the sham that it’s always been. It’s always been a transparent ploy to push bad news past the election. Now that the election’s over, the Democrats should treat this dirty trick (which, by delaying a change of course in Iraq, has cost dozens of lives) with the contempt it deserves. You don’t need James Baker to tell you that Iraq has been turned into an unwinnable quagmire.

From the outset, this commission has been a variation of the same self-investigation, “punt our problems into the future” trick that the Bush Administration has been pulling since they sailed into office. They doubted global warming for years insisting that it required more study while rejecting the findings of their cherry-picked experts as the work of “bureaucrats”. The denied that Iraq didn’t have WMD’s while tarring the men who came back empty handed from the government-sponsored snipe hunts as appeasers or fools. And now we’ve got an Administration-friendly look into the mess George Bush has made and they expect us to believe this is going to change anything?

Even if the Baker-Hamilton Commission is candid in its assessment of Iraq (I trust Bush family consigliere James Baker to investigate Dubya’s folly about as much as I trust the Republican Party to investigate Mark Foley.), I see three possible reactions from the Bush Administration :

1) They take the findings to heart and use them as political cover to do the right thing and get the hell out of Iraq.

2) Get annoyed that the report threatens to burst the Bush bubble by saying something King George doesn’t like to hear. Give the report kudos in public, but insist that the Iraqi situation is so complicated that it requires further study. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

3) Hold a photo op praising the members of the Baker-Hamilton Commission for their hard work and dedication to their country. Everybody lines up to get their picture taken with the President. In his remarks, the President promises that his administration will “work quickly to look into implementing the commission’s recommendations”. Bush pretends to do make drastic changes, but does nothing.

Of the three, my guess is that (3) is the most likely. After all, that’s how they dealt with the 9/11 Commission and the “McCain” anti-torture legislation. They’ll do their best to make it seem like they’re actually shifting strategy, but it’ll be “stay the course” until Jan. 2009.

UPDATE : John at Americablog has more. According to the Washington Post, James Baker has “been testing the waters for some time to determine how much change in Iraq policy will be tolerated by the White House“. As John says :

Excuse me? So, that means the guy running this panel isn’t going to give his honest advice – he’s only going to give the closest to honest the White House will let him give. That is totally messed up, incredibly dishonest, and it’s the very reason we’re in this predicament to start with. Generals being afraid of giving honest advice, top advisers to Bush being afraid to tell him the truth. It will be a total travesty if Baker only agrees to what the White House is willing to hear, and Lee Hamilton feels obliged to agree to whatever the Republicans want. Then what is the point of this entire exercise?

To provide political cover to the President and the GOP. The Democrats would be fools to treat the Baker-Hamilton Commission seriously.

There’s one thing we know about Doug “Fucking Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth” Feith: he’s not afraid to make stark moral judgments.

For instance, here’s Feith in a 2002 speech:

However much the language of morality elicits sniffs from some of our sophisticated critics abroad and at home, we don’t flinch from using it. Moral clarity is a strategic asset.

Here’s a bit of his 2003 article “Strategy and the Idea of Freedom”:

President Reagan’s talk of democracy and good-versus-evil and his exhortation to tear down the Berlin Wall were widely criticized, even ridiculed, as unsophisticated and de-stabilizing. But it’s now widely understood as having contributed importantly to the greatest victory in world history…

God, I can’t wait until he finds out about this new Washington Post op-ed, with its moral relativism and mealy-mouthed equivocation! I bet he’s going to EXCORIATE it!

Rumsfeld is a bundle of paradoxes, like a fascinating character in a work of epic literature. And as my high school teachers drummed into my head, the best literature reveals that humans are complex. They are not the all-good or all-bad, all-brilliant or all-dumb figures that inhabit trashy novels and news stories. Fine literature teaches us the difference between appearance and reality.

— “The Donald Rumsfeld I Know,” by Douglas J. Feith

ALSO: I wonder if by giving this piece the title “The Donald Rumsfeld I Know,” headline writers at the Post were having a little fun with Feith.