PMC Commentary

Bush's isolation portends even greater ugliness

Good god. Now Bush has trouble even getting his friends to talk to him.

"The first meeting in a scheduled two-day summit between President Bush and Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq," reported the NYT, "was canceled at the last minute today, against the backdrop of threats by a radical Shiite cleric to boycott the Maliki government and the disclosure of a classified White House memo that was highly critical of Mr. Maliki."

Some are saying the White House deliberately leaked the classified memo as a less than subtle shot over Maliki's bow prior to high-level discussions. That may be, but if true, the tactic was a spectacular flop on several fronts.

For starters, Maliki's pique at the memo's personally humiliating contents and disclosure only whiplashed as a personal humiliation of Bush. The prime minister's no-show at the kick-off confab was a public refutation of the president's attempt at looking tough -- and in terms of leverage, a tough posture was just about the last card Bush had left to play.

Second, the memo's disclosed contents gutted the next day's talks of any fresh substance. The summit was billed as an eyeball-to-eyeball sorting out of an unsteady power relationship, but if Bush had anything new to bring to the table as an eyeball-opener, so much for the surprise. Maliki was permitted to come loaded for bear. If the memo's disclosure was a leak with the highest approval, it was a damn foolish one.

Furthermore, the principal danger to Iraq's "government" was not only not averted, but exacerbated. The Bela al-Lugosi of Iraqi power politics, the lugubrious Moktada al-Sadr, was treated to a public display of the White House's discontent and frustration with Maliki -- one that stripped bare two paper tigers. The overt rift surely thrilled and emboldened Mr. Sadr, whose subsequent walkout from Parliament -- as promised, should the summit go forward -- was pretty much the last nail in the bloody coffin that is Iraq.

In short, forget the controversy over whether the memo was leaked. The summit itself was a doomed proposition. It guaranteed that Bush would take incoming from all sides now.

Which is precisely what's happening even at home -- literally his own home. One of the country's newly elected U.S. senators was seen ducking and hiding from POTUS at a White House reception, but ultimately James Webb ran out of luck.

As has been widely reported, Bush immediately -- characteristically -- asked the worst possible question he could put to Webb. "How's your boy?" who happens to be stuck in Iraq, courtesy Mr. Bush.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb answered more inclusively.

"That's not what I asked you" said Bush, obviously relishing the opportunity to piss off yet another potential ally. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb retorted, openly disrespecting the most deservedly disrespected man on Earth.

Webb later revealed "that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief," which, sadly, was a missed opportunity for Webb and an admiring world. Jury nullification at his criminal trial would have reigned supreme.

Bush slapped Maliki, Maliki slapped him right back. Bush jabbed Webb. Webb jabbed him right back. Bush has isolated and alienated himself from the planet. The planet welcomes and encourages his isolation and alienation. Seemingly no one cares any longer what or who Mr. Bush is.

If freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose, Bush now has it in spades. And given the hardware and manpower still at his disposal, that's a scary thought.

I spy nincompoops

New York Times' top story, top paragraph, top secret!:

"A classified memorandum by President Bush’s national security adviser expressed serious doubts about whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had the capacity to control the sectarian violence in Iraq and recommended that the United States take new steps to strengthen the Iraqi leader’s position."

This was classified? This is how Stephen Hadley and his "senior aides" at NSC spend their days? Shhhh. Don't tell anyone, Mr. President, mum's the word, but we're starting to think that maybe Maliki doesn't have things under control.

Remember now, this is supersecret brainwork, for your eyes only -- a product of national security thinking that only qualified professionals could unravel. So don't let on, lest the media start snooping around over there and discover ... problems.

Our professional recommendation? Maybe we should help the prime minister. He just might need it.

... Are the paychecks in yet?

"The memo questions whether Mr. Maliki has the will and ability to establish a genuine unity government, saying the answer will emerge from actions he takes in the weeks and months ahead."

One marvels at their perspicacity. Which probably derived from noticing the utter lack of any government in Iraq. But then again, only a qualified professional could make that determination. The chronology laid out in the memo derives from pure, qualified-professional brilliance as well. We can't say if Maliki now has the ability to create a government, but time will tell. These boys are indeed pros, that rare breed that understands answers to current questions lie only in the future. They point these things out in classified memos.

Based on Mr. Hadley's Oct. 30 meeting with the prime minister, further insights erupted: "Maliki reiterated a vision of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish partnership, and in my one-on-one meeting with him, he impressed me as a leader who wanted to be strong but was having difficulty figuring out how to do so."

Yes, there may be a couple internal contradictions in play here. May. Not sure. But there are hints. First, strong leaders don't generally struggle with strength. James Buchanan really, really, really wanted to be a tough guy, but his rather noticeable fecklessness led to ... let's see, what did they call it? Oh yeah. The Civil War.

Second, as the NYT paraphrased Mr. Hadley's professional findings: "the Iraqi leader’s assurances [of establishing a 'Shia, Sunni and Kurdish partnership'] seemed to have been contradicted by developments on the ground." Seemed to have been contradicted by developments. Not sure. But there are hints. And they're keeping an eye on "developments." Because they're professionals -- qualified professionals.

Now you're not a professional, but go ahead and take an amateurish stab at what you think the following in Mr. Hadley's memo seems to suggest: "Reports of nondelivery of services to Sunni areas, intervention by the prime minister’s office to stop military action against Shia targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq’s most effective commanders on a sectarian basis and efforts to ensure Shia majorities in all ministries."

Give up? Of course you do, you muddled dilettante. But qualified-professional Hadley saw that depriving the Sunnis of food, water and electricity; redirecting military assaults against Sunnis only; appointing Shia commanders merely because they're Shia; and packing the prime minister's cabinet with Shia -- "all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shia power in Baghdad." Just as Hitler's 1939 blitzkrieg "suggested" hostilities -- but of course only time could tell.

Here's where I stopped reading: "The memo also lists steps the United States can take to strengthen Mr. Maliki’s position. They include efforts to persuade Saudi Arabia to use its influence with the Sunnis in Iraq and encourage them to turn away from the insurgency and to seek a political accommodation."

That should do it. Take a memo: Re: from Saudis to Sunnis: Stop it. Just stop it. Come on, guys, stop all this tomfoolery. Please?

Yet jumping to another story failed to distract. In a Times' "News Analysis," I'm informed that "at a time of heightened urgency in the Bush administration’s quest for solutions, American military and political leverage in Iraq has fallen sharply."

Whence came this conclusion? You got it. Mr. Hadley's classified memo. The damned thing haunts.

Still, I tried another story. How about "Man Mistakenly Abducted by C.I.A. Seeks Redress"? Perhaps it has a happy ending -- some flicker of overdue governmental competence and fair play.

It seems a vacationing German man was shanghaied in Macedonia, whisked to Afghanistan, "shackled, beaten and injected with drugs" for five months, "told that he was in a place where he had no right to recourse for what happened to him," released after his captors realized they had the wrong guy, and was left on his own -- in Albania -- to get home.

The poor bastard sued -- mostly for a simple apology, not money -- but was denied a U.S. trial because the federal judge "was persuaded by the government that there was no way to even begin a trial without impermissibly disclosing state secrets." Like what? Like the state has unbounded dimwits in charge? Some secret.

The ball-busting superspooks and qualified professionals who ponder, write and then classify all this pristine crap do so primarily not to protect national security, but to hide from the public what thorough mediocrity, absolute mystification and downright haplessness reign in the uppermost circles of power.

Just "think" Professor Harold Hill.

'State of Denial': Chapter ... how many are we up to now?

Yesterday the L.A. Times ran one of those deadly serious leads that only provokes uneasy laughter:

Angry Shiite Muslims pelted Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's motorcade with stones Sunday after the Iraqi leader pleaded for national reconciliation at a memorial held in Sadr City for victims of a large-scale bombing attack.

Being pelted for boosting reconciliation is not a good sign that the whole reconciliation thing is going to work out. It generally doesn't when contemporary reports on attempts at "national reconciliation" also include phrases like, "victims of a large-scale bombing attack."

Poor Mr. Maliki. He is not only in way over his head, events are way ahead of him. And in recognition of this reality, those events have now been officially redefined by NBC News as "civil war." So long, familiar sectarian violence.

The language change by a principal member of the mainstream media is a huge development, simply because words have meaning that can instantly change perceptions. And to the American public, which largely gets its news in 90-second television clips, NBC's usage of "civil war" as opposed to "sectarian violence" means American troops in Iraq are no longer battling "them" over there so "they" won't attack us here. It means, rather, that American troops are now hapless, helpless referees in someone else's vicious, internal fight.

No one knows this better than the Orwellian language masters at the White House, those happy warriors of "clean skies," "healthy forests" and "compassionate conservatism." Predictably, they reacted to NBC's phrasal change like vampires to the rising sun.

No, no, no, said the president's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley. We're not in a civil war at all. All the blood and bombings and slaughter and carnage and kidnappings and dead bodies lying naked and mutilated on the streets are just a "new phase, characterized by ... increasing sectarian violence that requires us obviously to adapt to that new phase."

Got that? It's strikingly similar to Abraham Lincoln's take on Gettysburg, which he immortalized as merely another stage in the country's being "engaged in a great new phase, testing whether this nation can long endure."

Armed with his assigned talking points, Mr. Bush chimed in yesterday on the "civil war" controversy, desperately resurrecting the bogeyman of an al Qaeda-9/11 link while downplaying the bloody reality of millions of Sunnis and Shiites' mutual throat-cutting based on nothing more than ownership of a surname: "We have been in this phase for a while. There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented in my opinion because of these attacks by al-Qaeda causing people to seek reprisal."

NBC News, the L.A. Times (which beat NBC News to the definitional punch), scores of social-conflict scholars, hundreds of in-country journalists and thousands of dead Iraqis all have it wrong, according to Mr. Bush. No civil war there. Just al Qaeda troublemakers. Simple as that.

Yet the saddest part for Americans and their human proxies in Iraq is that nothing will change as a result of their new education. At story time, master George sits longingly at the feet of tutoring Condi Rice, who assures her pupil that great leaders tough it out in great conflicts, no matter how much domestic flak they encounter. She further assures George that he can be one of them, that he can be Lincolnesque and Churchillian in stature, if he just toughs it out as well. Encyclopedias will love him.

No doubt the next 3000 dead Americans and their bereft loved ones will find comfort in knowing they helped to polish Mr. Bush's bio.

Bye-bye America: The legacy of Bush II and Reagan

The fix is in. The scam is on. And the suspense, as modest as it was, is prematurely over.

The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group is expected to release a report that is heavy on regional talks but light on talk of withdrawal timetables. Anticipating this, the Bush administration has preemptively fabricated a presto of regional confabs -- Bush in Jordan and Cheney in Saudi Arabia -- while remaining characteristically mum on any talk of a timed, phased withdrawal. Hence when the report is officially released next month, the administration will tout, We're way ahead of you -- all that could be done is already being done.

As added cushion -- read "cover" -- for doing what it planned on doing anyway, the administration by then will also have its "independent" Pentagon and National Security Council reports on hand, saying much the same: Stage a diplomatic chat now and then, set no enforceable conditions, and pray like hell that things somehow work out.

It's the Ronald Reagan equivalent of launching supply-side economic policy. His budget director predicted a deficit disaster, but golly shucks, Ron really, really wanted massive tax cuts. Reams of expert forecasts filled with the commonsensical outcomes of soaring outgo and dwindling income would not deter him. He was prepared to simply cross his fingers and see how things worked out.

That was quite literally Reagan's attitude, much to his budget director's horror and ghastly realization that presidential will can be both profound in its ignorance and supreme in its authority.

Bush's Iraq policy is only a bleak reminder that the right-wing ideology of faith trumping reality is nothing new. It has towered over us at home for at least a quarter-century; Bush is merely operating a new branch of its blindness overseas. Happy days. Now the world can stumble through guaranteed, foreseeable disasters right along with us.

One ISG operative told the Times that when meeting with commission members two weeks ago, Bush spent an hour and a half “essentially arguing why we should embrace what amounts to a ‘stay the course’ strategy.” Nothing is about to deter him, and we're about to see that played out after all the ballyhooed anticipation of the Baker-Hamilton report.

This leaves Congressional Democrats in a truly sticky wicket. They put all their procrastinating eggs in the ISG's findings, which, along with two other self-justifying reports, the administration will claim are already being sagely implemented. Bush's status quo will then have the bipartisan imprimatur of "the best and the brightest" among the "Wise Men," two other terms that hark back to another, incubating era of dead-end faith that we once thought had been rejected forever.

The only realistic option left for Democrats is to cut the war's funding, which is, of course, as realistic of an expectation as Bush's overcoming ignorance and stubbornness.

All of which does indeed prove the mindless and enduring power of faith -- and it's about to leave us and 150,000 human targets stuck in Iraq for at least another two years.

So much for "New Directions." Democrats' political faith in electoral cover will trump the deed of doing the right thing, Bush's faith in God only knows what will persevere, and we'll all helplessly watch foreseeable catastrophe unfold -- just as we've been doing for decades.

To paraphrase Churchill, the one-two punches of Reagan's fiscal madness at home and Bush's addition of disastrous policies abroad may not be the beginning of the end of America's superpower status, but they are undoubtedly the end of the beginning -- courtesy the right-wing ideology of faith over reality.

"A modest proposal"

The man who has come to define "shady politician," Tammany Hall magician George Washington Plunkitt, nonetheless saw himself as a real stickler for what he called "honest graft." For instance it was Okay, he philosophized, to personally profit from an insider land deal, but to buy property and then push it for public use, well, that would be roguish.

In famously, and one gathers rather self-defensively, declaring that "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em," Plunkitt was only being honest about ubiquitous dishonesty. Politics was all about personal influence and the power and money that derive. A hundred years later -- a hundred years of ethics reform and lobbying reform and campaign-finance reform later -- things are pretty much the same, excepting the money involved is bigger.

"We heard continually out here that people were tired of the way business is conducted in Washington," says new Democratic House member Harry Mitchell, who just defeated one of the slickest demagogues I've yet to see, the Abramoff-tainted J.D. Hayworth of Arizona. (One can hear radio's Jack Benny: "Wasn't he wonderful, folks? He'll be back.") "They didn't like the way lobbyists had so much influence," Mitchell continued. "They didn't like the way rules were not enforced. They just didn't think things were being done right."

That's probably because they weren't, if "done right" means representing the interests of the vast majority of the body politic rather than money-spewing, hat-in-hand special interests.

Given the public's acute anguish, Democrats have an ideal opportunity to see that things are indeed done right -- in the form of slashing and burning the present system of "ethical" government. Preliminary news reports on what lies in store, however, would indicate that the public is about to be disappointed.

To maximize mostly the public relations appeal of honest graft, House "freshmen would offer, over as many as five days in January, separate amendments to ban gifts, meals and travel financed by lobbyists.... New rules mandating the disclosure of all contacts with lobbyists would be another vote, as would a rule requiring that the sponsors of funding for home-state pet projects be identified. The House would also vote on whether to reinstate budget rules, known as pay-as-you-go."

Banning the lobbyist manna of gifts, meals and travel is nice, but freebie fountain pens, cheeseburgers and plane rides aren't the real problem. Nor is an absent piece of paper disclosing lobbying encounters. Nor is identifying the sponsors of bridges to nowhere, nor, even, is the unpaid-for bridge the problem.

The problem -- the real cancer on democracy, to shamelessly borrow from John Dean (who, by the way, I recently learned shamelessly borrowed the metaphor from another distressed presidential assistant) -- is legalized bribery from the military contractors, industrial polluters, pharmaceutical concerns, insurance conglomerates, credit card companies, and on and on and on, whose profits-over-people interests their lobbyists merely represent.

That's the problem. It's the tons of cash flowing from special interest to representative that is the problem. It's the bundling, the winking, the subtle promise exchanged that is the problem. The problem is the selling out of average Americans.

Eliminate so much as one dollar transferred from a private concern to a public representative's campaign treasury, and you eliminate the problem.

Yet "Democrats face divisions on how far to go on some issues," such as campaign finance. So round and round we'll go, watching the ins protect their turf by scooping up as much honest graft as is humanly possible.

Bad move on the Democrats' part, assuming one regards the protection of a protection racket a bad move.

But here's an idea. The obscene amount of $2.6 billion in plutocratic bribery was spent on the recent midterms. Fine, raise it again, spend it again. But while you're at it, Dems, "earmark" $2.6 billion for lobbyists on behalf of the voiceless poor and middle class. They can then throw it right back at ya.

At least it would be a fair fight. And with a little equalization, you can then decide if the $10,000 bribe you got from Chase Manhattan Bank is socially worthier than the $10,000 bribe you got from the Children's Defense Fund.

The all-time W.O.P.R. of a problem

Someday, someone is going to invent a board game of international strategy called "Hopeless." It'll be a reality game of the foggiest surrealism in which each player is charged with conducting U.S. foreign policy, but -- and here's the kicker from which the game derives its name -- each player, in each move, must pledge to think like George W. Bush.

To help this counterintuitive mental process along, copious quantities of mind-addling glue, toxic spray paint and Demerol, complete with refill Rxs, will come included. Psychotics will naturally excel at the game, however, since utter detachment from reality and any guiding ethical principles will be the game-winning sine qua nons.

A winner is declared by butterfly ballot when all players, in unison, scream in frustration -- "It's hopeless!"

Which, with respect to Iraq, appears to be the concluding move today. Everyone, including those whose diplomatic careers were renowned for their love of napalming extortion, are wailing in so many words -- "It's hopeless!"

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country," Henry Kissinger qualified for the BBC, "that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."

Notice that three years into this, and well after we've been treated to repeated declarations of an elected, sovereign Iraqi government, the enabling advisor of "stay the course" uses the future tense: "If you mean ... an Iraqi government that can be established."

"I think we have to redefine the course," said Kissinger, "but I don't think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal."

And I think, dear Mr. Kissinger, there's a more familiar term for your bundle of garbled, dreary euphemisms that in reality propose to redefine very little: "Continuing occupation."

That's what necessarily protracted, regional negotiations portend -- the indefinite presence of unwanted foreign troops because a conclusive "military victory" establishing a friendly, stable government was unattainable, ensuring perpetual indigenous hostility and retaliation, which in turn make "total withdrawal" a total loser. Hence more of the same, day after bloody day.

What else do we call such a set of rock-and-a-hard-place circumstances? You got it. "Hopeless."

Gloomy Henry accurately topped off his observations by anticipating chess moves that even the seemingly sensible calls for an "immediate strategic redeployment to the horizon" anticipate. "A dramatic collapse of Iraq -- whatever we think about how the situation was created -- would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region."

In short, moving American troops to, say, Kuwait, would merely be an exercise in Ku-waiting for Iraq to implode, requiring the re-redeployment of those troops to the Iraqi hot spots formerly occupied. Check, but not checkmate -- forever.

The whole mess is reminiscent of the "Wargames" scene in which the thermonuclear-war-playing computer, "W.O.P.R.," finally realizes that the entire exercise is -- and always was -- as hopeless as a game of tic-tac-toe. For every move you make, there's the guarantee of an equally counterbalancing, negating move. The only way to win is not to play.

It would have been nice if someone had forewarned Mr. Bush of all this three years ago. Oh wait, someone -- a lot of someones -- did, but they were mostly the peacenik candyasses who don't understand the manly game of true national security.

Shoot me now

There's just no comforting way to put this: Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi portends disaster for House Democrats.

Her first official act was conceived and executed with the worst imaginable judgment, and that -- her judgment, not the customary Democratic disarray and divisions that ensued -- is what troubles most.

Take with a huge grain of salt all the soothing happy talk that sprang from the Democratic caucus and its sympathizers after the curtain went down on Pelosi's flop. Her egregious judgment inflicted deep wounds and they'll leave massive scars. For reasons that soon became clear, that sort of thing simply isn't done.

Her ill-advised (and apparently unadvised) intervention split the caucus into mutually hostile and suspicious camps when harmony was a post-victory given, it spotlighted an ethically questionable House member on the heels of an election largely fought over ethical shams, it showered attention on in-House pettiness rather than weighty issues of looming concern to the voters who put her party in power, it exposed ominous weakness in the leadership's authority, it elated and reenergized the dispirited GOP opposition, it foolishly distracted from "the message," and in general it instantly transformed the good vibes of November 7 into a public fiasco.

All of it was needless. All of it was negative, in vain and pointless. And all of it was so easily avoidable. There was simply no good reason for it, no good excuse.

My, shall we say, disappointment in Ms. Pelosi is nothing new, because her penchant for manifesting a most unappetizing inadequacy is nothing new. As I wrote following her third-place showing in a one-person interview on "Meet the Press" in May:

"I guarantee you there are a couple hundred Democratic members of the House of Representatives scratching their heads this morning, wondering why in God’s name they ever cast a vote for Nancy Pelosi as the public face of their party.

"She just made an appearance on “Meet the Press,” and it was a disaster. Worse than that, it was a lasting embarrassment for any progressive-minded viewer hoping to see something other than a profile in stuttering, stammering, defensiveness, vacillation and evasion. I haven’t felt that uncomfortable since watching Roger Mudd ask Ted Kennedy about his day.

"She said nothing with conviction, sitting instead visibly trying to recall her talking points cleared by a horde of nervous, focus-grouping advisers. As one sad example Tim Russert gave her the opportunity three times -- three times -- to pledge she would honorably and proudly work to repeal Bush’s inane tax cuts as Speaker, and she responded with empty, circumlocutory nothingness on each occasion.

"Her answers concerning Iraq were almost unintelligible but clearly contradictory; her solution to the energy crisis was stilted, bumper-sticker pabulum having something to do with shifting our focus from the Middle East to the Midwest -- get it? clever, huh?; her demotion of “investigations” to only “hearings” into White House crimes was a bizarre and muddled distinction; and the rest of what she didn’t say with excessive strain wasn’t worth hearing, either....

"If you doubt my assessment of her agonizing appearance on “Meet the Press” you can read the transcript here, though I would suggest you first take a slug or two of fermented fortification. It’ll rattle you. Really."

In the interim I held out hope that Pelosi would improve by taking a human relations class or a Dale Carnegie course or maybe just by reading Tip O'Neill's memoirs, Man of the House. No such luck.

To have to launch her Speakership with the anachronistic, foreboding words of "Let the healing begin" is not a happy sign.

I rarely agree with the prince of editorial darkness, Robert Novak, but his column yesterday was merely a sourced assessment of Capitol Hill's justifiably nervous climate: "Pelosi's mistake confirms long-standing, privately held Democratic apprehension about her abilities.... What they hesitate to contemplate is what lies ahead based on Pelosi's performance before she has taken the oath."

Based precisely on that performance, so acutely painful because of chronically poor performances, is there any reason for more hope?

If he's right, he's wrong

David Kuo, the former White House faith-based factotum, has written a rather puzzling non sequitur as a postelection follow-up to his eminently sober Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, whose 300-page theme was that Bush & Co. is -- and I'm sure you braced yourself for this revelation -- cynical and manipulative. So are politics in general.

Having recovered from those unexpected blows, Kuo went on to speculate in Tempting Faith that perhaps it's time for evangelicals to take five from political activism; that the new light of religion and the dark art of politics are bad roommates. He urged the spiritually motivated to concentrate on something novel for a change, like, rather than dialing for Republican pols, maybe helping the poor? That occurred to Jesus, too, when he wasn't busy passing out anti-Pilate leaflets.

Kuo's op-ed today is an effort to keep hope alive that evangelicals are indeed awakening nonpartisanly, contrary to "The conventional wisdom about the Democratic thumping of Republicans last week [that] says something a little different about the religious right -- that its members are beginning to migrate to the Democratic Party."

Perhaps in a bit of introductory overstatement, he posits that "There has been a radical change in the attitudes of evangelicals," but concludes "it’s just not one that will automatically be in the Democrats’ favor" [emphasis added]. This perceived change, as Kuo hopes, is that evangelicals are following his prophetic exhortation to detoxify themselves from their addiction to politics, and not simply switch party allegiances.

"So before rearranging their public policy agenda in hopes of attracting evangelicals" -- a pleasant dig at the GOP's historical reshuffling -- "the Democrats would be wise to think twice."

He attempts to puncture Democrats' misplaced optimism with that most malleable friend of all debaters -- a few statistics: "Yes, it is true that almost 30 percent of white evangelicals voted for the Democrats [last week], up from the 22 percent Senator John Kerry received in the 2004 presidential race. But that 2004 number was aberrantly low. More typical were exit polls from the 1996 Congressional election, where 25 percent of white evangelicals voted for Democrats." Aberrantly low? More typical? No explanations?

Nevertheless if Kuo is largely right about evangelicals' devotional change to political withdrawal, he's profoundly wrong in the electoral conclusion he draws.

What he misses, or ignores, or misinterprets -- the end all of "We will have to wait until 2008 to see just how deep this evangelical spiritual re-examination goes, [but] evangelicals aren’t flocking to the Democratic Party" -- is that evangelicals' broad disillusionment with right-wing politics, if true, means if nothing else a critical reduction in the GOP's base turnout.

And that means an electoral transmutation "that will," indeed, "automatically be in the Democrats' favor."

It makes no difference if evangelicals fail to jump parties. Their mere withdrawal translates into a Democratic windfall of far fewer door-knockers, van-drivers and lever-pullers for the enemy camp.

As exposed by once-faithful followers such as Kuo, the religio-political cynicism and manipulation practiced by the GOP in general and George W. Bush in particular have operated, in effect, as a massive campaign of negative advertising and thus voter suppression directed at their own party. The ensuing backlash may not inflate Democratic Party identification, but it sure will deflate GOP turnout.

That's assuming Kou is right, of course -- meaning he couldn't be more wrong.

The new and improved quagmire

Those calling for an immediate but phased withdrawal of American troops in Iraq are reigniting the kind of reactionary thinking that kept American troops in the slog that was South Vietnam. Not yet, the thinking went; just a while longer, and we'll see what shakes out. Year after year, each administration adding a bit more to the previous administration's efforts in the unrealistic hope that the enemy would fold or back off.

In America's Longest War, historian George Herring dove into the Pentagon Papers for answers to how we got sucked in, little by agonizing little, and he emerged with some rather interesting -- and contemporarily relevant -- conclusions. Rather than having committed any specific errors in judgment in prosecuting the Vietnam War, Herring saw that American policy makers, proceeding unquestioningly from the underlying worldview of falling dominos, had simply never stopped to examine two very fundamental issues: the importance of South Vietnam to the United States' position in the world, and the viability of South Vietnam as a self-sustaining, political entity.

In the end, after our "peace with honor" more than two decades in the making, South Vietnam's status was left to be resolved by other means and at a later date. In short, our eventual withdrawal left the same situation that existed years before, excepting the waste of a few million lives and billions of dollars -- while the fall of all southeast Asia, which had hovered as a certain fear, never materialized.

As we know, another underlying worldview dumped rather than sucked us into Iraq. Neoconservatism's equally unquestioning assumption that, given enough initial firepower, we'd witness a flawless transition to democratic liberation was as blind to reality as the vision of all those falling dominos.

Strike one.

Then there was the unexamined question not of Iraq's importance to the United States' position in the world, but of Saddam Hussein's importance to the United States' position in the world. As virtually everyone but the neocons understood, the strongman was one of our better allies in the Middle East, keeping, as he did, the lid on a sectarian powder keg that otherwise would blow up not only Iraq, but the entire region.

Strike two.

Finally there was the overlooked question of Iraq's viability as a self-sustaining, political entity. And that's the question on which we now all hang.

Many in Congress who voted against the war, as well as some who voted for it but at long last have seen the dark at the end of the tunnel, are calling for a relatively rapid end to America's involvement in the whole mess. Perhaps those Iraqis in nominal control of Iraq will pick up the pace of control if protective big brother isn't going to be around much longer.

Yet in reaction to these calls for benign withdrawal, some military pros and policy analysts once as critical as anyone of the war's execution are warning, Whoa, not so fast.

"The logic of this is you put pressure on [Prime Minister] Maliki and force him to stand up to this," said General Anthony Zinni. "Well, you can’t put pressure on a wounded guy. There is a premise that the Iraqis are not doing enough now, that there is a capability that they have not employed or used. I am not so sure they are capable of stopping sectarian violence."

Zinni added that the U.S. should, rather, think about deploying more American troops for a while to "regain momentum" in stabilizing Iraq, training indigenous security forces, promoting political negotiations and all the other things 150,000 American troops have been unable to accomplish since early 2003.

Retired Major General John Batiste, also of the formerly dyspeptic crowd, has topped Zinni in the soundbite department by labeling calls for withdrawal as "terribly naïve." "There are lots of things that have to happen to set them up for success. Until they happen, it does not matter what we tell Maliki." In writing about the possible need for thousands more "coalition troops," Batiste is trying to top Gen. William Westmoreland.

And Ken Pollack, now of the Brookings Institution and once a member of Bill Clinton's NSC, says "If we start pulling out troops and the violence gets worse and the control of the militias increases and people become confirmed in their suspicion that the United States is not going to be there to prevent civil war, they are to going to start making decisions today to prepare for the eventuality of civil war tomorrow. That is how civil wars start."

Pollack may have meant to say, "That is how this civil war got started," since withdrawal has always been an eventual certainty, the violence has already gotten worse, the control of the militias has steadily increased and the Iraqi people concluded long ago that the United States cannot prevent civil war.

Because George W. Bush has never been one to gainsay the happy possibilities of military firepower, I think it is safe to conclude even before release of the almighty "Baker Report" that we are well on our way to ...

Strike Three.

Good grief ... or ... And they're off!

Parents of small children are often guided by the sensible advice of "Choose your battles wisely." To avoid constant squabbling with the little ones and to avoid lending credence to the actual, underlying reign of anarchy, determine what's truly important and then stick to your guns on only that. It'll save you years of needless headaches and promote at least some level of purpose and calm.

Right out of the gate, however, presumptive-parent Nancy Pelosi has ignored this sage advice in dealing with her squabbling, attention-getting children of the House -- an unpropitious beginning indeed for restoring mature behavior to the nation's lower legislative romper room.

Choosing a softer participle than "incensed," the WP observes that "Some Democratic lawmakers and watchdog groups say they are baffled that Pelosi would go out of her way to back [John] Murtha's candidacy [for majority leader] after pledging to make the new 110th Congress the most ethical and corruption-free in history."

Remember those topics? Ethics and corruption? They were in the news lately, having something to do with millions of outraged independents and Republicans jumping to the Democratic side in the hope that DeLay-Ney-Cunningham-Hastert-Foley-Boehner-Reynolds et alia behavior would take a back seat to good government. At least for a few days.

But no such luck. Because Pelosi, for reasons beyond virtually anyone's giving a damn, has chosen to openly battle for Murtha, who in turn "has battled accusations over the years that he has traded federal spending for campaign contributions, that he has abused his post as ranking party member on the Appropriations defense subcommittee, and that he has stood in the way of ethics investigations. Those charges come on top of Murtha's involvement 26 years ago in the FBI's Abscam bribery sting."

Admiration of Murtha for his critical dissections of the Bush administration's Iraq policy -- a protracted problem -- should bear little or no weight in treating the immediate problems of ethical lapses, front-page corruption, bad appearances and corrective substance. Not to mention that, politically speaking, Pelosi is handing a loaded "gotcha" gun to the GOP. Its strategists must be beaming.

In the worst of all possible explanations, "A senior Pelosi aide conceded that her endorsement is risky but said that she had to show her loyalty to Murtha" -- which is to say, loyalty over an obscure battle for minority whip years ago, misplaced personal loyalty over good public relations, Bush-like loyalty over clean personnel.

And in an equally stunning display of political tone deafness, in addition to Cheney-like, "I haven't seen that article" obtuseness, Murtha-supporter Rep. Michael Capuano "said he was not aware of the ethical issues around the lawmaker, but said they will have little impact on Democrats as they gather Thursday to choose the next majority leader."

Gosh, that's a bit ... baffling -- just as it is to the progressive watchdog of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, whose executive director said "Pelosi's endorsement suggests to me she was interested in the culture of corruption only as a campaign issue and has no real interest in true reform. It is shocking to me that someone with [Murtha's] ethics problems could be number two in the House leadership."

Good grief.

Maybe the real battle should be over who's going to be the responsible parent here.

Can we first get something straight?

Challenges of the day framed in daunting language: The Democratic class of 2006, armed with "a distinct world view," tells the Fourth Estate it is determined "to deal with long-festering problems like access to affordable health care and the loss of manufacturing jobs, and to find a bipartisan consensus for an exit strategy in Iraq ... also, somehow, find a way to address the growing anxiety among voters about a global economy that no longer seems to work for them....

"In general, they set themselves an extraordinary ... task: to avoid the ideological wars that have so dominated Congress in recent years, to be pragmatists, and to change the tone in Washington after a sharply partisan campaign."

To reduce the complex to the comprehensible, the Democratic Big Picture solutions -- a minimum-wage uptick; college-tuition deductibility; renewal of a children's (only) health care program; trade-treaty revisions; an agonizing, drip-drip-drip Iraq withdrawal -- are dubbed as having "a strong populist tinge."

But is this really populism? Does the tinkering advanced by Democrats justify the monumental "populist" tag? Has the shibboleth of "populism" been so overused that its meaning has devolved into the meaningless?

Well, here's a strong opinion for you: I don't know. I'm not sure, although my less than laudatory attitude likely indicates my inclination. At any rate the questions' broader implications are deserving of a book-length, not column-length, examination. So that lets me off the hook.

To simply touch on these questions, however, brings to mind the excellent work of Michael Kazin in The Populist Persuasion. His analysis spans the history of populism in America (as its subtitle, An American History, would aptly suggest), from Jefferson's populist vision in building "the republic," to Jackson's efforts to save it, to Lincoln's fidelity to his plebeian roots, and so on and so on, right through to the 1990s, its era of publication.

Yet Kazin's history was principally a vehicle to examine contemporary conservatism's use of the populist tag and whether it succeeded in creating a new populist, political order. His answer was, in short, no. Conservatives, from the postwar to Clinton eras, mostly succeeded in defining only what they hated -- not what they wanted to change -- and populism is all about vigorously promoting the human condition.

Whether consciously or not, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter insightfully picks up on Kazin's theme for the modern era, writing that the "GOP's big tent [of neocons, nativists, libertarians and theocons] contained none of the hope and optimism essential to success in American politics."

Concludes Alter: "So the Conservative Era is over, a cautionary tale for Democrats who might be tempted to impose a liberal one."

But this begs a large question. If recent conservatism's ideologically framed, bold negativity was indeed some sort of transmogrified populism, can Democrats' new order of what might be called "timid pragmatism" also legitimately be classified as populism?

You may find this only a matter of semantic hairsplitting. I disagree. "Populism" holds a powerful punch in the lexicon of political appeals. Its use should be reserved for powerful ideas.

The hoodlums are back and asking to stay

The constitutionally heretical monster of presidential absolutism that underlay the vast crimes of Watergate is alive, well, and more robust than ever. The new, new, new Nixons are among us, excusing and even flaunting criminal abuses of power as merely the sad exigencies of national security.

The public has forgotten how critical the exalted claim of "national security" was to the banal perpetrators of Watergate. As Nixon and cohorts so fervently believed, the president could not secure the orderly world he envisioned if political opposition was allowed to flourish and somehow menace that vision. Hence the genesis of bugging and wiretapping and breaking and entering and burglarizing any who might possibly stand in the way. It was for their own good, for the country's own good -- it was for the good of "national security."

Once these self-justified criminal acts came to light, then further crimes, from perjury to obstruction of justice, were once again justified on the grounds of national security. All that magnetic evidence on those revealing tapes contained complicated excuses of national security that the public might not understand, might not appreciate, and at any rate should not be privy to.

There was more to Nixon's cover-up of having ordered the CIA's obstruction of the FBI's investigation into Watergate crimes than self-preservation, or so the president and his aides convinced themselves. One revelation might lead to another, and before long the public might know of dark but necessary national security secrets behind historical shenanigans like the Bay of Pigs. The linkage was obscure, ludicrous, even laughable, but "national security" was the president's understanding friend. Better to keep a lid on the whole thing. It was for everyone's own good.

But not everyone understood the president's absolute need for absolute authority on essential matters of national security -- matters that would eventually entail, for example, the unquestioned need to rifle an American citizen's private psychiatric files. Such understanding was, rather, largely limited to commonplace hoodlums without any grasp of their nation's history and the whys and wherefores of its embrace of constitutional guarantees -- hoodlums now elevated to inner circles of power. They knew better.

As the slime of Watergate spilled into public ken at Senate hearings, the hoodlums were by then openly justifying criminal act after criminal act on the elusive grounds of national security and the president's monarchical need to direct it. Yet those grounds were eerily difficult to comprehend precisely because of their elusiveness. As one senator (Herman Talmadge) struggled to ascertain, given the arguments presented, just where any line of presidential power could be drawn, he asked one of the hoodlums {John Ehrlichman):

"Now if the President could authorize a covert break-in, and you do not know exactly what that power would be limited [to], you do not think it could include murder or other crimes beyond covert break-ins, do you?"

To which the lawyerly hoodlum responded just as uncomprehendingly: "I do not know where the line is, Senator."

So the senator tried the enlightenment angle: "Do you remember when we were in law school, we studied a famous principle of law that came from England and also is well known in this country, that no matter how humble a man's cottage is, that even the King of England cannot enter without his consent?"

Hoodlum, defiant and self-justifying: "I am afraid that has been considerably eroded over the years, has it not?"

Apparently so.

Perhaps it is excusable that a public burdened by daily worries of wage stagnation, spiraling healthcare costs or no healthcare at all, real retirement doubts and the like would have fallen asleep over the last 30 years. Perhaps it is excusable that, given these preoccupying worries, the public was slow in recognizing and storming the castle of the constitutionally heretical monster of Mr. Bush.

But it remains Congress' constitutionally imperative job to do so, whatever inattention may outward lie. And if the present Congress continues its abdication of responsibility, its incoming members should raise holy hell, for as the New York Times editorialized this morning with devastating historical accuracy ...

"Mr. Bush [has] made it clear that, for now, his idea of how to 'put the elections behind us' is to use the Republicans’ last two months in control of Congress to try to push through one of the worst ideas his administration and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill have come up with: a bill that would legalize his illegal wiretapping program and gut the law that limits a president’s ability to abuse his power in this way.... Mr. Cheney and a few other hard-liners have been trying to turn back the clock and have succeeded in some truly scary ways, including the military commissions act they pushed through Congress before the elections."

We've seen this executive team before, and we recognized then its implications for our "security." The new Congressional team should tell the new, new, new Nixons and their legislative enablers in no unclear terms where to get off -- that enough is enough -- or "putting the elections behind us" will put behind us a lot more than that.

Election odds and ends of note

The New York Times has a good post-election analysis of both parties' pre-election problems and pitfalls. Three items in particular caught my eye, listed here in ascending order of immediate interest.

The vulnerability of sanity

For some time this has been a problem for the GOP's big-tent aspirations, as well as the nation's balance of representational sobriety. Ever since fanatical ideologues have been driving the party, every radically idiotic position they take endangers not the idiots, but the dwindling number of moderates in the dwindling number of swing districts who, whether by nature or reason, maintain political moderation in the attempt to score a plurality.

Here's how that played out in Iowa for a Republican veteran of 30 years:

The Republican National Committee had sought before Election Day to send a mailing into Mr. [Jim] Leach’s Iowa district to attack his opponent’s position on same-sex marriage.

Mr. Leach recoiled at the mailing and called Mr. Mehlman, saying he would caucus with the Democrats if Mr. Mehlman did not withdraw it.

"I would rather lose running an uplifting race than prevail by finger-pointing," Mr. Leach said.

And lose he did, thereby leaving a higher percentage of fanatics in his party. Their survival instinct may modify their language for a while, but in the long run one-dimensional pols are incurable.

Give me a smoke-filled room any day

This one was fascinating. Weighing the stigma of having been prowar against the stigma of having dabbled in funny business, GOP strategists saw the effectiveness of slamming any Democrat campaigning under a cloud of suspicion headed off at the pass. Naturally, they first took a poll.

Respondents were given a choice between a candidate with a history of corruption, facing possible indictment, versus a candidate who supported the war. Each received 40 percent, a sobering finding for Republicans.

It was clear from watching the slime-machine that New Jersey's Thomas Kean, Jr. geared up that he didn't believe it, but Robert Menendez more than confirmed the poll's finding. Mark one up for the good old days.

"Mother of God, is this the end of Howie Rico?"

The lugubrious handwriting on the wall....

Officials in both parties said yesterday that the best thing the Democrats had going for them was the bad political environment and the White House’s mistakes. But they said the party might still have fallen short were it not for the rise of Mr. [Rahm] Emanuel and Mr. [Charles] Schumer. Both men brought an unusual mix of fund-raising skills and understanding of political tactics, filling a void created when the party’s national chairman, Howard Dean, focused instead on building up the resources of the state parties in 50 states, rather than on the midterm elections.

Those passages -- "were it not for ... Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Schumer," their "understanding of political tactics," they spent their time "filling the void created [by] Howard Dean" who had wandered off to God-knows-where -- were devastating to the DNC chairman's reputation, and probably his political lifespan. The manner in which the Times' reporters framed that tidbit of analysis was clearly intended to reflect widespread condemnation of Dean as much as praise the DCCC and DSCC bosses, and since the reporting only mirrored what Democratic Party insiders were saying, seemed just as clearly pre-obituary.

Dean's questionable 50-state strategy will now face the firing squad of dreamy expectations and what-ifs. Had he targeted rather than scattered the DNC's resources, would the party have, say, 40 new House seats, not 28? Could Harold Ford, Jr. have overcome his Tennessee odds for the Senate?

It's impossible to say, but the bad blood and lingering doubts will isolate and lay siege to Dean.

Memo to Dems: "It Takes a Nixon"

Angry, restless Democrats and independents discredited my electoral pessimism last night in humiliating the retrograde party of medieval values, so why do I feel like Dick Nixon immediately after crushing the opposition in 1972, the man who, as described by one of his Cabinet members at the time, had a "joyless, brooding quality" about him?

Journalist-historian Theodore H. White attributed the victor's untimely depression to his profound dismay that "the American government ... had, without a doubt, grown too cumbersome to cope with the tangles of the post-war world at home and abroad." Nixon may have been on top, but he mostly felt cornered -- restrained by institutional custom, frustrated by bureaucratic blockades, cobbled by Congressional fiefdoms.

Nixon's solution to government's torpidity was, as we know all too well, to upend the Constitution by asserting executive power with unprecedented aggressiveness. Checks and balances were indeed cumbersome, and for Nixon, like his contemporary doppelgänger, badly in need of retirement. So off he went, reordering nearly two centuries of what, after all, had worked, despite its built-in difficulties.

Ultimately, of course, Nixon's street-fighting aggressiveness did him in. As the common wisdom goes, only Nixon screwed Nixon. In his criminal pursuit of supremacy, he and his political militia forgot, or had never learned, the limits of power and hazards of arrogance.

It's the anticipated, extreme opposite of Nixon's governing philosophy, however, that troubles and depresses me about the new boys and girls in partial power -- which is to say, their seeming timidity.

Bush & Co. make the Nixon Gang look like a paragon of good government, and if ever aggressive counterchecks and full-forced headbutts were needed, it is now. Yet if its rhetoric is to be taken seriously, the leadership of incoming Congressional Democrats has every intention of playing only footsy with the lawless executive branch -- dancing around vitally needed aggressiveness for fear of offending its expanded base's sensibilities.

For heaven's sake, why? A very motivated and very, very pissed-off electorate just howled that it has had enough -- enough of Bush's anticonstitutional crimes, enough of a pointless war, enough of middle-class stagnation, enough of utter inattention to a miserable healthcare system, fiscal insanity, environmental ruination.... Good God, one could go on and on.

But what does the Democratic leadership propose?

Timidity -- timidity bundled in heaps of mind-numbing, inscrutable tax credits and wrapped in vague, cautious references to "oversight."

Rather than first unfolding a million-word bill on some byzantine, college-tuition tax credit, it seems to me this had-enough electorate would prefer, or at least happily tolerate, a Democratic dumptruck unloading a mountain of tidy subpoenas on the White House. Here's some "oversight" for you, Mr. Bush.

But what do I know? I misread this election and perhaps I'm now misreading the electorate's mood. Maybe timidity, tax credits, new committee nameplates and the occasional request for accountability are all it wants. And maybe that's the smart political thing to do.

Aside from the politics of it, however, I do know what's right -- "right" being a little item too-often alien to politics. And what's right is an aggressively Nixonesque but exquisitely legal, street-fighting assault on the antiAmerican, anticonstitutional Bush Gang.

Before it's too late.

Bush-Cheney's dishonesty factory

In the NYT's Sunday Book Review, columnist and editor Michael Kinsley takes a worthwhile romp through that particularly depressing section of your neighborhood bookstore that asks and proposes to answer: What's wrong with our democracy?

The short answer, of course, is "Everything." Nevertheless for more than 4000 words Kinsley perseveres, pondering the oft-cited flaws of "electoral irregularities, purposeful or accidental;" the pernicious influence of "money;" the somewhat comical, "inexplicable failure of all other Americans to vote my way;" and politicians' "broken promises and ... outright lying."

All these are problematic enough, but which is "the biggest flaw"? In weighing them, Kinsley rejects each in favor of his own conclusion: "the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe."

I'm a trifle fuzzy on the differentiation between "outright lies" and "intellectual dishonesty," despite Kinsley's threading the argumental needle that "politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe." If you say something you "obviously don't believe," is it not an "outright lie" when you aver that you do, in fact, believe it?

Notwithstanding that debatable distinction, Kinsley has a point. Intellectual dishonesty -- and the politician's comfort of knowing his superficiality will go largely uncontested -- seems to be on the rise. The author notes the pregnant example of George W. Bush's legal team preparing in 2000 to piously argue either side of the electoral-college-vs.-popular-vote legitimacy debate, depending on which side it just might happen to land.

Following his victorious argument that any electoral college outcome is always, always democratically preferable to total votes cast, Bush moved straightaway and seamlessly into the presidentially intellectual dishonesty that massive tax cuts were needed not because things were so good, as he had lectured us for two years, but, indeed, because things were so bad. He never even broke stride. It was a thing of beauty to oppressed, struggling sophists of the world.

Space doesn't permit a full chronology of our president's intellectually dishonest journey, so I'll further note only the latest, which he's navigating with expert co-pilot Dick Cheney.

Right on the heels of Bush's pre-election assurances to the broad and very nervous electorate that his administration is not about "staying the course" in Iraq, and never has been, Cheney assured the administration's base scattered among ABC News' audience that it's “Full speed ahead.” “It may not be popular with the public" -- wink, wink, my warmongering friends who may be thinking not of staying the course, but of staying at home Tuesday -- but “it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

And that's how brazen politics' intellectual dishonesty has become. In a double-sided, one-two punching, hypocritically flip-flopping, simultaneously contradictory, Janus-faced p.r. thrust, the administration argues both stay the course and anything but stay the course. At least Cheney's argument has the merit of being truthful, but it's a choreographed truth dropped on a vital, targeted audience in the overall commission of a broader lie.

Parenthetically, in the same interview Cheney "declined comment" about "Richard N. Perle and Ken Adelman [recently telling] Vanity Fair magazine that they would not have supported the invasion if they had known how 'incompetently' the administration would manage it," protesting "that he had not read the article." Have you ever noticed that Cheney never quite gets around to reading anything critical of the administration? Ever? That tired tactic is Cheney's own excessively preferred method of intellectual dishonesty.

Kinsley undoubtedly scores defensible debating points in arguing intellectual dishonesty as "the biggest flaw" in our democracy. Still, to me, upsetting that argument's supremacy are troublesome chickens and eggs.

For any successful purveyor of intellectual dishonesty there must be a thriving market -- hordes of buyers personified by willful ignorance. Quite simply, Bush-Cheney could not -- and would not -- peddle coeval, contradictory arguments for insane tax cuts and insane wars if a vast and receptive audience wasn't around to blindly lap them up.

And that, it seems to me, is "the biggest flaw" of our democracy: those half-the-voters-plus-one who either don't know, or don't care, that their leaders are littering the land with patent nonsense. That also happened to be the chief cause of worry among the Founding Fathers.

I remain cautiously pessimistic, but maybe tomorrow will prove us both wrong -- at least till the next election cycle.