US election analysis - a shitload of interesting stuff for you to read if you want

1. Thank You, America/The Guardian / UK

For six years, latterly with the backing of both houses of a markedly conservative Republican Congress, George Bush has led an American administration that has played an unprecedentedly negative and polarising role in the world's affairs. On Tuesday, in the midterm US congressional elections, American voters rebuffed Mr Bush in spectacular style and with both instant and lasting political consequences. By large numbers and across almost every state of the union, the voters defeated Republican candidates and put the opposition Democrats back in charge of the House of Representatives for the first time in a dozen years.

When the remaining recounts and legal challenges are over, the Democrats may even have narrowly won control of the Senate too. Either way, the results change the political landscape in Washington for the final two years of this now thankfully diminished presidency. They also reassert a different and better United States that can again offer hope instead of despair to the world. Donald Rumsfeld's resignation last night was a fitting climax to the voters' verdict. Thank you, America.

In US domestic terms, the 2006 midterms bring to an end the 12 intensely divisive years of Republican House rule that began under Newt Gingrich in 1994. These have been years of zealously and confrontational conservative politics that have shocked the world and, under Mr Bush, have sent America's global standing plummeting. That long political hurricane has now at last blown itself out for a while, but not before leaving America with a terrible legacy that includes climate-change denial, the end of biological stem-cell research, an aid programme tied to abortion bans, a shockingly permissive gun culture, an embrace of capital punishment equalled only by some of the world's worst tyrannies, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and his replacement by a president who does not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. The approval by voters in at least five more states of same-sex marriage bans - on top of 13 similar votes in 2004 - shows that culture-war politics are far from over.

Exit polls suggest that four issues counted most in these elections - corruption scandals, the economy, terrorism and Iraq. In the end, though, it was the continuing failure of the war in Iraq that has galvanised many Americans to do what much of the rest of the world had longed for them to do much earlier. It is too soon to say whether 2006 now marks a decisive rejection of the rest of the conservative agenda as well. Only those who do not know America well will imagine that it does.

The Democratic victory was very tight in many places, but its size should not be underestimated. November 7 was a decisive nationwide win for the progressive and moderate traditions in US political life. The final majority in the House will be at least 18. The recapture of the Senate, if it happens, will involve captures from the Republicans in the north-east, the north-west, the midwest and the south. The Democrats won seven new state governorships on Tuesday, including New York and Ohio, and now control a majority nationwide. Republican governors who held on, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Charlie Crist in Florida, only did so by distancing themselves from Mr Bush. The statewide Democratic wins in Ohio give their 2008 presidential candidate a platform for doing what John Kerry failed to do in this crucial state in 2004.

Claire McCaskill's win in the Missouri Senate race showed that Democrats can win a state which almost always votes for the winning presidential candidate. If Jim Webb has won the recounting Virginia Senate seat, Democrats will have gone another step towards re-establishing themselves in a changing part of the south. In almost every one of these cases, as in the Connecticut contest won by Joe Lieberman running as an independent, the Democrats have won by cleaving to the centre and winning the support of independent voters. The new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be the Armani-clad San Francisco leftwinger of the caricaturists' dreams but she heads a caucus that will demand caution on some of the baby-boomer liberal generation's pet subjects.

The big questions under the new Congress will be the way that Mr Bush responds to this unfamiliar reduction in his authority and whether the Democratic win will push the president into a new Iraq policy. At his White House press conference yesterday, Mr Bush inevitably made plenty of suitably bipartisan and common-ground noises. He had little alternative. But they rang hollow from such a tarnished and partisan leader. It will take more than warm words in the immediate aftermath of an election reverse to prove that Mr Bush is now capable of working in a new way.

The departure of the disastrous Mr Rumsfeld has come at least three years too late. But it shows that Mr Bush has finally been forced to face the reality of the Iraq disaster for which his defence secretary bears so much responsibility. As the smoke rose over the Pentagon on 9/11, Mr Rumsfeld was already writing a memo that wrongly pointed the finger at Saddam Hussein. He more than anyone beat the drum for the long-held neoconservative obsession with invading Iraq. It was he who insisted, over the advice of all his senior generals, that the invasion required only a third of the forces that the military said they needed. He more than anyone else is the architect of America's humiliations in Iraq. It was truly an outrage that he remained in office for so long.

But at least the passing of Mr Rumsfeld shows that someone in the White House now recognises that things cannot go on as before. Business as usual will not do, either in general or over Iraq. Mr Bush's remarks last night showed that on Iraq he has now put himself in the hands of the Iraq Study Group, chaired by his father's consigliere James Baker, one of whose members, Robert Gates, an ex-CIA chief, was last night appointed to succeed the unlamented Mr Rumsfeld. Maybe the more pragmatic Republican old guard can come to the rescue of this disastrous presidency in its most catastrophic adventure. But it has been the American voters who have at last made this possible. For that alone the entire world owes them its deep gratitude today.


2. Post-Election Etiquette -- by Molly Ivins/Truthdig

The sheer pleasure of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone after Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, not to mention the trashing of both Clinton and his wife—accused of everything from selling drugs to murder—all orchestrated by that paragon of manners, Tom DeLay.

Media Matters collected some gems of fairness. For instance, Monica Crowley with MSNBC, in the wake of John Kerry’s botched program, astutely observed “how lucky we are that he was not elected president. ... The Republicans remain the grown-ups, the responsible ones on national security.”

How many dead Americans has this grown-up war resulted in?

And how darling of Fox’s Juan Williams, upon learning that polls show the people favor Democrats on taxes, to say, “To me, that’s crazy.”

And how many times did Chris Matthews use the Republican talking points about Nancy Pelosi? Extremist, uncooperative, incapable, unwilling to work with the president.

So after 12 years of tolerating lying, cheating and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave with bipartisan manners.

Given Bush’s record with the truth, this bipartisanship sounds like a bad idea on its face. Go back to the first year of the administration, when Bush double-crossed Ted Kennedy in the No Child Left Behind Act. Think about it: You’ve said at the outset of your administration that you need cooperation to get anything done. Then you double-cross one of the senior senators of the other party when your re-education and labor agenda is dependent on him?

These people are not only dishonest, they’re not even smart. Not that I recommend nailing them at every turn, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to do it to Democrats. If what Republicans have been practicing is bipartisanship, West Texas just flooded.

OK, here’s what the D’s have going for them. New kids. Easy, popular first moves—for example, increasing the minimum wage. Republicans so inept that it’s painful. You want to look at some really, really basic legislation, try fixing the Medicare prescription drug bill. Or the bankruptcy bill. Or new dollar and trade policies.

Then we get to the real meat of this election. There are all manner of shuffle steps and politically shrewd thing for the D’s to do. But now is not the time to be clever. The Democrats won this election because we are involved in a disastrous war. We know how to do this: Declare victory, and go home.

I noticed when Republicans are forced to talk about how to end this, they tend to announce that it’s all hopeless: They have no ideas at all. Thanks, guys. Of all the options, I would say splitting Iraq into three states is least advisable. First, it puts us in the position of screwing the Kurds once again. Second, Turkey has serious objections to a Kurdistan. Third, Turkey is not a militia. Fourth, then you give Iran and Saudi Arabia a pawn apiece. And there’d be an unimaginable amount of future hassle.

Do I have any good ideas? Yes, but it’s not a solution. We need to start the Middle East peace process again. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because it’s what Bush should have done to begin with. Because we have to start somewhere.

(To find out more about Molly Ivins and see works by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.)


3. What the Democrats Should Do Now -- by Robert B. Reich

The 2008 Presidential campaign begins today. Whatever the Democrats do with their new-found congressional power over the next two years, it will be with the big 2008 prize in mind.

Some Democrats want to expose the malfeasance and nonfeasance of the Bush Administration – find out who really knew what and when with regard to weapons of mass destruction, Abu Graahb, Katrina, payoffs to Abramoff and all the other rot. That’s understandable, but it would be far better if Democrats used their new-found power to lay out a new agenda for America.

There’s no point digging up more dirt. Bush isn’t running again. John McCain, the Republican’s most likely choice to replace him, has distanced himself so far from the administration that no amount of dirt will soil him. Besides, the public and the media are already suffering from outrage fatigue. And the Democrats wouldn’t be credible, anyway. It will be easy for Republicans to dismiss their efforts as more of the same old partisan bickering. The fact is, the public is sick of mud-slinging. Instead of dwelling on what’s gone wrong, Democrats should focus on what to do right. For example:

Cut the Alternative Minimum Tax so it doesn’t slam the middle class, and roll back the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
Open Medicare to every American who needs affordable health insurance, and use Medicare’s resulting huge bargaining clout to reduce drug prices.
Bar companies from deducting from their corporate income taxes any executive pay in excess of $1 million a year.
Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation.
Reform Social Security by eliminating the ceiling on payments so people earning over $100,000 a year pay the same percent of their income as everyone else.
Raise fuel economy standards, eliminate subsidies to the oil companies, and use the money instead for basic R&D in non-carbon based energy.
Renegotiate the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gas emissions.
And while we’re at it, reaffirm the Geneva Conventions.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Democrats should use their new-found clout to offer ideas for tackling America’s hard problems. Even if these bills get vetoed by the President, at least they set out an agenda for where the nation ought to be heading.

That’s what the election of 2008, which starts today, ought to be about.


4. New Vermont Senator Not Standard Fare -- by Amy Goodman/ Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Bernard Sanders is the new U.S. senator in Vermont. He ran as an independent, but he is the first self-described socialist to be elected to the Senate.

In a fitting matchup for a socialist, Sanders' opponent was multimillionaire businessman Republican Rich Tarrant. As Sanders said before the election, "We are running against the richest man in Vermont, who will spend more per capita than anyone in the history of the U.S. Senate." And, as he pointed out, "I don't mind really if millionaires vote against me; they probably should."

I caught up with Sanders at a Pre-Election Victory Rally in Montpelier, the state capital, on the Saturday before the election. The packed high-school cafeteria was decorated with red balloons declaring the name by which he is known across Vermont: Bernie. One attendee looked at his free dinner of chicken and pasta and said, "This is the same stuff they fed me 20 years ago when I went here."

But Bernie, the candidate the diners had gathered for, is not standard fare.

With global attention focused on the control of Congress, and the prognosticating political pundits working at a fever pitch, scant notice has been paid to this Senate socialist.

Vermont, the small New England state known traditionally for its steady, stoic, plain-speaking farmers and pragmatic Republicanism, has also in the past 25 years proven to be an incubator for progressive politics. Vermont's congressional delegation is the only one in the country to vote unanimously against the invasion of Iraq. It's a delegation of three: retiring Sen. Jim Jeffords, whose switch from Republican to independent in 2001 briefly restored Senate control to the Democrats, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sanders. Sanders has been the point person in building Vermont's progressive politics.

Sanders is a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., with an accent and irascibility to prove it, but has been in the Green Mountain State since the late '60s. He was the first Senate candidate of the upstart Liberty Union Party in the early 1970s, where he secured a solid protest vote of 2 percent. Ten years and a few unsuccessful statewide campaigns later, Sanders won the Burlington mayor's race by 10 votes, and ushered in the Progressive Era of Vermont politics. In his political autobiography, "Outsider in the House," Sanders writes of that first mayoral campaign, "The coalition we had brought together -- low-income people, hard-pressed working-class homeowners, environmentalists, renters, trade unionists, college students, professors, and now the police -- reinforced each other. I cannot emphasize enough how important it was that we developed a 'coalition politics.' " (Why the police? They were union. The Burlington Patrolmen's Association joined the coalition after Sanders vowed to bargain fairly with them, unlike the incumbent mayor.)

How do his socialist policies play with conservative Republican Vermonters? "Truth of the matter is ... conservative Republicans don't have health care, don't have money to send their kids to college; conservative Republicans are being thrown out of their jobs as our good paying jobs move to China. And if you talk about those issues, you know what those people say? 'I want someone to stand up to protect my economic well-being.' Conservative people are very worried about Bush's attacks on our constitutional rights. So the job is to say, 'We're not going to agree on every issue, but don't vote against your own interests.' "

After eight years as Burlington's mayor, and 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Sanders is heading to the Senate. Senators have longer terms, more procedural power, a more prominent bully pulpit. Sanders has policy ideas that cross the simple partisan divides, that unite people by impacting them where they live. He thumbs his nose at millionaires, yet is joining the Senate, which has more than 40 of them. With a lame-duck president and nearly evenly split Senate, where coalitions matter and every vote counts, Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is poised to make a difference.

(Amy Goodman hosts the radio news program "Democracy Now!" Distributed by King Features Syndicate.)


5. Bush and Cheney and Their Disdain for Democracy -- by Matthew Rothschild/ The Progressive

November 7 gave President Bush a meal of comeuppance. Finally! After six years of ruling with Tory arrogance and terminal recklessness, Bush got the rebuke he so sorely deserved.

It is he who must own responsibility for the monumental changes in the Capitol, for when voters went to the polls, they did so with a purpose: to slap him in the face.

“Because of progressive principles, mainstream progressive values, as Ohio goes in ’06, so goes the nation in ’08."
—Sherrod Brown

Exit polls showed that 60 percent of the voters were angry or dissatisfied with his Administration. Almost the same amount disapproved of the Iraq War, with 41 percent strongly disapproving.

The voters also went after any Republicans tainted by the myriad scandals that attach themselves to those who consume too much power too quickly. A whopping 74 percent said that a concern about corruption was either extremely important or very important to them.

As hard as Bush and Karl Rove tried to make the issue about how untrustworthy the Democrats are, the voters were willing to take a chance in hopes for a change. This time, as opposed to 2004, the dirty depiction of Democrats as terrorist lovers did not sell. Bush and Rove went to that putrid well once too often. The Rove style (sleaze) and the Rove strategy (get out the far right base) failed.

Take “genius” off his business card.

November 7 was a victory for progressives all the way around. Most notably, Sherrod Brown’s defeat of Mike DeWine in Ohio demonstrated the power of the fair trade issue, and Bernie Sanders’s triumph in Vermont, making him the first avowed socialist in the U.S. Senate, affirmed the Wellstone style of grassroots organizing.

Progressives won on many statewide referendums, which should embolden the ranks. Arizona became the first state to turn down the gay marriage ban. South Dakotans defeated a crude abortion ban. The people of Missouri approved embryonic stem-cell research, an issue that was a winner all over the country for progressives. And in the six states—Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Ohio—where raising the minimum wage was on the ballot, it passed in every one. It’s not just the rightwing that knows how to use referendums anymore.

Now Bush has a choice. He can continue in his heedless ways, or he can make good on his long-ago promise to be a uniter, not a divider.

Don’t hold you breath on that one. Chances are that Bush will follow Dick Cheney’s lead again, and disregard the wishes of the people.

Cheney revealed the full length of his arrogance in his interview with George Stephanopoulos the weekend before the election. Asked about the Iraq War, Cheney said: “It may not be popular with the public—it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Such utter disdain for the democratic process is not new for this power couple.

“Together, we are going to turn this nation around." —Bernie Sanders

Right after the Supreme Court gave Bush the White House in 2000, he and Cheney disregarded the wishes of the public at large that they should repair the rift in the nation and govern from the middle.

Instead, they set out to ram their agenda down our throats.

High on that agenda was the Iraq War.

Then Bush and Cheney took the 2004 election not only as an endorsement of their decision to go to war but the final word on it.

“We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” Bush told The Washington Post in January 2005. Bush echoed that comment as recently as his October 25 press conference.

Bush and Cheney view the United States almost as a dictatorship that is authorized by a quadrennial plebiscite.

Their rhetoric and their actions flow from this profoundly anti-democratic belief.

Especially in foreign and national security policy, Bush and Cheney are likely to charge along their path. They are too invested in the Iraq War to pull out. And they may even, despite the election setback, proceed with their fanatical plan to attack Iran. That both courses are profoundly irrational and destructive may not deter them.

Such calculations don’t count.

The Democrats have a choice, too. They can exercise the power they’ve attained, or they can sit on it. They have an obligation to act. They must push a minimum wage increase and better prescription drug coverage. And they must be a backstop against further reactionary moves by the Bush Administration, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, giving more tax breaks to the top 1 percent, and imposing another rightwing Supreme Court nominee on us.

But they can’t stop there. They must bring the Bush Administration to account. To do so, they will have to buck the timid in their own party.

Even before the votes were cast on Election Day, leading figures in the party urged caution. Nancy Pelosi pledged that if she became Speaker of the House, she would take impeachment off the table. Paul Begala and Rahm Emanuel—the smart money guys, who are always playing the angles—talked about the need to move to the center. Harry Reid, before getting a night’s sleep on November 7, announced, “We must work from the middle.”

Says who?

Did Newt Gingrich work from the middle? No, and he achieved a lot for his party and his ideological agenda.

Cowardly Democrats fear that if they act in what is perceived as a partisan manner, they will lose in 2008. But did Republican partisanship, which reached its nadir with the Clinton impeachment, prevent a Republican from winning the Presidency two years later?

November 7 was the nearest thing to a mandate that the Democrats have had in a long time. Not to act on that mandate—not to investigate Katrina, not to investigate Iraq and Halliburton, not to investigate the Abramoff scandal, not to investigate the illegal NSA spying, not to demand impeachment hearings—would be an abdication of responsibility and a betrayal of their base.

Fundamentally, this is not about inflicting partisan pain. This is about exposing wrongdoing, pursuing corruption, restraining a runaway executive, resetting the balance of power, and restoring democracy.

For six years, Democrats suffered from a severe case of subpoena envy. Now they’ve got the power. Use it.


6. Republican Defeat Means the Iraqi Insurgency Has Won
Belligerent, ill-conceived interventionism has come to an end. For level-headed Americans it was a good day
By Simon Jenkins/ Guardian / UK

The ugly American mark two is dead. Overnight six years of glib European identification of "American" with rightwing fantasism is over. The gun-toting, pre-Darwinian Bushite, the tomahawk-wielding, Halliburton-loving, Beltway neocon calling abortion murder and torturing Arabs as "Islamofascists" has been laid to rest, and by a decision of the American people. Another McCarthy raised its head over the western horizon and has been slapped down. It is a good day for level-headed Americans.

Yesterday's result could hardly have been more emphatic. George Bush's election wizard, Karl Rove, said he would make America's midterm elections "a choice, not a referendum". The electorate declined. Certainly the spectacle was not always pleasant. These regular fiestas of participatory democracy make the European visitor's hair stand on end. They are politics as blood sport, all-in wrestling with no quarter given, Eatanswill on speed. The welter of dirty tricks, midnight robocalls, push polls and face-to-face confrontation contrasts with Europe's "new politics", a feelgood quest for the centrist voter.

I have watched many American elections, but still find myself shocked by candidates accusing each other in public and on television of corruption, homosexuality, lying, surrendering to terror, killing babies, favouring torture, associating with hoodlums and consorting with prostitutes. My favourites this time were "Brad Miller pays for sex but not for body armour for our troops" and, most savage of all, "Michael Steele loves George Bush". Achieving office in Britain is a stroll in the country. In America the participant must carry the one true ring to the land of Mordor. The game goes only to the strong.

I find this healthy. The electioneering technique pioneered by Rove eschews consensus. It splits electors into slivers of opinion, profiling them by what they watch on television, where they play golf, what car they drive, what they buy and where they pray. It then directs specific messages and canvassers to win their vote. The strategy has proved successful in the Bush cause in the past. It separates the person from the mass and responds to his or her fears and needs.

As such it purges politics of the accumulated sludge of power. The huge amount of negative advertising is distasteful, but demands that candidates defend themselves on their weaknesses as well as their strengths. An elderly man in the street, a declared Republican, smiled at the camera, shrugged and said simply: "My president lied to me." No wound is left unopened. The scrutineer of American politics is not the voter but the opponent. And internet fundraising has made resources available to any plausible candidate, not just the rich. As for this being the "dirtiest campaign ever", there have been plenty worse. Lyndon Johnson accused his opponent, Barry Goldwater, of wanting to blow up little girls with mushroom clouds.

So what now? Democrats campaigned against Bush and won a mandate to use their congressional power to curb his remaining two years in office. They took the House of Representatives by a safe lead and appear to have deprived the Republicans of a Senate majority. The argument, put forward in this week's Economist, that American government is better constrained when Congress is at odds with the presidency than when they are at one is about to be put the test.

The new congressional majority wishes to press ahead with a higher minimum wage, an end to pork-barrel budgets, an immigrant amnesty, energy conservation, stem cell research and reform to the spiralling drugs bill and welfare generally. Most of these measures may fall by the wayside, but they have behind them the winds of mandate.

A bigger challenge is to reverse the drain of power away from Congress and the courts to the executive under Bush. As the impeccably conservative Grover Norquist said in June: "If you interpret the constitution's saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws, you don't have a constitution: you have a king."

Such usurping of power is not confined to the so-called war on terror, used by Bush to justify any and every illiberal act. Congress must find a way of curbing federal spending, which has risen under Bush faster than under any president since Johnson. Otherwise a Democratic president in 2008 will endure agonies of retrenchment. Whether Bush will cooperate with such reform in the hope of rescuing his floundering presidency is up to him. The first sign of compromise is the departure of his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld - announced by a chastened Bush at his press conference yesterday - who has been facing a near-mutinous revolt of his generals against the Iraq war. However, the only Republican of any stature, Senator John McCain, is disinclined to come to Bush's aid.

American politics is suddenly open and interesting. California's Nancy Pelosi is poised to become the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives and thus third in line to the White House. She has already promised to cooperate with a shattered Republican party to salvage something from Bush's remaining administration. Round her is an array of plausible Democrats with their eye on 2008: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, a reborn Al Gore and a reputed "10% of the Senate" claim to be considering the presidential nomination.

They all have one item of unfinished business. A CNN exit poll of swing issues suggested Iraq, terrorism, the economy and corruption were of equal concern to voters, with the Republicans scoring badly on them all. The politics of fear has lost all its post-9/11 traction. Republicans mouthing dire threats of "Islamicists" under every bed are simply scorned. The most ferocious television ad I saw had a voice incanting that Americans were less popular, terrorism was worse, people were less safe, gasoline was more expensive, soldiers were dying and Osama bin Laden was still free - all because of the Iraq war.

Over 60% of electors want US troops withdrawn from Iraq now or soon. Reports from Baghdad indicate expectation and relief that American policy in that country is about to change. The US army wants to leave. The government ran on a pro-war ticket and suffered a resounding rebuff. At this point the insurgency knows it has won, however long it takes the occupying power to go. Retreat in good order is the best hope. An era of ill-conceived, belligerent interventionism has come to an end - by democratic decision, thank goodness.


7. For Republic's Sake, Pelosi Must Ponder Impeachment -- by John Nichols/ Madison Capital Times

When my friend Salli Martyniak heard that Nancy Pelosi would be featured on the CBS news program "60 Minutes," she got excited. Like a lot of professional women who have been turned into political activists by six years of Bush-Cheney-ism, Martyniak busied herself during the recently completed election campaign doing everything she could to end Republican control of the House. She put the right campaign signs in her yard, she hosted fundraising events, and she knocked on doors and made calls on behalf of the campaign to change the Congress. And she lit up at the prospect of the first female speaker of the House.

But when Pelosi's segment aired on "60 Minutes" three Sundays before the election, Martyniak said, "I was shouting at the television. How could she say that? How could she so miss the point of being an opposition leader?"

What was it that so infuriated my friend and millions of other Americans who want this election to be about holding an out-of-control presidency to account?

Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who surfed a wave of voter resentment against the Bush team into the speaker's office in Tuesday's voting, bluntly declared that it would not be the purpose of a Democratic House to restore the rule of law. She made her comment despite the fact that more than three dozen members of her own caucus - including U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison - have joined U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, who will chair the Judiciary Committee in the new Congress, in calling for an inquiry into possibly impeachable offenses by the administration.

"Impeachment is off the table," Pelosi declared, calling it "a waste of time."

A waste of time?

Not in the eyes of the American people. A majority of those surveyed last fall by Ipsos Public Affairs, the firm that measures public opinion on behalf of The Associated Press, agreed with the statement: "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

Given what has been learned over the past year about the deceits employed to guide the United States into Iraq and about the quagmire that has ensued, support for impeachment has undoubtedly risen.

So why has Pelosi been so determined to disassociate herself from talk of impeachment?

Is she fearful that challenging a president who is still popular with conservative voters will cause trouble at home? Spare me. Pelosi represents what may well be the most impeachment-friendly district in the country. On Tuesday, San Francisco voters approved a referendum, Proposition J, urging impeachment.

Since it is impossible to imagine that the House Democratic leader honestly disagrees with the merits of calling the president and vice president to account - especially when, if seen through to its conclusion, the successful impeachment of Bush and Cheney could make her president - she must believe that impeachment is bad politics on the national scale.

But is impeachment really a political loser? Not if history is a guide. There have been nine attempts since the founding of the republic to move articles of impeachment against a sitting president. In the cases in which impeachment was proposed by members of an opposition party, that party either maintained or improved its position in Congress at the next general election. In seven instances the party that proposed impeachment secured the presidency in the next election.

Pelosi's problem appears to be that she doesn't want to be accused of repeating the partisan misuse of impeachment that Republicans perpetrated in 1998 and 1999. But the misdeeds of Bush and Cheney are precisely the sort of wrongdoing that impeachment was designed to check and balance.

As a political reporter who has spent a good many years trying to unlock the mysteries of the Democratic Party, I contend that an openness to impeachment is not just good but essential politics for Pelosi and her caucus. The Democratic victory on Tuesday was not secured because the party proposed a bold agenda and won on it. Pelosi shied away from making presidential accountability a central theme of the campaign; arguably, she shied away from central themes in general - except, of course, the promise that Democrats will behave more admirably than Republicans.

To do something that will matter in the long term, something that will give Democrats the moral authority and the political pull that will allow them to correct the country's course, Pelosi and her fellow partisans must abandon the hyperstrategic politics of a contemporary status quo, which prevents surprises for entrenched officials, wealthy campaign contributors and powerful lobbyists. And the first step in that process involves embracing the oath members of the House take - to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

It is impossible to support and defend the Constitution in this era of executive excess while taking impeachment off the table. As long as impeachment is wrongly portrayed as the political third rail by Pelosi, standards of accountability remain low, and prospects for fundamental improvement in the national condition are diminished.

The benefit of an impeachment fight to an opposition party comes not in the removal of an individual who happens to wear the label of another party. Rather, it comes in the elevation of the discourse to a higher ground where politicians and voters can ponder the deeper meaning of democracy.

When the whole of a political party finally concludes that it must take up the weighty responsibility of impeaching a president, as Democrats did in 1974 but Republicans never fully did in 1998, its language is clarified and transfigured. What Walt Whitman referred to as "long dumb voices" are suddenly transformed into clarion calls as a dialogue of governmental marginalia gives way to discussion of the intent of the founders, the duty of the people's representatives, and the renewal of the republic.

When a political party speaks well and wisely of impeachment, frustrated voters come to see it in a new way. It is no longer merely the tribune of its own ambition. It becomes a champion of the American experiment. To be sure, such a leap entails risk. But it is the risk-averse political party that is most likely to remain the permanent opposition.

If Pelosi hopes to build a new and more vital relationship with the American people, she must overcome the irrational fear of presidential accountability in general and impeachment in particular that have so paralyzed Democrats. Tuesday's Democratic win resulted from the recognition by voters across the country that America needs an opposition party, not to reshuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic, but to turn the ship of state in a new direction. Pelosi owes it to Salli Martyniak and all the other activists who poured their hearts and souls into making her the next speaker of the House to put impeachment back on the table. She owes it to her San Francisco constituents, who so clearly favor impeachment. Most importantly, Pelosi owes it to the republic that as speaker she will have it in her power to restore and redeem.


8. This Marks the Beginning of an End - and the End of a Beginning
Time is up for Bush's foreign policy. The US must now try to forge a bipartisan, multilateral approach. Here's how
By Timothy Garton Ash/ Guardian / UK

Tuesday November 7 2006 marks the beginning of an end and the end of a beginning. A Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and a Senate too close to call, means the beginning of the end of the Bush administration and its unilateral, polarising style in foreign policy - exemplified by the now departing Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. More importantly, it marks the end of the beginning of a long struggle for which we do not yet have a generally accepted name. From now on, given the result of these mid-term elections, the mess that the United States faces in the Middle East, the scale of global challenges such as climate change and the rise of other great powers, American foreign policy will have to be more bipartisan at home and more multilateral abroad.

Five years after 1945, following a period of trial and error, the government of the United States produced a seminal national security memorandum, NSC-68, which set the course for a generally bipartisan American strategy in what we came to call the cold war. Five years after September 11 2001, the US does not yet have such a consensus - but its possible outlines may be found in the final paper of a programmatically bipartisan project on US national security based at the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton University.

With an idealism of which Wilson would have approved, the paper is entitled "Forging a World of Liberty under Law" - and its emphasis on the importance of law, both inside states and between them, presents a sharp contrast to the Bush administration's war on terror à la Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The international liberal order that this bipartisan group advocates would be founded on what the second president of the United States, John Adams, memorably called the "government of laws not of men". Attempting to combine Wilsonian idealism with Kissingerite realism, it takes on board many of the criticisms that have been made by lower-case democrats outside the United States and upper-case Democrats inside the US over the past five years.

Yet it is distinctly harder-edged than the position of many leftwing Democrats and democrats. The results of these elections suggest that is where many American voters want their government to be. The Democrats only did so well by fielding many centrist candidates talking tough on national security. Their outspokenly anti-war Senate candidate for Connecticut, Ned Lamont, was defeated by Joe Lieberman, who notoriously got kissed by President Bush for supporting the Iraq war.

The Princeton paper describes itself as an attempt to do collectively what George Kennan did individually in his famous "Mr X" article, prefiguring American cold war strategy. It argues that the three strategic priorities of American policy should be a secure homeland, a healthy global economy, and "a benign international environment, grounded in security cooperation among nations and the spread of liberal democracy". Liberty and law both need to be backed up ultimately by the use of force, so it suggests a "global counterinsurgency" strategy against global terror networks and tough measures against nuclear proliferation. It argues, however, that rather than overrelying on the single instrument of military force - perhaps the biggest error of the last five years - American policy should be multidimensional, "operating like a Swiss army knife, able to deploy different tools for different situations on a moment's notice".

The new strategy should fuse hard power and soft power, be grounded in hope rather than fear, focused as much on what happens inside countries as between them, and adapted to the information age of 24/7 instant communication. Its three central goals should be pursued through what it calls a Concert of Democracies, for which the authors even draft a possible charter. Major democratic powers such as India, Japan, Brazil, Germany and two unspecified African states should become permanent members of the UN security council, though without a veto. "As demonstrated by both reason and social science," it adds, "a world of liberal democracies would be a safer and better world for Americans and all people to live in." (I like the implicit distinction between reason and social science.)

It would be naive to suppose that this paper is going to become the basis of a new consensual strategy, any more than Kennan's article translated directly into NSC-68. There will be plenty more American politics around foreign policy between now and then. While George Bush and Dick Cheney are still in the White House, the rhetoric and the policy will change only so much - even with Rumsfeld's long overdue departure. A preemptive bombing campaign against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities remains a possibility. Moreover, Democrats in power could lurch towards political isolationism and, more particularly, economic protectionism. But the Princeton paper indicates the areas in which a bipartisan strategic consensus might be found, while these mid-term elections suggest that many Americans would welcome it. The United States may still be "two nations" on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, but red and blue are mixing on foreign policy.

What is more, this is an approach to which many fierce critics of the Bush administration in other democracies around the world could subscribe. Take a look at wws.princeton.edu/ppns/report/FinalReport.pdf and see what you think. Apart from the fact that it inexplicably omits climate change from its conspectus of "major threats and challenges", I think it's a very impressive attempt. But there remains a big question about how this strategy for a "benign international environment" and a Concert of Democracies is to be arrived at. Somewhere underneath the Princeton paper there is a sense that the United States should lay out a strategy for what used to be called the free world, as it did in the early years of the cold war. Where it leads, others will follow.

Yet the Princeton project's own analysis shows just how much more complex and multipolar the world of 2006 is than that of 1950, and how much more limited is the United States' ability to set the agenda on its own. If that is true, it follows that other democracies (and democrats in less free countries) should be involved in designing the strategy, not mere recipients of it. The report concludes with an insistence that the US should do more and better "gardening" among its allies - a favoured metaphor of the project's honorary co-chair, George Shultz - but it may be worth recalling that the rest of us are not plants.

As it happens, the two years of divided government in Washington, leading up to the next presidential election, will also be years of leadership change in other major democracies, with notable leaders such Manmohan Singh of India and Angela Merkel of Germany still relatively fresh in office, Gordon Brown about to move from No 11 to No 10 Downing Street, and a new French president due next May. To secure liberty under law, the United States needs to change not just its own strategy but the way it arrives at that strategy. The world's second largest democracy has spoken, but a Concert of Democracies can only be made by a concert of democracies.


9. We Voted for Peace -- by Katrina vanden Heuvel/ The Nation

End-the-war energy fueled the success of "Bring Our Troops Home" ballot initiatives in communities throughout Wisconsin, Illinois and Massachusetts on Tuesday.

In Wisconsin, voters supported the initiatives by a margin of more than two-to-one. In Illinois, even counties that were won by George Bush in 2004 voted to bring the troops home. And in Massachusetts, 36 legislative districts – representing 139 communities – voted on a resolution to "end the war in Iraq immediately and bring all United States military forces home." All 36 districts voted in the affirmative.

Not only did voters support explicit peace initiatives such as these, but they also came out in droves to vote for candidates who promised to bring our troops home.

"I don't think the voters could make themselves any clearer," said Steve Burns, Program Coordinator for the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice . "The voters get it – they know that the best thing for the American people and the Iraqi people is for us to bring our troops home from their country. Now it's time for our government to listen."

But getting our governent to listen will be no mean feat.

Tom Hayden suggests in a post today, "The Administration will continue the conflict into the 2008 election year…. The peace movement therefore needs to gear up for the 2008 elections, by establishing anti-war coalitions that no candidate can avoid in the primary states. The first four states – Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina – have large peace-and-justice constituencies."

Despite the clear verdict on Tuesday – that democrats, independents and many republicans want this disastrous war to end --and end now – many would-be leaders in both parties will shrink from the challenge of ending the bloodletting.

When these would-be leaders stand down, we must continue to stand up for peace.


10. Watching the US Elections from Canada
As I Lay Dying
By JOHN CHUCKMAN

Sadly, little coming from America's politics can fire my enthusiasm. During my lifetime, America has busied itself with the task of burying liberalism, reminding one of October's frenetic squirrels hunting and burying acorns.

The nation is pretty much at ease with ugly imperial government. Liberalism, and I mean liberalism in the broadest, richest sense of the word, is a topic of bathroom humor.

We read and hear a great deal about the Democrats' sizable victory in mid-term elections, and I suppose after six years of Bush's near-insanity, people have a right to a little excitement, although one is sobered by the recollection that the same people returned him to office just two years ago. At least, the world can be grateful that Bush has been hobbled for his last two years.

The Democratic Party has been all but dead for years as a meaningful national alternative. The party has no recognized national leader. It has no cause, no fire in the belly. It has been largely silent for six years while Bush rampaged through the world and literally peed on American liberties like a grotesquely-smirking, small-town sheriff. No President in history has shown so little respect for human rights, and with so little excuse, yet all the would-be defenders of the Republic, whether Congressmen or the Don't-Tread-on-Me crowd, have been no where to be seen. And Democrats like Lieberman or Kerry can hardly be distinguished from Republicans.

The Democrats have been elected because Americans are now sick of Iraq. Their enthusiasms die quickly. American expectations for the wars they start are perfectly captured by the image of Bush landing on an aircraft carrier with a big banner behind him saying Mission Accomplished. It's a blockbuster version of the Homecoming Game with guys in uniforms and cheerleaders and flags, and there is no hint of death or decay. Anything beyond that kind of performance is welcomed like the kid who couldn't make the team.

I doubt there is widespread concern that Iraqis still huddle in homes with no reliable electricity or clean water, no jobs, and fearful to step into murderous streets. I doubt there is much guilt over having killed half a million of them. I doubt there is guilt about running a secret gulag and torturing helpless captives. I doubt there is guilt about blood-spattered holes like Abu Ghraib. Because if there were such guilt, there would have been a revolt against Bush's criminal government.

The American tendency to quickly tire of things is mightily reinforced by the depressing consciousness of having lost. Americans are conditioned in the great booming engine of Social Darwinism they call society that there is no substitute for winning, and winning in a chest-thumping way. Losing is for losers, and loser is a favorite American expression of contempt for others. They hate losing, and yet the simple fact is that many of the conflicts into which they thoughtlessly are led end up lost.

I am sure Americans are tired of images and commentary about Iraq on television, tame as they have been deliberately kept. They're tired of knowing that cute little Steve and Susie graduating high school this year can't just join up to have their college paid and be heroes in uniform without risking their health.

The greatest horror Bush has inflicted on humanity, the suppurating body of Iraq, is unlikely to be attended by Democrats. They want the White House in two years, and they do not want to be left holding Bush's "tarbaby." Instead, they will scrutinize and highlight every twist and turn of Bush's bumbling, murderous efforts as he struggles to leave Iraq. American politics are just that brutal. No wonder there are so many wars.

(John Chuckman lives in Ontario.)


11. The 2006 Elections and the Coming Train Wreck
Blood on the Tracks
By ROBERT JENSEN/Counterpunch

As I stood in line for coffee on the morning after election night, a Democratic Party supporter ahead of me in line said, "Thank God this country is finally switching trains."

If only that were true.

On Election Day 2006, the U.S. public didn"t switch trains but simply ratified a different group of conductors.

It"s the same old train, on the same tracks, heading in the same direction.

This isn"t an argument that there are never any meaningful differences between politicians; sometimes it does matter who is giving the orders on the train. But on this day after the morning-after, it"s crucial for those with a critical perspective to highlight that this train -- contemporary U.S. society -- is barreling forward toward disaster, no matter who"s punching tickets.

Here"s the unavoidable reality: Our train is on an unsustainable course in cultural, political, economic, and ecological terms. In a predatory corporate capitalist economy in an imperial state -- a system that values the concentration of wealth and power, and devalues people -- certain things are inevitable:

--Our deepest values concerning justice and solidarity will be undermined by the anti-human values of capitalism and empire.

--Truly democratic politics, in which ordinary people have a meaningful role, will be subverted the concentration of wealth.

--An increasingly fragile economy mired in self-indulgent deficit and debt, with an artificially inflated currency, will start to collapse when our military and political power are unable to keep the rest of the world in line.

--The ability of a finite planet to sustain life as we know it will diminish dramatically in a system based on fantasies of unlimited growth marked by the glorification of domination.

The train moves forward, as the vast majority of Democrats and virtually all Republicans avoid these realities. Where can such a train take us? Pick your metaphor.

--It could be that the train tracks end at a cliff, or

--it might be that the train is heading for a brick wall, or

--perhaps the train will derail along the way, or

--maybe the tracks will simply end abruptly and the train will run into the ground.

If we don"t take radical action relatively soon, every ending we can imagine is likely to be brutal and violent, deadly not only for most of the world"s population but also for the non-human world. This isn"t irrational apocalypticism but a rational approach to the evidence in front of us. No one can predict how this will play out, but it will most certainly play out ugly unless we change the trajectory.

Many who would agree in some fashion with such an assessment will say, "Yes, but at least electing Democrats might slow down the train." With a reactionary right-wing Republican Party in total control, the train is hurtling forward at 100 miles per hour, according to this position, but with Democrats in charge the train might slow down to 90 miles per hour.

Theoretically they could, though I hear little coming from Democratic Party leaders that suggests they will pursue policies that will significantly turn from an unsustainable capitalism or a profoundly immoral empire. Instead, they talk of different strategies and tactics for managing those systems.

But, for the sake of argument, let"s assume that Democratic Party rule could slow down the train and buy us more time. If nothing is done to change the direction of the train, the end remains the same. So, the important question is, what can we do with that time -- not off in an abstract future, but now?

The small amount of time we might gain will be meaningful only if we confront the harsh reality that the systems that shape our world -- capitalism and empire, rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy -- are fundamentally bankrupt and indefensible, yet deeply rooted in our culture.

When I make this point, I"m often told by liberals and progressives that I"m not being realistic, that ordinary people won"t listen to such analysis. That"s not my experience. When I have tried to articulate this worldview in plain language in recent political talks, I have found that a growing number of people not only will listen but are hungry for such honesty.

Of course not everyone agrees -- not anywhere near the number needed for a mass movement right now, and certainly not a majority -- but one wouldn"t expect that in this affluent society in which many people are still insulated from the consequences of these systems. But more and more people, from many sectors of society, are facing these realities, and we are searching for a community in which to confront this together.

Our political work should focus on connecting with people on common ground, and then working to shape a radically new vision of justice and sustainability. The time for that is now; the direction and speed of the train dictate that we not put it off any longer. It"s time to dig in for what one writer has dubbed "the long emergency."

I think that in the two years to come before the presidential election, pressing this kind of analysis is the crucial political work for those committed to left/feminist/antiracist values and progressive politics. Rather than fussing about how to persuade Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean of the need for radical action, let"s take that message to ordinary people, who are more likely to listen.

This isn"t about who can be most radical for the sake of being radical -- it"s about whether we can be realistic. Such an approach cannot promise political transformation in the short-term, but I believe it is the only hope for our future.

(Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu)


12. Enforcers or Enablers?
Will the Democrats Become Part of the Problem?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It only took six years for Americans to comprehend George Bush and the Republican Party and to realize that the Republicans were not leading America in any promising directions.

Exit polls and interviews with voters across the country by CNN political analyst Bill Schneider show that the November 2006 election was a vote against both Bush and the war in Iraq. Schneider reports that voters did not even know the name of the Democrats for whom they voted. Voters said: "I am going to vote Democrat, because I don't like Bush, I don't like the war. I want to make a statement."

I believe that voters recognized that the peril of one-party rule is that political accountability exists no where except at the ballot box. With the Republican built and programmed electronic voting machines, even accountability at the ballot box was disappearing.
Americans realized that they had made a serious mistake giving power to one party, and they rectified it.

With Republican control of the legislative branch ended, Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was immediately swept from power. With the troops, generals, and the service newspapers calling for Rumsfeld's head, only the delusional warmonger, Vice President Richard Cheney, wanted to keep Rumsfeld in power.

It was a battle that Cheney lost. Cheney's defeat is an indication that reality has elbowed its way back into Republican consciousness, pushing hubris and delusion away from the control they have exercised over political power.

The lust for unbridled power proved to be too strong a temptation for normally cautious Republicans. The Republicans waved the flag and shouted "terrorist sympathizer" at every civil libertarian who attempted to defend the US Constitution, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions' proscriptions against torture, and America's reputation from a nazified US Dept of Justice (sic) and a president who behaved--with the approval of Republicans--as if he were above the law. In violation of his oath of office, Bush used signing statements to negate laws passed by Congress, not with a veto, but with his personal opinion. Bush, thus, elevated himself above the rule of law that has protected America from becoming a tyranny and made a mockery of the separation of powers that are a foundation of American liberty.

Americans may not have understood this as clearly as the Founding Fathers did, but the people recognized, however dimly, a problem and exercised corrective action. The question now is: what will the Democrats do?

The Democrats clearly have no mandate for their pet issues of gun control, homosexual marriage, and higher taxes--especially at a time when the average American is deeper in personal debt than at any other time in history and jobs are being offshored at a rapid rate destroying the economic prospects of the American people.

After the years of illegal war and the overnight destruction of civil liberties that were 800 years in their creation, the United States stands at a watershed. If the legislation that has been put on the books permitting spying on Americans without a court warrant, legalizing torture and self-incrimination, and repealing habeas corpus and the right to an attorney remains on the books, the United States will be a police state regardless of which party is in power.

If the Democrats are to make a real difference, their first task is to repeal the Orwellian-named "Patriot Acts," the torture legislation, the detention without court evidence legislation, and the right-to-spy and invade privacy without court warrant legislation. The White House tyrant needs to be quickly told that one more "signing statement" and he will be impeached, convicted, and turned over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague.

The notion that Americans can be protected from "terror" by giving up the Bill of Rights is absurd. Democrats are complicit in this absurd notion. Many were intimidated into voting for police state legislation, because they lacked the intestinal fortitude to call police state legislation by its own name. The legislation that has been passed during the Bush regime is far more dangerous to Americans than Muslim terrorists.

Indeed, the prime cause of Muslim terrorism is the US interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries and America's one-sided stance in favor of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Jimmy Carter was president, his even-handed approach made the US respected throughout the Muslim world. 9/11, if it was actually an act of Muslim terrorism, was the direct consequence of US one-sided meddling in Middle Eastern affairs.

When, and only when, the Democrats have erased the Bush administration's police state legislation from the books, thus restoring the Constitution, they should clear the air on two other issues of major importance. The Democrats must convene a commission of independent experts to investigate 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report has too many problems and shortcomings to be believable.

Recent polls show that 36 percent of the American people do not believe the report. Such a deficient report is unacceptable. 9/11 became the excuse for the neoconservative Bush regime to launch illegal wars of aggression in the Middle East. The 9/11 Commission Report is nothing but a public relations justification for the "war on terror," which in truth is a war on American liberty. As long as politicians with a police state mentality can cling to the cover of the 9/11 Commission Report, the Bill of Rights will remain endangered.

The other issue is the blatant corruption in the Bush regime's contract practices. So many contracts are tainted with their connections to Republican power brokers, including Vice President Richard Cheney, that the taxpayers are being fleeced on the level of the Grant administration. Indictments and long prison sentences are in order.

This leaves the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are lost. Both invasions were illegal. Those responsible must be held accountable.

The American prosecutors of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg emphasized, as Robert Jackson put it, that Germany's crime was not in losing the war but in starting it. Under the Nuremberg standard, to launch a war of aggression is a war crime. It is punishable with a death sentence.

As the wars are crimes, they must be stopped. Having overthrown a stable secular regime in Iraq, the US and its craven allies have no recourse but to accept that Iraq will break into three states: In the north the Kurds will unite with the Turkish Kurds, and Turkey will have to deal with the situation without US interference. In the south, the Shiites will have an Islamic regime similar to the government in Iran, with whom the Iraqi Shiites will be allied. The Sunnis will be isolated in the middle without any oil.

The US and Britain no longer have any role to play in the Middle East. As the King of Jordan predicted, there is now a Shiite crescent that runs from Iran through Iraq into Lebanon. This Shiite crescent is the most powerful force in the Middle East.

The Iraqi Sunnis can come to terms with Shiite power or be destroyed. The American puppet states of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates are faced with the instability that comes from being allied with the "hegemonic" West against their own people. It is up to their own wits whether they can make the transformation.

The US has neither the resources, the finances, nor the credibility to intervene.

The Israelis have isolated themselves with their genocidal policies against the Palestinians. Intelligent Israelis are already sending their children out of the country. Israeli peace groups have thrown up their hands in the face of the persistent intransigence of the Israeli government and the disregard of common sense. It remains to be seen if the Israelis can learn to care about anyone but their own kind. Israel can save itself if its political leaders will stop pushing Palestinians off of their own land by destroying their homes and orchards and murdering their children, thus turning more Palestinians into refugees. It would be easy for the economically talented Israelis to pull the Palestinians into prosperity, thereby ending the conflict. Are Israelis capable of the humane leadership required to create a place for themselves in the Middle East or are they forever wed to Mao's dictum that "power comes out of the barrel of a gun"?

Republican rule in the 21st century has devastated American civil liberties and American prestige and leadership capability. Can Democrats restore American liberties and leadership, or will a lust for power corrupt them, too, and cause Democrats to retain the police state powers Bush has created?

If the Bush regime's police state legislation is still law in 2008, the Democrats will have failed.

(Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com)


13. What Can We Expect from the Democrats?
The Repudiation of One-Party Rule
By ALAN MAASS/Counterpunch

Going into the midterm congressional elections, Republicans held all the power in Washington. But after the drubbing they got on November 7, only the White House remained firmly in their grasp.

The Republicans' 30-seat majority in the House of Representatives was turned around, into a Democratic majority of nearly 30 seats. Even more remarkable was the Democrats' near-total sweep of competitive Senate races, giving them a majority if razor-thin leads in Virginia and Montana held up through the final count and likely recounts. The Democrats also won enough governorships to take a majority of state mansions as well.

For millions of people who have opposed George Bush and his right-wing agenda for six long years, this election is a long-awaited cause for celebration. It represents a rejection of one-party Republican rule and the GOP program on a range of issues--corporate greed, political corruption, Religious Right fanaticism, and, looming above them all, the disastrous U.S. occupation of Iraq.

This is why the 2006 vote took on much greater importance than most midterm elections. A Gallup poll in the lead-up to the vote found that half of respondents were paying "quite a lot" of attention to the elections, the highest since 1994 when the Republicans took control of Congress in the so-called "Republican Revolution." Nearly two-thirds of people surveyed in Election Day exit polls said they voted on the basis of national issues, not local ones.

On those issues, the tide has turned dramatically against the Republicans. A USA Today poll survey found that six in 10 Americans were dissatisfied with "the way things are going in the country."

Exit polls showed almost the same proportion opposing the Iraq war, with the overwhelming majority of them voting Democrat. A succession of scandals culminating in the Mark Foley congressional page scandal took another leg out from under the Republicans--exposing the hypocrisy of party leaders who covered up for one of their own.

The right did have some successes pushing through ballot measures on hot-button issues such as banning same-sex marriage, making English the official language of Arizona and supporting the death penalty in Wisconsin--even in states where the Republicans suffered significant losses. As in 2004, these referendums passed not because masses of people embrace the Religious Right, but because Democrats ducked every opportunity to make the case against them--leaving the debate over them one-sided in favor of the right.

By contrast, the best news of the night on ballot measures--the sound victory for a South Dakota referendum to overturn a state law banning virtually all abortions--was the result of a grassroots effort by pro-choice supporters to win opinion to their side.

* * *

Already on Election Night, the professional pundits were spinning the results into a new conventional wisdom that Democrats won because they ran more conservative candidates.

In Indiana, for example, Brad Ellsworth, the Democrat who beat Rep. John Hostettler, brags about the "A" rating he received from the National Rifle Association. In North Carolina, Heath Shuler, who trumpets his evangelical Christianity and opposition to abortion rights, defeated incumbent Republican Charles Taylor.

But the idea that Democrats won because they were more conservative is as wrong-headed as the idea that the election represented no change at all.

The fact about the U.S. two-party system is that it normally presents voters with two choices--the status quo or "throwing the bums out." The Democrats became the beneficiaries of a mix of sentiments, most of them against Bush and the war, without doing much at all to present an alternative.

But in an election like this one, that hardly mattered. According to ABC News exit polls, 62 percent of Rhode Islanders said they supported the job that incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Republican, was doing. Yet Rhode Islanders voted Chafee out of office anyway--as a clear protest against Bush and the Republicans.

The Democrats did their very best to win this election without proposing any concrete alternatives on the Iraq occupation or other major issues. But among those who voted against the Republicans by voting for the Democrats, there is nevertheless an expectation that a Democratic Congress will make some difference.

According to a New York Times /CBS News poll, for example, nearly three-quarters of respondents say they expected U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Iraq more quickly under a Democratic-led Congress. The poll also showed that people expect a Democratic Congress to try to deliver a minimum wage, lower health care and prescription drug costs, and an improved economy.

But these expectations won't come close to being met if Democrats are left to themselves. As left-wing writer Joshua Frank pointed out on the CounterPunch Web site, two-thirds of Democrats in tight House races oppose even setting a timetable for troop withdrawal--in other words, "exactly the same position on the war as our liar-in-chief, George W. Bush," Frank wrote.

Even setting aside these party conservatives, though, the Democrats share much more in common with the Republicans than they differ on. As a party, the Democrats are the U.S. ruling establishment's B-team, coming off the bench to save the game after the A-team Republicans have nearly blown it.

Thus, on Iraq, the Democrats--when they say anything concrete at all--propose a repackaged occupation in Iraq, not an end to it.

The Democrats are not defining themselves as opposed to the Republicans, but rather as the not-Republicans--and that is a crucial difference. The party leadership wants to become the new "center" in American politics, uniting sensible liberals--so long as they've broken with inconvenient illusions that Democrats should oppose war or increase social spending or roll back tax break giveaways to the rich--with conservatives who were at home in the Republican Party until the right-wing kooks took over.

In an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Hillary Clinton used all the catchphrases we can expect to hear from Democrats for the next two years. "Americans are primarily pragmatic," she said. "We are both conservative and progressive. In the pragmatic center, you get people together; you listen, you learn; you don't draw lines in the sand."

Expect the Democrats to push for measures they know Republicans will be hard-pressed to oppose, like a long-delayed increase in the minimum wage--or, as House Majority Leader-to-be Nancy Pelosi never tires of repeating, implementing the national security recommendations of the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks.

But on the issue of the war, reports the Wall Street Journal , Pelosi "is privately trying to insist that liberals tamp down expectations of getting out of Iraq now. Democratic allies in the House say she wouldn't do anything to jeopardize the new recruits' electoral future, and by extension Democrats' newfound power."

* * *

The Democrats won't pose a real alternative to the Republicans--unless they face pressure from below. But the demise of Republican one-party rule in the 2006 election creates the potential for this pressure to build.

The right's stranglehold on politics has been loosened, opening up new space in the mainstream debate that can embolden people in their growing questioning of U.S. government policies overseas and at home.

On Iraq, Republicans and Democrats alike have vowed to seek a "new direction"--in other words, a Plan B that will repackage the occupation. But even a debate over pro-imperialist alternatives for Iraq will open splits at the top that can cast further doubt on the legitimacy of the occupation and give confidence to activists to press ahead with their ideas and activism.

Already, the movement of active-duty GIs and antiwar veterans has taken some new steps forward--these can serve to inspire a revitalization of the wider antiwar movement.

What's more, the Democrats' newfound power in Congress will force them to define their proposals more clearly--exposing them in the eyes of people who believe they represent a real alternative to the Republicans.

The key in all this will be to take advantage of every opportunity opened up by the crushing election rejection of the Republicans to rebuild the struggles against war and for justice and democracy.

(Alan Maass is the editor of the Socialist Worker and the author of The Case for Socialism . He can be reached at: alanmaass@sbcglobal.net)


14. Restoring the Good Nation -- by Laura Neack

In a public forum in May 2003, a well-informed and concerned audience member asked what could be at the core of our war in Iraq. She was not convinced about WMD or terrorist links even then. At a conference of international scholars in March 2006, another well-informed and concerned audience member (this time not from the US) wondered what would lead the United States to a war that was so out of line with the better things we promoted in the world. Different answers were given by different panelists, but my answer was the same at both events: we wanted revenge. Something in our collective psyche wanted revenge, we wanted blood for 9-11 and we were not too worried about whether this bloodlust would lead to justice. This answer made the first audience uncomfortable; the second audience (so much more intellectual) suddenly noticed that I had three eyes and perhaps horns and so could be discounted.

I don’t have three eyes or horns, but I still think my answer was correct. Our country was out for vengeance after 9-11. We sought it out and justified it even in its worst forms (think of Abu Ghraib or renditions). We got nasty in the world in the name of national security but felt less secure and more discomforted. Our politics at home got nasty and self-righteous as well. The era of “I got mine” politics was embraced and celebrated (even some religious groups preached pilates rather than good works). Meanwhile, in the small town where I teach and my husband practices psychology, the number of calls to local shrinks went up and up. We may have wanted blood collectively, but individually this impulse made us sick.

This week’s midterm elections may be the sign that as a country we’ve gotten over this recent illness, this recent need for blood. The Iraq war motivated people in cities, in the country and in the suburbs, in the red states and the blue, and in all four cardinal directions to demand change. Enough of the bloodletting was the clear message.

We also said enough to the politics of self-indulgence and “I got mine.” Too many members of both houses of Congress and even in our states reflected our illness at its most extreme and we finally said enough. And so on November 7 there was a much-needed house-cleaning in Ohio and Democrats took back a majority of governorships. A totally unreasonable and invasive abortion ban in South Dakota was rejected and minimum wage increases were approved in Arizona, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Colorado and Ohio. On the other side of the balance sheet, gay marriage bans also passed in many states, indicating that the fight for civil liberties and social justice is still far from concluded.

It is the case that our national illness might not be in total remission – much of the vote yesterday was polarized. But the prognosis is more promising than it has been for a long time. As a nation we may have turned the corner on our bloodlust, restored democratic accountability and put ourselves back on the course for decency, kindness and recovery. We were all implicated in the need for revenge, now we may all be elevated by the restoration of our better nation.

(Laura Neack is Rejai Professor of Political Science at Miami University in Ohio. Her book Elusive Security: States First, People Last has just been published.)


15. Elections Offer Hope for a Change in Course in Iraq -- by Erik Leaver

Back on February 15, 2003 millions of people across the globe made headlines as they protested against the impending Iraq War. While that mass mobilization failed to stave off that unpopular and tragic war, it's hard to believe that President George W. Bush will miss the message voters delivered on Election Day--it's time to change course in Iraq.

For the first time in decades, a foreign policy issue, the Iraq War, dominated the electoral landscape. Both in polls before the elections and in exit polling, voters were clear that their votes were cast for a change in Iraq. The Washington Post reported that, "Fifty-six percent of voters support withdrawing some or all U.S. troops from Iraq, which will embolden Democrats pushing for a pullout."

Iraq headed the agenda in states such as Wisconsin, Illinois and Massachusetts where "Bring Our Troops Home" ballot initiatives succeeded in every community in which they appeared. In Cook County, IL, 80 percent voted yes for Countywide Public Policy Referenda #3 which posed the question: "Shall the United States Government immediately begin an orderly and rapid withdrawal of all its military personnel from Iraq, beginning with the National Guard and Reserves?"

During the course of the elections, politicians on both sides of the aisle felt the winds of change in the air and began to speak out against the war. Anti-war Democrats led the charge but it was the Republicans making headlines as they began to turn against Bush. Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) shocked party loyalists in Washington when he called for firm timelines for Iraqi security forces to replace U.S. troops who are doing police work. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) acknowledged that, "We're on the verge of chaos, and the current plan is not working." Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) said, "It absolutely has to change. And that message should have been conveyed by the administration much sooner."

With Democrats now in charge of at least the House, and quite possibly the Senate, the $379 billion question is can they change the course and what would a new direction look like?

Over the last week, likely new House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) message shop was circulating talking points outlining a comprehensive four point plan:
Begin a responsible, phased redeployment of U.S. forces by the end of the year;
Pressure Iraqi leaders to disarm the militias and ensure an inclusive society;
Convene a regional conference with Iraq's neighbors to forge a settlement to divisive political issues and guarantee Iraq's sovereignty;
Convene an international conference to facilitate reconstruction.

Pelosi's plan draws from many of the best thinkers and strategists on Iraq and meets the demands from those at polls on Election Day to bring the troops home. With Iraq the top issue for voters, this plan should headline Pelosi's first "100 hour" agenda for the new Congress.

The House and Senate should convene hearings and carry out investigations that would be valuable in making the case for withdrawing troops and provide the oversight that has been sorely lacking. At least two hearings should focus on the probability of success for Bush's current course of "democratization" and building Iraqi Security forces. They should ask how many Iraqi troops are really trained and why the recent military operations in Baghdad failed, resulting in one of the highest death tolls to date.

Another hearing should focus on the effects on the U.S. military of staying the course until Bush's term ends, as he vowed will be the case in August 2006, and what the overall fiscal costs would be. And of course, hearings on the content of the Iraq Study Group (also known as the Baker-Hamilton commission because it's headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton) report should focus on their recommendation along with the other alternatives being suggested.

In addition to holding these hearings, Congress should form a war oversight committee as a new stand-alone committee. This panel would have oversight over contracts, war profiteering, military contractors, and be able to assess the management and conduct of the war. While hearings are a useful tool in monitoring the war, accountability mechanisms should also be adopted as a built-in enforcement tool that has been lacking throughout the entire course of the Iraq War.

Even if Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, a timetable for withdrawal would seem to be a tall task. Bush, after all, has vowed, "We're not leaving [Iraq] so long as I'm the president." But a perfect storm is brewing with the voters delivering a mandate for change, Republicans breaking ranks and the forthcoming Iraq Study Group report will likely outline a change in course. In addition, a new emergency spending request from the White House is rumored to be double that of any previous request at $160 billion shows no efforts by Bush to seek a new direction. As these events come to a head they provide the opportunity to change course and enact a bold plan to bring our troops home.

(Erik Leaver is the Newman Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the policy outreach director for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project)


16. Bush's presidential quagmire
Donald Rumsfeld's discharge continues a shake-up begun months ago -- and marks a major power shift in the White House. But is it too late for Bush to salvage his presidency?
By Walter Shapiro /Salon.com

WASHINGTON -- To update Tolstoy, George W. Bush's press conference in the wake of Tuesday's elections illustrated that every unhappy president is unhappy in his own way. Other presidents (Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and even Franklin Roosevelt) have in Bush's enduring description taken a "thumping" in the congressional elections midway through their second term. But no other modern president appeared before the cameras the next day in a mood that veered from contrition to manic giddiness -- and fired his defense secretary to boot.

In the annals of presidential truth-telling (a thin volume), there is no obvious precedent for Bush's startling admission that he lied to reporters when he offered Don Rumsfeld a strong presidential vote of confidence just before the election. As Bush tried to explain Wednesday, "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question ... was to give you that answer." Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution whose knowledge of the White House dates back to his days as a young Eisenhower speechwriter, called it "the honesty of the honest lie. Bush was telling the truth when he said he lied."

This was a gambit of a rogue politician, not a president whose stock in trade is that he is a straight-talking conservative. The shiv in Rumsfeld's back, belated though it may have been, was also at odds with Bush's image as a don't-rock-the-boat leader who prizes loyalty. Displaying a rarely seen Machiavellian side, Bush all but said that he had been in serious negotiations with former CIA director Robert Gates about taking the Pentagon job even before Rumsfeld was told that it was time to write his memoirs.

At the core of Bob Woodward's latest book, "State of Denial," was the mystery of Rumfeld's job security when even Laura Bush was privately raising questions about his fitness to continue. Woodward's implicit answer was the hidden hand of Dick Cheney. But what does it say about the new power realities in the White House when suddenly Rumsfeld -- an inflexible ideologue wedded to victory on the cheap in Iraq -- is axed to make way for Gates, an establishmentarian whose pragmatism seems at odds with the history-will-absolve-us certainty of the Bush inner circle?

The Gates selection is just the latest example of an unheralded retooling of the Bush administration that began, earlier this year, when Josh Bolton, the budget czar, was selected to replace the overmatched Andrew Card as White House chief of staff. This was a talent upgrade akin to the sooth-Wall-Street selection of Henry Paulson to replace John Snow at Treasury, or the choice of ready-for-prime-time Tony Snow as the new White House press secretary. This is not the stuff of TV specials and news-magazine covers, but it does suggest that the president is slowly learning the virtue of opting for competence rather than sticking with smug complacency.

Yet even if Rumseld, that reluctant retiree, has to be physically carried out of his office, he will still have his memories and the Iraq war. The Defense secretary will always be identified with the strategic misjudgments that have created the mess in Mesopotamia in the same way that Robert McNamara is forever linked with the Vietnam tragedy.

In fact, the obvious analogy to Rumsfeld's surprising return to the private sector is Lyndon Johnson crony Clark Clifford, a suave and hawkish Washington lawyer, moving into McNamara's Pentagon office after the Tet offensive in early 1968. Clifford quickly reinvented himself as a dove, resisting plans to send 206,000 more American soldiers to Vietnam. And while it took America another five years to extricate its troops (thank you, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger), LBJ was out of the White House within the year.

One of Johnson's trademark phrases was "I'm the only president you've got." As rancorous as the current divisions are in American politics, Bush has now entered that twilight zone in which he has moved beyond the will of the voters, yet he has a long 26 months still to go in office. So in a patriotic sense, rather than in a narrow political sense, the question must be asked: Can this presidency be saved?

There are parallels for a successful late-term adjustment in course, most notably Reagan bringing in Howard Baker as White House chief of staff in 1987 after the Iran-Contra scandal. But Reagan was the Gipper -- the conservative ideologue whom many liberals found difficult to hate. "Remember Reagan carried 49 states in 1984," said Stephen Knott, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs. "And to be blunt about it, people weren't dying over Iran-Contra the way they are in Iraq."

Bush's determination to govern as if he had a sweeping mandate even when he owed his presidency to hanging chads, and the Republican get-out-the-vote juggernaut in Ohio, has created wounds that will still be festering years after Bush has returned to the life of a semi-retired rancher in Crawford, Texas. The arrogance demonstrated by this administration when everything was breaking right for Bush does not leave the president with a reservoir of goodwill now that everything is broken.

Yet something is changing in this White House -- and it may be time to redraw those one-dimensional portraits of Bush as president. As Fred Greenstein, a professor and expert on the presidency at Princeton, said, referring to the press conference, "I think Bush is after a niche in the Guinness Book of Records -- for trying to reconfigure his whole style of governing when he should be a lame-duck president."

Make no mistake, 60-year-old presidents do not suddenly discover their cerebral side after they lose control of Congress. Nor is the course in Iraq clear or attainable now that Rumsfeld has finally been ousted. But, as he proved Wednesday, Bush is still capable of decisive surprise. And while he seems incapable of escaping the harsh judgment of history, he is not going quietly -- even as a lame-duck president saddled with a Democrat-dominated Congress, and unable to either win or withdraw from a brutal war of his own making.


17. Fall of the house of kitsch
Like Haggard and other GOP cultural warriors, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were empty historical characters -- faux "war heroes" who trafficked in style over substance.
By Sidney Blumenthal/Salon.com

The cultural crackup of conservatism preceded the final political result. For weeks before Election Day, prominent figures on the right threw themselves into their culture war only to be left in the trenches battered, scorned and disoriented. They were unable to shield themselves through their usual practices. Their prevarications were easily penetrated; derision hurled at their targets backfired; hypocrisy was fully exposed. These self-destructive performances were hardly peripheral to the campaign but instead at the heart of it.

The Bush administration and the Republican Congress could not defend themselves on their public record and urgently needed to change the subject. They required new fields of combat -- not the Iraq war, certainly not convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham, investigated Rep. Mark Foley or indicted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. So they launched offensives on Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease, Jim Webb's novels and gay marriage. Yet battle-hardened cultural warriors -- Rush Limbaugh, Lynne Cheney and the Rev. Ted Haggard, among others -- did not find themselves triumphant as in the 2004 campaign, but unexpectedly wounded at their own hands.

The president, vice president and secretary of defense, meanwhile, marched to their Maginot line to defend the fortifications of the "war president" and his war paradigm ("alternative interrogation techniques" ... "terrorist surveillance program" ... "terrorists win, America loses"). Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld behaved as though they were the latest in a straight line of descent from heroes past, inheritors of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill. Mythologizing themselves as they struggled to gain support for "victory," they sought to distract from catastrophe by casting deepening failure as inevitable success. Envious of the "Greatest Generation," they claimed its mantle. But elevating themselves into the latter-day versions of the leaders from World War II was delusional imitation as the highest form of self-flattery.

And now the first of the Bush "warrior-heroes" has fallen. Although President Bush had said he would keep Rumsfeld in his job until the end of his term, on Wednesday Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation, naming former CIA director (under the elder Bush) Robert Gates as his replacement. Currently serving on the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker, secretary of state under the elder Bush, Gates remains close to the realist foreign policy circle that has been excluded and dismissed for six years. With Gates' appointment, it appears that the father is at last being acknowledged by his son.

The cultural style of the Bush warriors is the latest wrinkle in one of the most enduring modes of antimodern aesthetic expression. "Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas," wrote art critic Clement Greenberg in his seminal essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in 1939. "Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times."

Kitsch is imitative, cheap, sentimental, mawkish and incoherent, and derives its appeal by demeaning and degrading genuine standards and values, especially those of modernity. While the proponents of the faux retro style claim to uphold tradition, they are inherently reactive and parasitic, their words and products a tawdry patchwork, hastily assembled as declarations against authentic complexity and ambiguity, which they stigmatize as threats to the sanctity of an imaginary harmonious order of the past that they insist they and their works represent. Kitsch presumes to be based on old rules, but constantly traduces them.

The Bush kitsch warriors have created a cultural iconography that attempts to inspire deference to the radical making of an authoritarian presidency. These warriors pose as populists, fighting a condescending liberal elite. Wealthy, celebrated and influential, their faux populism demands that they be seen however as victims.

Having risen solely by association with sheer political power and economic force (News Corp., etc.), the cultural charlatans become the arbiters of social standing (especially in a capital lacking a secure and enduring establishment). In Washington, the more status-conscious elements of the press corps, aspiring to the shabby fringes of the talk-show media (the low end of the entertainment state), often serve as publicity agents in the guise of political experts, and it is from this platform that they then derive greater status. Indeed, the conservative kitsch cultural industry is centered in Washington, where Republican political power has protected philistinism from the ravages of cosmopolitanism, unlike in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

Under Ronald Reagan, conservative kitsch was the last nostalgic evocation for a glowing small-town America before the New Deal, with its raucous city dwellers, brain-trusters and an aristocratic president gleefully swatting "economic royalists." Reagan drew his raw material for "morning again in America" from an idealized view of his boyhood in Dixon, Ill., where his father was the town Catholic drunk, rescued at last only by a federal government job. Reagan also had a well of experience acting in movies romanticizing small-town life, produced by the Jewish immigrant moguls of Hollywood for whom these gauzy pictures enabled them to assimilate into a country that had richly rewarded them but in which they remained outsiders.

Bush's America contains no nostalgic evocation of small-town life. The scion of the political dynasty, raised in the oil-patch outpost of Midland, Texas, where the streets are named for Ivy League universities, and whose family retained its summer home in its New England base of Kennebunkport, Maine, attended all the right schools as a legacy, one of the last of his kind before more meritocratic standards were imposed and religious and racial quotas abolished. George W. Bush's inchoate resentment at the alteration of the world of his fathers impelled the son of privilege to align with the cultural warriors of faux populism.

The pathology of Bush's kitsch is the endless reproduction of vicarious hatred of the "other," who is the threat to the sanctity of what kitsch represents. The "other" lies beyond the image of the lurking terrorist to the lurking Democrat -- "America loses." "You're either with us or with the terrorists," Bush said famously. You either have a "pre-9/11" mind-set or a "post-9/11" one, according to his strategist Karl Rove, who carefully set the terms of demonization. In the great act of kitsch, Bush et al. apotheosized their fiasco in Iraq into a battle against Hitler -- "appeasers" ... "Islamofascism." By impersonating a historical context, they projected themselves into it.

Unlike the kitsch before and during the Reagan era, the Bush warriors' kitsch lies beyond unintentional camp. Their kitsch lacks more than irony or self-consciousness. It is deliberately sarcastic, mean-spirited, fearsome and fearful. Their unbridled bullying reveals their deep fears within. Their personal disintegrations expose what they fear most about themselves. Whether it is accused sexual harasser Bill O'Reilly (the biggest right-wing TV star), thrice-divorced drug addict Rush Limbaugh (the biggest radio star) or closeted gay drug abuser Ted Haggard, their self-destructive patterns invariably emerge.

The results of exit polls on Election Night 2006 showed that the voters were most outraged by "corruption," as well as the predictable issue of Iraq. This revulsion at "corruption" was more than the sordid wheeling and dealing of the Republican congressional barons. It was disgust at the moral hypocrisy and false sanctimony of the cultural warriors and the transparent fakery of Bush's imagery. The fate of the Senate turned on many contests, including crucial ones in Missouri and Virginia. In Missouri, an initiative that would authorize embryonic stem cell research that could lead to cures of many diseases divided the candidates. Actor Michael J. Fox made a TV commercial for the Democrat, Claire McCaskill. Looking straight into the camera, with no imagery other than his constantly swaying body, racked with the effects of his medication for Parkinson's disease, Fox made a simple appeal wholly on the basis of the stem cell research issue. Fox was a promising young actor whose his career came to a halt when his disease seized control of him. Now he plays only himself. Immediately, Rush Limbaugh was thrown into the breach against the new enemy. Earlier this year, he had declared, "What's good for al-Qaida is good for the Democratic Party in this country today." Mocking Fox by spastically wriggling in his chair as he spoke on his syndicated radio show, Limbaugh told listeners that Fox's jerky movements were "purely an act" and that he'd whack him "if you'd just quit bobbing your head." In the ensuing uproar, Limbaugh steadfastly refused to apologize. He depicted his mockery and physical threats as expressions of conservative conviction: "I stand by what I said. I take back none of what I said. I wouldn't rephrase it any differently. It is what I believe. It is what I think. It is what I have found to be true." As the criticism built, he acknowledged: "So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act."

Limbaugh's act as an embattled profile in courage continued to influence his followers. In Wyoming, the hard-pressed Republican incumbent, Rep. Barbara Cubin, after a televised debate, vented her frustrations by turning on her Libertarian opponent, Thomas Rankin, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair. "If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face," she said. After apologizing, she explained that she had been inspired by Limbaugh's example in his attack on Fox. Cubin narrowly survived on Election Day. But, in Missouri, McCaskill ousted the Republican, Sen. James Talent, in an indispensable victory in turning the Senate Democratic. In Virginia, Sen. George Allen had planned for this race to serve as the trampoline for a presidential campaign in 2008, where he expected to become the consensus conservative candidate and thus the Republican nominee. His opponent, James Webb, had a résumé that not only included winning the Navy Cross in combat in the Vietnam War, and serving as Reagan's Navy secretary, but a career as an acclaimed novelist. His novels, based on his experience in Vietnam, are realistic, harsh and disturbing. For the beleaguered Allen and his Republican supporters, Webb's writings provided a source for out-of-context negative attacks. Scenes depicting unsettling sexual behavior were lifted to taint Webb as a pervert. Allen ran TV spots with Webb's words obliterated by huge red letters: "Censored." On Oct. 27, Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, who bills herself "Grandmother of the United States," but who is also an ardent conservative, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and ferocious former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Reagan period (during which he established her bona fides as a cultural warrior), appeared on CNN to discuss her new children's book, "Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America," and to attack Webb's novels. "His novels are full of sexual explicit references to incest, sexually explicit references -- well, you know, I just don't want my grandchildren to turn on the television set," she told interviewer Wolf Blitzer. In fact, in 1981, she had published a novel, written in the kitsch softcore pornographic style of a Harlequin romance, featuring a bisexual heroine in the Old West. To wit: "The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage -- no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were." The attack on Webb as novelist failed; he narrowly defeated Allen. On Amazon.com used copies of Cheney's novel are selling for $495.

In Colorado, as Republicans tried to muster support for their candidates through a statewide initiative against gay marriage, a homosexual prostitute named Mike Jones disclosed that the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, confidant and one of the most influential backers of President Bush, a participant in a weekly White House telephone conference call with evangelical leaders, was one of his regular clients for three years and also a purchaser of methamphetamine. After initially denying the accusations, Haggard resigned from his New Life Church in Colorado Springs and issued an apology. "I am a deceiver and a liar," he said. "There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." Haggard's self-loathing confession continued his projective campaign against homosexuality as satanic, even within himself. However personal his drama, the fallout had a political effect. In Colorado, Democrats took the governorship and a congressional seat.

At the White House, on Oct. 25, Bush summoned a gaggle of conservative columnists to the Oval Office. He confided in them his self-comparison to presidents past. "That's what makes this more difficult -- I don't know what Harry Truman was feeling like, or Franklin Roosevelt."

The day before, the White House had summoned dozens of right-wing radio talk-show hosts to conduct interviews with officials to rally the Republican faithful before the election. Vice President Cheney, interviewed by Scott Hennen of WDAY in Fargo, N.D., posed as the virile tough guy. Hennen asked Cheney if he was in favor of waterboarding detainees, an interrogation technique that is a form of torture. "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" "Well," said Cheney, "it's a no-brainer to me, but I -- for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in." For the next week, the White House issued a series of denials that Cheney had said anything about waterboarding or torture.

Rumsfeld, who had been holding forth for years about his fascination and identification with Churchill, on Oct. 26 held a peevish press conference at the Pentagon in which he said simply, "Back off." His analogies had run their course -- but by Wednesday he no longer needed them.

With their fabrication of faux identities, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were of a piece with the other cultural warriors. Fashioning themselves in the image of historical characters was ultimately fashion. Rather than the real things, they were impersonating the genuine articles. And after the judgment of Election Day, they were revealed as historical reenactors without the costumes.


18. The Thumpees Try Their Luck at the Blame Game -- by Dana Milbank/Washington Post

President Bush had many explanations for what he called the "thumping" his party took on Tuesday, but the most creative was the notion that his chief strategist, Karl Rove, had spent too much time reading books.

"I obviously was working harder on the campaign than he was," the president said at yesterday's East Room news conference. The reporters laughed. The Architect, who had challenged Bush to a reading contest, wore a sheepish grin and stared at his lap.

True, Rove will have to surrender his "genius" credentials after the GOP lost the House and apparently the Senate. But the recriminations weren't stopping at Rove's door. The president, who started his appearance with an admission that "I share a large part of the responsibility," went on to blame everybody else.

He blamed corruption: "People want their congressmen to be honest and ethical, so in some races that was the primary factor."

He blamed Mark Foley, whose name remained on the Florida ballot: "People couldn't vote directly for the Republican candidate."

He blamed ballot rules. "You could have the greatest positions in the world . . . but to try to get to win on a write-in is really hard to do."

He blamed Democratic organization: "I'm sure Iraq had something to do with the voters' mind, but so did a very strong turnout mechanism."

He blamed bad luck: "If you look at race by race, it was close."

Implicitly, of course, he blamed Donald Rumsfeld, by firing him as defense secretary in favor of the "fresh perspective" of Robert Gates.

And, not least, he blamed the uncomprehending voters: "I thought when it was all said and done, the American people would understand the importance of taxes and the importance of security. But the people have spoken, and now it's time for us to move on."

The president's performance fit neatly into yesterday's version of the post-election ritual in Washington: The winning side gloated, and the losing side pointed fingers every which way.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, the party's bantam rooster, barely waited until sunrise to start crowing. In a morning news conference at the National Press Club, he stood with hands in his pants pockets and used the word "extraordinary" nine times and "huge" 12 times to explain the triumph: "Huge night!" "Huge achievement!" "Huge step forward!" "Huge mark!" "Huge piece!" "Huge breakthrough!" Dean, who spent much of the election season squabbling over strategy with his fellow Democrats, boasted: "We all worked together, and it came out great."

Republicans were equally determined to show their disunity. While Dean spoke, conservative leaders held dueling news conferences in other rooms at the press club. Their theme: Blame the party, not us. "This was not a repudiation of conservatives," said Pat Toomey, a former GOP congressman. "It was a rejection of the Republican Party." At the rival conservative event across the hall, Richard Viguerie was condemning "the failed big-government policies of President Bush."

GOP officials pointed the finger elsewhere. On Fox News, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said the party's vaunted turnout operation works only "in the very close races." Rep. Tom Reynolds (N.Y.), who led House Republicans' campaign efforts, said more Republicans could have won -- if they had acted more like him. "Just take a look at my race," he suggested. He blamed his colleagues for "self-inflicted wounds" and being "caught unprepared," and he blamed the "stiff wind" blowing in Republicans' faces.

The creator of this stiff wind, however, was in no mood for contrition. "Say, why all the glum faces?" Bush asked when he entered the East Room. In fact, his aides had worn exaggerated grins as they took their seats.

Clearly, Bush was trying to tone down the rhetoric from the campaign, when he said the Democratic "approach comes down to this: The terrorists win, and America loses." Yesterday, he voiced soothing notions of "consultations" and "bipartisanship."

But he seemed unsure how much to concede. He began by saying "Iraq had a lot to do with the election." He amended that to "Iraq had something to do with it." And finally he cited cases where "I'm not sure Iraq had much to do with the outcome." While he said "many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure" with Iraq, he looked puzzled when a reporter suggested that voters wanted the troops withdrawn. He said he was "making a change" at the Pentagon to respond to the voters, but he also said he was going to sack Rumsfeld "win or lose."

Likewise, he wrestled with the message voters sent on Tuesday. "If you look at race by race, it was close," he reasoned. "The cumulative effect, however, was not too close. It was a thumping." But when the New York Times' Jim Rutenberg repeated the "thumping" description, Bush bristled. "Let's make sure we get the facts," he said. "I said that the elections were close. The cumulative effect: thumping."

Ken Herman of Cox News teased the wounded president. "That was 'thumpin',' without a 'g,' correct?" he queried. "I just want to make sure we have it right for the transcript."