Assessing the Republican Field

My own inclination is to regard the field of Republican Presidential candidates as a bad joke -- the qualities of the various "first-tier" candidates an early indication that the Republican Party is undergoing a process of self-immolation, which will not stop much before 2010 at the earliest.

But, of course, I am not a Republican, and I have no way to gauge the sentiment in the country, especially among the politically ill-informed. The outcome of the 2002 and 2004 elections makes me shy, and I am acutely aware that right-wing Republicans completely own and control the news media and the punditocrisy. Some people, who don't share my allegiance, like David Brooks and George Will, are also skeptical of the Republican field, and of Republican electoral prospects in the wake of the Bush catastrophe, but, hey, Joe Lieberman got elected in Connecticut.

It may be that a large part of the American electorate has not yet learned the hard lesson of Republican malfeasance, and that the country will find itself tested by yet another flirtation with Republicans in power.

In that spirit, I read Michael Gerson warning of hurricanes on the horizon: "With the same rootless confidence that causes people to ignore hurricane warnings, many social conservatives remain in denial about Rudy Giuliani's chances of winning the Republican nomination."

I think Gerson has Guiliani's number: "Giuliani is a Nixon Republican."

chutzpah

A political storm, as I have explained before, is a bit of political theatre and storytelling, in which the nation, hopefully, learns from its mistakes.

The nation certainly made a mistake, when it let George W. Bush crawl into the Presidency, and then confirmed the Republicans in control of the Congress in 2002 and 2004. The Republicans have led the nation into the debacle, which is Iraq, as well as further down the road toward national bankruptcy and corruption, and away from the rule of law.

The rampant corruption apparent in the Republican Congress, the catastrophic aftermath of Katrina and the debacle in Iraq brought on the political storm, giving the Democrats a remarkable sweep in 2006. The Democrats are now in charge of Congress (or are they?) and trying to stage-manage the on-going political storm.

But, the Republicans, with near-complete control of the news media, and near-control of the Senate, appear to be winning the political struggle to control the narrative accompanying the poltical storm.

digby at Hullabaloo:

You can't help but be impressed by the sheer audacity of their strategy. Since the November election, in every situation, the Republicans have responded by not compromising, negotiating or capitulating in even the most minor ways. They have instead aggressively upped the ante.

The Democrats won largely as a result of the public's desire to end the Iraq war. What did the president do? He escalated it. The Democratic congressional majority quite naturally wanted public oversight, the president offered private, undocumented "talks." Then, when the congress issued subpoenas to ex-staffers, the white house directed them not to comply. One showed up and testified incoherently, and the white house ordered the other one not to show up at all. Even when the congress asked for documents about Pat Tilman the president invoked executive privilege.

The Republicans in congress have not been any better. Today you see them completely reversing their recent position that the filibuster is unacceptable (recall their mantra, "elections have consequences") and bizarrely calling for a permanent filibuster on all Iraq measures, as if ending the occupation should require a super-majority!

I don't think the Democrats have fully internalized what is going on yet. As I wrote the other day, we are dealing with a political party that is employing a strategy of anarchy in which incoherence is used to flummox the opposition and confuse the media. They are confident (and likely right to be so) that this will never catch up to them because the media has ADD and today's political atrocity is forgotten by the next news cycle. By running circles around the Dems with obnoxious disregard for the congress and gleefully flouting their own precedents and rhetoric, the president and the Republican minority are almost daring the Democrats to try and stop them. Which is the point. They are going for the big narrative, which is the old stand-by that the Democrats are too soft to run the country: "If they can't stop Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, how can we trust them to stop Osama bin Laden?"

The question comes down to whether the Democrats will make sure the Republicans are held responsible for the mess they made or whether they are going to allow themselves to be held responsible for failing to stop them. The Republicans are betting that the public will blame the indulgent parents when the children run wild and it's a pretty creative plan for a party that has a deeply loathed president and monumentally unpopular agenda.

I wonder what the Democrats' strategy is?

I wonder, too.

Fear

Fears of a Tet Offensive in Iraq - Yahoo! News:

"The U.S. commanders in Iraq seem to sense some new horror for the country is near. On July 7, Gen. David Petraeus predicted that insurgents would lash out with spectacular attacks in the coming weeks, as the clock runs down on time ahead of the September progress report due in Washington. And yesterday Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the commander of U.S. forces in southern Iraq, echoed the fear when talking to reporters in the Green Zone. 'We're concerned about some kind of Tet offensive that's going to affect the debate in Washington,' Lynch said, harking back to the pivotal 1968 push by communist forces in Vietnam.
Today the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk witnessed one version of what an Iraqi Tet offensive might look like. At midday, a car bomb shook the city. Then came another blast, followed by one more. The coordinated trio of explosions left at least 75 people dead and offered a horrifying glimpse of the kind of organized assaults that American officials fear could unfold nationwide. Imagine a day in Iraq when catastrophic car bombs rip through not just one Iraqi city but several. "

If we leave, we will be morally responsible

Anne Applebaum - No Magic Bullets For Iraq - washingtonpost.com: "Perhaps these things would never have happened if we hadn't gone there in the first place -- but if we leave, we'll be morally responsible."

Above, we see displayed the narrative time-bomb being hurled by the complacent and the right-wing at all attempts to get the U.S. out of Iraq.

It is not a logical argument. It is not an analysis. It belongs to more closely to the category of hypnosis. And, it sets up the all-important stab-in-the-back theory.

Bush and the Republicans have created a catastrophe in Iraq, but the Democrats will become "morally responsible" for all the consequences, when they get us out.

Great.

Impeachment?

Two salients have emerged, heralding the more perfect, coming storm:

1.) War with Iran
2.) Impeachment of the President and Vice-President

The first -- war with Iran -- is, apparently, what Bush has in mind, or what people, who are paying too much attention fear Bush has in mind.

The second -- impeachment -- is how many people feel the present Constitutional crisis can and must be resolved.

Those advocating impeachment most strongly have "eschewed any political calculations or even any specific charges" to predict that the Constitutional machinery will, inevitably, lurch into action.

Excuse me, if I demur that no political movement occurs without calculation or specifics.

I don't know that I credit the notion that Bush is planning a War with Iran. There's a logic to it, and plenty of circumstantial evidence that Bush is determined to drum up war with Iran. I just find it hard to believe that even Bush could be dumb enough to start a war -- or, even more unwisely, permit a terrorist attack in the U.S. -- in an effort to restore his own power and popularity. The political backfire from such a hare-brained scheme might well bring down the Republic.

But, the idea that an impeachment will get underway, without a Capone charge -- some indefensible and unambiguous charge of wrong-doing, however irrelevant -- seems even more incredible than war with Iran.

War with Iran?

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter, testifying on February 1, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The depressing message

No matter how bad things get, just remember, things could be worse.

In the spirit of that cheery thought, let us recall that all of the earnest efforts being made in Washington, to get the U.S. out of Iraq, real soon now, are premised, as they must be, Constitutionally, on a withdrawal managed in its details by the same hopelessly incompetent President, who "planned" and "managed" the Occupation and Reconstruction.

Fred Kaplan at Slate:

A precipitous and total U.S. withdrawal from Iraq probably would have 'serious consequences.' Iraq could erupt into sheer chaos. (If you think the country's already as bad off as it can be, think back on Lebanon during the civil war or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.) This chaos could impel neighboring countries to intervene, either to contain the violence or to fight alongside their respective sectarian allies.

However, this warning is beside the point. Few Democrats, much less Republicans, want a rapid and total pullout, for precisely these reasons. The defecting Republicans are telling Bush—either directly or through his aides, who have been scrambling to Capitol Hill this past week—that the only way the congressional leaders might vote for a total pullout is if the White House forces them to do so. If Bush fails to present an alternative strategy—if the only choice Bush gives them is "Stay the course" or "Cut off all the funding"—the weary legislators might well call his bluff.

Like the moth to the flame, so our President is drawn to catastrophe.