The Day After

 

My Blogfather Hugh Hewitt puts it like this:

Congratulations are in order to the Dems who ran a skillful campaign that kept the focus on the GOP's scandals and away from the left's agenda. The GOP couldn't recover from Foley's repulsive conduct, and the enemy was willing to kill randomly in the run-up to the vote in order to demoralize an American public.

After an eventful night hosted by CNN and surrounded by some of our finest, Ed Morrissey is calling a spade a spade:

I don't think anyone can honestly look at the results tonight and say that we saw anything less than a trip to the woodshed for the Republicans. We may hold the Senate by the barest of margins, but the House is gone in a substantial manner. Some will make comparisons between this six-year election and those past (1986, 1974, 1958) and claim a moral victory in containing the losses, but that simply won't fly.

This is a big loss, and it will hurt the GOP and the Bush administration. Even if we do hold the Senate, we will have to find compromise candidates for the federal bench, and also look forward to more taxes and regulation. Free trade is a goner. The prosecution of the war on terror will get limited by a probable repeal of the Patriot Act, or at least an attempt to do so, and I'm very sure the Democrats will move to defund the operations in Iraq by a date certain in order to force a "phased redeployment".

And that's not even counting the myriad investigations that Democrats will launch against the Bush administration. Republicans will keep it from getting out of hand, but the Democrats will want to build enough damaging allegations to win again in 2008.

Ouch!!!

A surprisingly sane contribution from the Kossaks:

In the nation, this was a change election, and like in RI, change wins. As of this writing, the swing voters swung, and they showed up. the anti-wavers were wrong. Say hello to Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid is a strong possibility. Next comes is the bloviating about how conservative the wave really was. Moderation is the new conservative.

'Moderation' from the Kossaks... That's interesting. As a commenter over at Ed Morrissey's pointed out; "Every loss contains opportunity".

The Republicans now have an enormous opportunity to re-evaluate and get back to the base.

The Democrats have a very tough road ahead. Many who were elected ran to the right of their opponents. How do they expand their appeal in the South and West and not lose the base?

All they can do is play a 4 corners offense and try to get to the 08 general with out revealing who they really are...that's huge leverage for a smart GOP strategy.

The Dems cannot possibly survive being overtly hostile to the intelligence system now in place and will find it extrememly difficult to deviate radically from the current WOT strategy.

I personally believe this election result makes it highly likely that a Republican will take the WH in 08. The only question is what kind of Republican and how wide are the coat tails if any.

Tiger Hawk raises an interesting point in 'What does the election mean... for bloggers?':

Conservatives wrote about policy because they could do something about it or at least influence it, whereas liberals wrote about conservatives with the objective of removing them from office, a precondition to influencing policy from the left.

The question is, will that change now that the Democrats seem to have won control of the Congress? Will the existing large-traffic conservative blogs become more explicitly partisan, adopting the removal of the Democrats from power in 2008 as a core objective? Will the leading lefty blogs begin to talk about the substance of domestic and foreign policy, rather than continuing to beat on the gasping elephant in the corner?

Keep this question in mind over the next months and beyond as we are heading for the 2008 elections; well worth to focus our minds!

A bravely defiant Michelle Malkin urges us to remember Diana West's important speech, which she'd wished the President would have delivered when next addressing the nation:

Over the past few years, then, the United States has supported fledgling democracies in Afghanistan Iraq and the Palestinian Authority. We have proudly assisted in making free and fair elections possible in these places, and with excellent results -- at least with regard to the freeness and the fairness of the elections. But the fact is, when these peoples have spoken, what we have heard, or should have been hearing, in the expression of their collective will is that the mechanics of democracy alone (one citizen, one vote) do not automatically manufacture democrats -- if by democrats we mean citizens who believe first and foremost in the kind of liberty that guarantees freedom of conscience and equality before the law.

On the contrary, each of these new democracies has produced constitutions that enshrine Islamic law. Because Islamic law, known as "sharia," does not permit equality between the sexes or among religions, it is anything but what we in American consider "democratic." Indeed, sharia law endows Muslims, and Muslim men in particular, with a superior position in society. It also outlaws words and deeds that oppose this inequitable power structure for being "un-Islamic." From this same Islamic legal tradition comes the mandate for jihad (holy war, usually against non-Muslims) and dhimmitude, the official state of inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam.

With their devotion to Islamic tradition, then, these new democracies have, in effect, peacefully voted themselves into the same doctrinal camp as the many terror groups that violently strike at the non-Muslim world in the name of jihad for the sake of a caliphate -- a Muslim world government ruled according to sharia.

So be it. What I mean by that is, it is neither in the national interest nor in the national will for the United States of America to attempt to reshape such a culture to conform to our notions of liberty and justice for all. It is neither in the national interest nor in the national will to attempt to reform a belief system that animates this culture to conform to our notions of freedom of worship. It is, however, in our national interest, and must become a part of our national will, to ensure that Islamic law does not come to our own shores, whether by means of violent jihad terrorism as practiced by the likes of Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, or through peaceful patterns of migration, such as those that have already Islamized large parts of Europe.

The shift I am describing -- from a pro-democracy offensive to an anti-sharia defensive -- means a national course correction. Rather than continuing to emphasize the democratization of the Muslim Middle East as our key tool in the war on terror, I will henceforth emphasize the prevention of sharia from reaching the West as our key tool in the war on terror.

Tom Barnett would of course champion a pro-active course, and focusing on economic stimulants, first of which would have to be emancipating women from Islamic suppression; his are some very convincing arguments for this approach to be the most effective and efficient means of pushing back the Jihadist tidal wave both in the Middle East and beyond.

So, in the hour of reflection, we should also consider Barnett's rather blunt criticism:

The Bush Neocons led by Cheney have nobody to blame but themselves for this moment, primarily because they’re so G.D. stubborn and lacking in strategic imagination [...].

As you probably remember, Barnett has been pushing for a comprehensive shift in strategy, urging DoD to acknowledge, that the armed forces  (the Leviathan) are best equipped to fight and win wars, but that another, equally well equipped, well trained and, most importantly, well funded organization/department needs to step in after the fighting and manage the process of reconstruction, which he calls SysAdmin.

My problem with all these well laid out plans is Iran's well oiled machinery of terror in Iraq, or, to put it more in the abstract, its 'moral hazard', i.e. the presence of huge incentives for the Mullahcrazy to act in ways that incur costs that they do not have to bear. SysAdmin needs our Leviathan too, to first root out the murdering evil before they can work their administrative magic. Barnett continues:

Somehow, with Iraq, we just assumed we could take on the entire region on all once, instead of locking in gains as we went along (and cutting some deals and holding our noses and getting some necessary allies), playing the board with some fluidity instead of this same lock-step approach again and again (Rice’s amazingly ineffective talking-point diplomacy coupled with Cheney’s scary bluster from on-high, amplified now and then by Rumsfeld, who, despite his great skill in running the Pentagon, doesn’t have a clue on foreign relations).

Given Iran's moral hazzard, I somehow can't see how even the smartest and most carefully planned strategies and tactics could have prevented or avoided the current raw thuggery and brutality meted out by the Mullahcrazy's proxy jihadists in Iraq -- may God miraculously shift the Left's obsession with their fictitious enemy at home to the real thugs and smite the murdering swine...

Comments

[Steve]

We reap what we sow. The public, in particular independents and "Reagan Democrats", determined, not incorrectly, that the Democrats are better Democrats than the Republicans are. I don't think they want big government Democrats at all, but the only way they could stop the Republicans from acting like Democrats is by showing them the door. They also don't like scumbags. In some places, where independents and Reagan Democrats hold no away, scumbags like Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy will keep being eleceted. I take it as something of a positive however, that jerks like Bob Menendez in NJ actually had a fight. If we can remove the ethically challenged from the competitive states, that's something at least.

What's with the free-trade issue all of a sudden? Did any candidates actually campaign on it? Have the protectionists seen France lately? Think about the depression era USA and you wouldn't be too far off. Protectionism can save existing jobs...but it prevents new ones from being created. Who wins? Unions. Who loses? Everybody else, but the young in particular. Secure the border...but let trade flow across.

The war is with Sha'ria, I'm glad some people are acknowledging it. Unfortunately, the left won't ever wake up to it. We'd sooner see Katie Couric pronouncing that "Islam is a really a peaceful religion", just before her beheading by Islamic fundamentalists live on the CBS nightly news.

[gringoman]

The technocratic Global Guys think you can "buy out" a mad world by the Free Trade Dynamic, enabling everyone to get the kind of "goodies" which the rich countries have and even the Chinese are beginning to get. It's a nice theory. It surely warms the cockles of a capitalist heart which really wants to do good by doing well. The Harvard Business School (etc) GG's, consciously or not, are trying to fuse the Capitalist Ethic with Marx's Materialist Conception of History. As good Communist Bertholt Brecht put it, "First bread, then morals." It's the secret love tie between Marxies and Multi-Nationals, even Dems and Pubs, even George Bush and George Soros.

What? You don't believe it? Just because they think Georgie screwed up by getting too "militaristic" instead of accepting a purer form of "buy-out," including the monumental UN Oil-For-Food Grease-Works, instead of being just a clever military-loathing hustle man like Slick Willy who did more to get border-busting NAFTA passed than any Bush could have? Relax. You probably realize already that they all, including the Two Georges, just want to break down borders, really, and that would include not only the borders that still keep Mexico/USA/Canada from becoming---as gringoVision terms it---The Republica of North America. They also, in their Free Trader (certainly not 'traitor') idealism, want to break down the borders of Sha'ria, which keeps Islam a Medeival misfit in the modern world.

Meanwhile, as the smart Global Guys seek to save the world with "goodies" that everyone surely wants, it will be interesting to see their response to developments in the real world of human and even sub-human passions, e.g. the Mullah Bomb in Iran, which the West, to make the best of its disturbing sense of something like impotence in the post-testosterone era, is now beginning to accept as inevitable

As for yesterday's Election in our great proto-Republica, it's not-so-secret significance was largely in the one area that most separates the Two Georges: military intervention, especially as seen in Iraq. As gV put it earlier:

The American electorate has a clear choice: (1) Republican incompetence in achieving victory or (2) Democratic competence in achieving defeat.