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DANG…MAYBE I SHOULD POST ON POLITICS MORE OFTEN

Thank you to RealClearPolitics, Done with Mirrors, The Small Wars Council and Interact for the links.

A TIPPING POINT OR A TURNING POINT?

Not only has the field changed with the 2006 election but so have the choices. The question for everyone is whether this watershed rebuke by the electorate represents a tipping point toward disaster a turning point for something better?

President George W. Bush has to face the fact that he has not only been sharply reprimanded by the voters, as often happens to the Chief Executive in midterm elections ,but he has squandered the lease on power the GOP had in controlling all three branches of government. Never has a party worked so long for such power, used it for so little lasting effect and lost it as quickly as have the Republicans.

How the Bush administration acts over the course of the next two years will weigh heavily in 2008 to determine whether the voters who deseted the GOP wil return to the fold. While I genuinely admire Rumsfeld and feel his accomplishments as SecDef are being ignored by those who once were heaping accolades on him not long ago, his position was untenable as of this morning. Even the Congressional Republicans disliked him and if someone had to go, Rummy was highest profile stand-in to atone for the president’s mistakes. His departure – and the Democrats own weak position despite being flushed with victory -buys the administration a breathing space to reconsider their political strategies and style from top to bottom.

On the opposite side, the Democrats are to be congratulated for running a smart race in a technical sense and for avoiding their usual ideological self-destruction. The Democratic leadership talked moderate, walked moderate and ran moderates in GOP-leaning states instead of sacrificial lambs hailing from the lunatic fringe of liberalism. James Webb is literally a very conservative” Reagan Democrat” who, frankly, I am more comfortable with politically than his socially conservative Republican opponent. Two years ago, if somebody told us that Democrats would elect a James Webb, Rush Limbaugh would have been doing backflips.

If Pelosi and the Democrats listen to folks like Rahm Emanuel for the next two years and formulate a coherent and honest strategy on Islamist terrorism that actually involves fighting Islamist terrorists rather than patting down Scandinavian grandmothers at airports, they will be well-positioned for 2008. If the elderly liberal bulls, like Waxman, Kennedy, Leahy, Dingell and Conyers, who soon will be easing themselves into chairmanships, drive the agenda and wave ” bloody shirt” leftist issues to the ecstatic ululations of the Moveon.org/DailyKos wingnut base, then 2009 will see the inauguration of President McCain.

NOTE ON MACHINE VOTING

“I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.”

– William Marcy “Boss” Tweed

Boy, they really are an oddly designed piece of crap – though the machines used in Illinois, a least in my precinct, print an official paper ballot. While I voted in about a minute, the voters older than, say, 45, appeared bewildered by the computer format and took inordinately long to cast their ballot. I was bewildered by the bizarre hand-crank wheel user interface – who thought adding a feature from a Ford Model T to a voting booth was a good engineering choice ?

It would also seem that the ID code you need to enter coupled with the tear-off tab from the voters registration file pretty much would eliminate the secret ballot, if anyone cared to correlate the information. Maybe Dave can explain that feature to me ?

READING ACROSS THE BLOGOSPHERIC SPECTRUM

Cheryl “CKR” Rofer had a kind word for me in a lively discussion in the comments section at American Footprints ( much appreciated Cheryl !) in a post by Blake Hounshell entitled “Who Reads the Right?”. It is a short post that sets up an intriguing dialogue, so here it is:

“A short post of mine yesterday on Tapped — asking “why read conservative blogs?” — spawned a pretty good discussion, with thoughtful contributions from Ben Adler and Sam Rosenfeld. Even K-Lo noticed that Sam labeled the Corner “the Conservative Id.” Ben and Sam agree that the Corner is a particularly good place to check the conservative “pulse”–a microcosm, if you will, of a movement gone off the rails. There seems to be consensus among Tapped readers that the thoughtful conservative blogs are those that have spit up the Kool-Aid and broken with the Bush administration. I read a few of these, such as Greg Djerejian, who has morphed from a tepid advocate to a must-read critic of Bush and his team (especially Rumsfeld). I don’t read the American Scene too often, also recommended by readers, but I was pleased to see that Ross Douthat had recently dealt with what he calls “the Conservative Cocoon.” So, do our readers here still check up on what they’re saying on that side of the ‘sphere? I know Eric does, but perhaps only when he’s looking for hanging curveballs?”

Some of the commenters were quick to recognize the danger of cocooning, a phenomenon that is as prevalent among bloggers as it is deleterious. It’s dangerous to read things that make you feel too comfortable – even if you are largely correct on some issue, it dulls your wits not to expose yourself to a different perspective. By ” perspective”, I mean political, philosophical, methodological, cultural and so on.

Most “big name” blogs, Right or Left, I read off of Memeorandum. My current favorite “liberal” or ” progressive” sites, BTW, include Whirledview, Prometheus6, Progressive Historians and Kevin Drum -most of Kevin’s commenters these days are parrots and trolls, but Kevin lost control of the mob a long time ago, so I don’t hold it against him. The price of popularity is an increase in the nut factor. Better discussions occur at smaller blogs.

Even diversifying the spectrum of political blogs you read still leaves you stuck in a “political” frame of mind, so I like to peruse blogs or sites dealing with the sciences, information technology, psychology, area studies, futurism and business. I particularly favor anything brain or network theory related and I sometimes cruise over to Gene Expression , NuSapiens and -increasingly –tdaxp for genetic/Ev psych commentary. After enough of this esoterica or equally abstruse miltheory 5GW discussions, I’m ready to return to my roots and read some undiluted historical writing.

If I had more online time, I’d make an effort to vary the domains I explore even more widely, but, alas, there are only so many hours in a day.

GAMING THE ELECTION OUTCOME

Frankly, I have had difficulty mustering up the interest for this post.

Partly, this is due to my irritation with the Bush administration bungling Iraq and partly because I simply cannot discern which way the trends are actually going, beyond a general Democratic lead. With the media having overestimated the actual Democratic performance in 1994, 2000, 2002 and 2004, they have lost all credibility with me. Honest error swings in more than one direction, in terms of probability.

On the other hand, the Republican leadership has been so depressingly mediocre that they deserve to lose. If the GOP squeaks by short of total disaster it will have little to do with them and more to do with gerrymandering and the refusal of Democrats to offer anything new to the voters.

So, my guess, and I claim it is nothing more than that, is that come Wednesday it is a narrowly Democratic House ( 4-8 votes) and a deadlocked Senate – with control hinging on several bitterly contested elections where charges of voter fraud will be hurled and recounts ordered.

But I could be wrong.