No Pride: The Left's Patriotism Gap

I noted previously, after the Texas primary, how Barack Obama claimed that young Americans today, traveling abroad, can't hold their heads high and proclaim: "I Am an American."

Obama's sentiments - which echo his wife's own anti-Americanism - should not be considered some peripheral issue bound to get lost in all the talk of health care and national security. No, the question of pride in nation goes beyond specifics to the fundamental qualities of what we want in our president, an American president.

Obama's a powerful speaker, but his elegant, lofty words cannot hide the considerable specificity to his unpatriotism.

Jonah Goldberg reminds us to attend to the essence of Obama's spoken prose, and how his ideas reflect on the contemporary left:

'Unity is the great need of the hour. ... Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country. I'm not talking about a budget deficit. ... I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny."

So quoth Barack Obama in Atlanta on Jan. 20, but it might as well have been last week, so central is unity to his presidential campaign. And then there's Michelle Obama. "We have lost the understanding that, in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another," the would-be first lady told a rally last month. "That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done."

What is fascinating here is not the sentiment, but what's missing from it. The P-word.
To invoke patriotism seriously is to brand yourself either an old fogy or a right-wing bully. If Obama spoke about patriotism with the sort of passion he expends on unity, many would take him for some sort of demagogue.

But what on Earth could he mean by unity other than a kind of patriotic esprit de corps for the good of his country? Indeed, patriotism is far, far preferable to mere unity. (Mafia syndicates and terrorist cells are unified, after all.) Patriotism is a species of unity that has some moral and philosophical substance to it. In America, patriotism -- as opposed to, say, nationalism -- is a love for a creed, a dedication to what is best about the "American way." Nationalism, a romantic sensibility, says "my country is always right." Patriots hope that their nation will make the right choice.

If you read the speeches of leading Democrats before the Vietnam War, it's amazing how comfortable they were with patriotic rhetoric. "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country," stands foursquare against so much of our entitlement culture.

Vietnam, of course, changed that. "The tragedy of the left," wrote Todd Gitlin in his 2006 book, "Intellectuals and the Flag," "is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide."

Suicide might be strong, but the left certainly amputated itself from full-throated patriotic sentiment. Most Democrats speak mellifluously about unity but get tongue-tied or sound as if they're just delivering words plucked from a political consultant's memo when they turn to patriotism. (Virginia Sen. Jim Webb being a major exception.) Sen. John Kerry, who made his name vilifying the Vietnam War, suddenly wanted patriotic credit for the same service when he ran for president in 2004. His line at the Democratic convention -- "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty" -- was cringe-inducing. The words came out as ironic, almost kitschy. The message seemed to be, "I can play this game better than that chickenhawk, George W. Bush."

When Democrats do speak of patriotism, it is usually as a means of finding fault with Republicans, corporations or America itself. Hence the irony that questioning the patriotism of liberals is a grievous sin, but doing likewise to conservatives is fine. That's how then-candidate Howard Dean could with a straight face insist that then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft "is no patriot. He's a direct descendant of Joseph McCarthy."

See also, Mona Charen, "Obama's Self-Portrait."

Where's the Revolution? Wait Until November

We're having quite a bit of antiwar activity these days, but such action appears nowhere near the scale of 1960s radicalism.

For true revolutionaries, today's events signal the lost promise of radical left politics. Tariq Ali, a British public intellectual of Pakistani background, and a member the editorial board of the New Left Review, has an essay at the Guardian lamenting the failure of revolutionary action in today's left wing movement:

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.

If the Vietnamese were defeating the world's most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers: that was the dominant mood among the more radical of the 60s generation....

History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away. In the autumn of 2004, when I was in the US on a lecture tour that coincided with Bush's re-election campaign, I noticed at a large antiwar meeting in Madison a very direct echo in a utopian bumper sticker: "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam." The sound engineer in the hall, a Mexican-American, whispered proudly in my ear that his son, a 25- year-old marine, had just returned from a tour of duty in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, the scene of horrific massacres by US soldiers, and may show up at the meeting. He didn't, but joined us later with a couple of civilian friends. He could see the room was packed with antiwar, anti-Bush activists.

The young, crewcut marine, G, recounted tales of duty and valour. I asked why he had joined the marine corps. "There was no choice for people like me. If I'd stayed here, I'd have been killed on the streets or ended up in the penitentiary serving life. The marine corps saved my life. They trained me, looked after me and changed me completely. If I died in Iraq, at least it would be the enemy that killed me. In Fallujah, all I could think of was how to make sure that the men under my command were kept safe. That's all. Most of the kids demonstrating for peace have no problems here. They go to college, they demonstrate and soon they forget it all as they move into well-paid jobs. It's not so easy for people like me. I think there should be a draft. Why should poor kids be the only ones out there? Out of all the marines I work with, perhaps four or five percent are gung-ho flag-wavers. The rest of us are doing a job, we do it well and hope we get out without being KIA [killed in action] or wounded."

Later, G sat on a sofa between two older men - both former combatants. On his left was Will Williams, 60, born in Mississipi, who had enlisted in the army aged 17. He was sure that, had he not left Mississippi, the Klu Klux Klan or some other racist gang would have killed him. He, too, told me that the military "saved my life"....

Following a difficult period readjusting, Williams read deeply in politics and history. Feeling that the country was being lied to again, he and Dot, his companion of over 43 years, joined the movement opposing the war in Iraq, bringing their Gospel choir voices to rallies and demonstrations.

On G's right was Clarence Kailin, 90 years old that summer and one of the few remaining survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He, too, has been active in the movement against the war in Iraq. "Our trip was made in considerable secrecy - even from our families. I was a truck driver, then an infantry man and for a short time a stretcher-bearer. I saw the brutality of war up close. Of the five Wisconsinites who came to Spain with me, two were killed... later, there was Vietnam and this time kids from here died on the wrong side. Now we have Iraq. It's really bad, but I still believe there is an innate goodness in people, which is why so many can break with unworthy pasts."

In 2006, after another tour of duty, G could no longer accept any justification for the war. He was admiring of Cindy Sheehan and the Military Families Against the War, the most consistently active and effective antiwar group in the US.

A decade before the French Revolution, Voltaire remarked that "History is the lies we agree on". Afterwards there was little agreement on anything. The debate on 1968 was recently revived by Nicolas Sarkozy, who boasted that his victory in last year's presidential elections was the final nail in the '68 coffin. The philosopher Alain Badiou's tart response was to compare the new president of the republic to the Bourbons of 1815 and Marshal Pétain during the war. They, too, had talked about nails and coffins.

"May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relaivism on us all," Sarkozy declared. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics."

He even blamed the legacy of May '68 for greedy and seedy business practices. The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses". So the 60s generation is held responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, Northern Rock, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the "free market", a culture strangled by brazen opportunism.

The struggle against the Vietnam war lasted 10 years. In 2003 people came out again in Europe and America, in even larger numbers, to try to stop the Iraq war. The pre-emptive strike failed. The movement lacked the stamina and the resonance of its predecessors. Within 48 hours it had virtually disappeared, highlighting the changed times.

Were the dreams and hopes of 1968 all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries - utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe - wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, improved and crafted into a chair or a table. Now the tree, too, has gone.

I concede that perhaps Sarkosy went a little far in assigning blame for the collapse of contemporary morality.

But what strikes me about Ali's essay is that which he laments: The failure to completely and decisively follow-up the burst of radical agitation in 1968 with a full-blown world social revolution toppling the capitalist classes in the industrialized West.

Perhaps Ali's just a wistful intellectual, ensconsed cozily in the editorial offices of his prominent left-wing journal of literature and politics.

But for the people on the streets today, the call to revolution is their siren. Code Pink not only breaches ethical protocols with events like the bloodspattering of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but the group's also allied with America's enemies with its financial support for terrorist organizations in the Mideast.

Another contemporary radical organization, the ANSWER Coalition, is composed of neo-Stalinists committed to the revolutionary destruction of the United States. Adam Kokesh, an ANSWER activist, once called for the deployment of American troops against the U.S. government: "It's too bad [the military is] stretched too thin to strike America."

As Ali's essay suggests, today's radical activism hasn't reached the same levels of generational outrage of the 1960s. As of yet, for example, the antiwar movement has failed to bring an end to war in Iraq.

But that's not reason to think these people are without influence.

The antiwar netroots have had a significant effect on electoral politics, and their hope is to elect a radical to the White House in November. Their candidate: Barack Obama. It's no wonder too. The Illinois Senator's refused to renounce his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons blamed the United States for September 11. Indeed, Obama has a long tradition of residing on the fringes of anti-establishment politics.

Gerard Baker, last month at the Times of London, unequivocally called Barack Obama a "dangerous left-winger."

Perhaps the unconventional street protests for which Ali longs - direct action geared to revolution - have gone that way of the Edsel, to be replaced fortuitously by the growth in success of far left-wing poltics via the electoral process. Such a development has equally revolutionary implications.

As I noted earlier, the Democratic Party's Hollywood base has already moved on from the Wright scandal, working to again position Obama as the political superstar of the American left.

The radical blogosphere loves Obama, of course, and has never flinched in their support - indeed, they cheer Obama's regular expressions of anti-patriotism. The hard left sees in Obama the chance to establish a collectivist U.S. government, complete with all the anti-democratic accoutrements.

Beyond this year's regular election issues like the economy, health care, and the war, it's this larger ideological battle with the forces of nihilist radicalism against which American conservatives must contend.

The True Costs of War

As the United States closes in on victory in Iraq, I'm noticing a new twist among antiwar types: Criticizing, for political purposes, the total costs of the war - financial, human, even opportunity costs.

Check out Eleanor Clift's essay over at Newsweek for a bit of this theme:

The Democratic-controlled Congress is once again trying to change the course of U.S. policy in Iraq; once again they've failed. Without 60 votes in the Senate, the latest war-funding bill, passed by a narrow margin in the House and with a quarter of the money requested by the White House, fell short—and President Bush has emerged the victor. We've seen this movie before, except this time it has a new wrinkle: a huge drop in public consciousness about Iraq.

It's happened in part because American casualties are way down—even though this year has been the bloodiest since the war began. The news media have backed off in their coverage, paying more attention to a prospective military clash with Iran and the Musharraf meltdown in Pakistan than the day-to-day turmoil in Iraq. "The media requires change, and the story hasn't changed," says Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center. "People's mood about the war hasn't improved, but they aren't tracking it because they can't find it."

At a breakfast last week a reporter asked House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer if Democrats were so wedded to the story line of Iraq as a failure that they risked embarrassment if it turns out to be a success.

Whatever is meant by success in Iraq, it would have to be pretty spectacular to justify the $1.6 trillion that the war could cost by 2009, according to a report by the Joint Economic congressional committee, which includes such hidden costs as the interest on borrowed money to pay for the war and health care for tens of thousands of wounded. Administration planners assumed a certain number of injured and some dead, but not this many—not in a war billed as a cakewalk with grateful Iraqis strewing the path with flowers and candy. For the 3,859 fallen soldiers and their families, the cost, as they say in that American Express commercial, is priceless. With the exception of Cindy Sheehan, who took her rage public after losing her son, these families are hidden from view, partly because of their own choice, but also because of administration policy banning pictures of returning coffins and a society that too often prefers to look away.

Clift concludes her essay with a cursory discussion of the Iraq war in current cinema. Recent feature films on Iraq have bombed at the box office, most likely because the public's not going for antiwar moviemaking nihilism. Therefore, Clift focuses on the poignancy angle, suggesting that some releases are offering stories of "pain, loss and coping."

That's all well and good, even necesary: No American should dismiss the hardship our fighting forces have sustained. But we ought not feel sorry for them, and heartfelt films on the war should not be presented as surrogates for some broader national antiwar sentiment.

We are at a turning point in the war, where all of the costs we've borne as a nation are redounding to the benefit of the Iraqi people and to America's increasing international efficacy.

But one wouldn't know this by reading Tyler Cowen's essay over at the Washington Post, "What Does Iraq Cost? Even More Than You Think." Cowen offers some useful ways of thinking about the enormity of the war's costs to American society (for example, opportunity costs: What might we have done with war resources in the absence of the conflict?). But Cowen's agenda is deeper. His goal is to impugn the administration and discredit the cause of toppling Saddam's regime. We thus get more claims along the lines of it's "a disastrous war" based on "administration lies."

After laying out the bottom line, here's Cowen's indictment:

Following your lead, Iraq hawks argued that, in a post-9/11 world, we needed to take out rogue regimes lest they give nuclear or biological weapons to al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups. But each time the United States tries to do so and fails to restore order, it incurs a high -- albeit unseen -- opportunity cost in the future. Falling short makes it harder to take out, threaten or pressure a dangerous regime next time around.

Foreign governments, of course, drew the obvious lesson from our debacle -- and from our choice of target. The United States invaded hapless Iraq, not nuclear-armed North Korea. To the real rogues, the fall of Baghdad was proof positive that it's more important than ever to acquire nuclear weapons -- and if the last superpower is bogged down in Iraq while its foes slink toward getting the bomb, so much the better. Iran, among others, has taken this lesson to heart. The ironic legacy of the war to end all proliferation will be more proliferation.

The bottom line is clear, Mr. President: The more you worried about the unchecked spread of doomsday weapons, the stronger you thought the case was for war in the first place. But precisely because you had a point about the need to stop nuclear proliferation, you must now realize that the costs of a failed war are far higher than you've acknowledged.

Ironically, it's probably the doves who should lower their mental estimate of the war's long-haul cost: By fighting a botched war today, the United States has lowered the chance that it will fight another preventive war in the near future. The American public simply does not have the stomach for fighting a costly, potentially futile war every few years. U.S. voters have already lost patience with the pace of reconstruction in Iraq, and that frustration will linger; remember, it took the country 15 years or more to "get over" Vietnam. The projection of American power and influence in the future requires that an impatient public feel good about American muscle-flexing in the past.

Even if the wisest way forward is sticking to our guns, the constraints of politics and public opinion mean that we cannot always see U.S. military commitments through. Since turning tail hurts our credibility so badly and leaves such a mess behind, we should be extremely cautious about military intervention in the first place. The case for hawkish behavior often assumes that the public has more political will than it actually has, so we need to save up that resolve for cases when it really counts.

Someone needs to break it to Cowen: This is a case that really counts. We are in Iraq to finish the job we began in 1991, and to enforce the will in the international community in sanctioning the Iraqi regime for frequent and egregious violations of U.N.-imposed sanctions. Rather than continue the tired old attacks on the origins and justification of the war, Americans need to be pulling together to compete the mission in national unity. That's the American way.

All wars are expensive, in all the financial and human totality of the word; and there's no discounting the burdens many Americans have shared in prosecuting this conflict.

But at some point the partisan rancor needs to stop. War opponents need to stand tall in facing our challenges, especially as a new American political alignment appears likely. The ulitmate cost of not doing so will be to continue the increasing and debilitating political polarization of foreign policy, precisely when the call of unity and purpose is at its loudest.

Brokered Convention Could Sink Divided Democrats

The Democratic Party's divisions this year are reminiscent to 1968, when the party, divided by Vietnam, saw rioting in the streets outside Chicago's summer nominating convention - unrest which presaged the party's general election defeat that fall.

Could a similar run of events befall the Democrats in 2008? Michael Cohen has a tantalizing analysis at the Wall Street Journal:

It has been more than five decades since any political party in America has had a brokered convention, and for political junkies a heated battle at the Democratic convention seems like a tantalizing possibility. But for Democrats, a protracted nomination battle, culminating in a convention fight, could undermine the party's hopes of reclaiming the White House this fall.

Since voters in Ohio and Texas breathed new life into Hillary Clinton's campaign, some have argued that the current stalemate will not hurt the party's candidate come November. After all, as several prominent bloggers have argued, wasn't the 1968 Democratic primary battle worse? Didn't eventual nominee Hubert Humphrey go on to lose by a mere 1% of the popular vote to Richard Nixon? If a bitter Democratic race hurts a party's chances in the general election, shouldn't Humphrey have lost by more?

The current struggle between Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama doesn't hold a candle to 1968. Forty years ago that race was capped by a "police riot" against antiwar demonstrators at the party's national convention in Chicago. However, the lessons of that year should be sobering for Democrats today.

Humphrey won the nomination only to find himself at the helm of a party divided between hawks and doves, blacks and whites, and blue collar and white collar. He wasted critical weeks trying to unite the party instead of laying the groundwork for victory in November. It wasn't until late September that he succeeded at bringing Democrats together by pledging a conditional halt to bombing runs against North Vietnam, and appealing to labor by forcefully attacking independent candidate George Wallace.

After, turning his fire on Wallace and Nixon, Humphrey's poll numbers dramatically improved and nearly won him the election. But in the end, his defeat was devastating for Democrats. Four years earlier, Lyndon B. Johnson had crushed Barry Goldwater with 61% of the popular vote. In 1968, Humphrey won just 43%. The nomination fight had exposed fissures that Humphrey was not able to close by Election Day, and which continue to divide Democrats.

While divisions among Democrats today are not as severe, a drawn-out nomination fight could leave the party critically short of the time it will need to build a winning campaign. Recent exit polls show that 20%-30% of Democratic voters will be dissatisfied if their candidate loses the nomination. Those numbers will likely increase if the battle between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama intensifies, and especially if it ends in a bitter squabble over delegates at the convention. Although Democrats are more ideologically unified than any time in recent memory, the party's nominee will still have serious fences to mend. Mrs. Clinton would need to reach out to blacks and first-time voters. Mr. Obama would have to win over blue-collar voters. Unfortunately, with the convention in late August, whoever the nominee is will have little time to unify Democrats. In just two months, he or she will have to bridge party divides while also rolling out a general election campaign against John McCain. As the kids say, good luck with all that.

Cohen doesn't mention the latest controversies stirring the Democrats, from Obama's Wright controversy to the Clinton campaign's call for a blogging backlash against the Obama campaign's planned assault on Hillary.

Not only that, Cohen might be downplaying the Democratic divisions this year. While we have not had massive antiwar street protests and violence on the scale of the Vietnam era divisions, much of the radical antiwar and oppositional sentiment is unleashed online. We're seeing a level of political alienation with establishment politics that rivals earlier eras, but is challenging in new ways.
The left blogosphere holds itself up as the new grassroots of the Democratic Party, mounting a puritanical campaign against big pro-war Democrats such as Senator Joseph Lieberman. If Barack Obama - who's the hope of the alienated left-wing fringe - ends up losing to Clinton at a brokered convention, the 1968 analogy could prove more powerful than many suspect.

Already, under-the-radar left-wing cells are planning for major "direct action" against the Democrats at the Denver convention in August. If radical organizations were to combine with larger numbers of disaffected groups - especially the same college-age cohorts who've turned out in massive numbers for Obama's nominating caucuses - the possibilty of a more full-blown 1968-style conflict can't be entirely ruled out.

My blogging buddy, Jan, who blogs over at Vinegar and Honey, forsees racial unrest on the scale of the Watts riots in 1965:

With the current racial divide in this country, it is not a stretch to think that if Senator Obama, for any reason, loses the election that there will be a revolt unequalled by any other that we've seen here. Again, I believe, the white establishment will be targeted, in the belief that the election was stolen from him in some way. Add to this the mindset that there is no justice for blacks, and that they still do not have equal rights.

I'm sympathetic to the argument, although I would suggest that rather than a localized, spontaneous revolt, a broader, underground movement to violently disrupt the Democrats in Denver could emerge as the result of months of planning among hard-line groups currently making up the nihilist antiwar organizational structure.

We're already seeing efforts to "recreate '68," so, again, possibilties are in the air, especially as more and more "insider" radicals - who regularly proclaim their solidarity with the world's socialist revolutionary forces - become increasingly disillusioned and more open to dramatically unconventionial (and potentially violent) political mobilization.

See also, the Politico, "Antiwar Movement Wrestles with 1968."

The Moral Abomination of Robert Farley

Some time back, I wrote about Robert Farley's review of David Horowitz and Ben Johnson's Party of Defeat.

Recall that Farley completely bombed in his attempt at making even the slightest dent in the Horowitz and Johnson's thesis, a thesis holding that the Democrats - pandering to their antiwar base - turned against a war they had nominally supported, an about face unprecedented in the domestic politics of American warfare.

Horowitz and Johnson show in exacting yet excruciating detail that today's Democrats have demonstrated a eager willingness to abandon objective national security threat assessments for narrow partisan political gain. Where once the party of John F. Kennedy led the fight against communism worldwide, the heirs of Democratic containment have sought to appease terrorism and coddle dictators. From Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, to Harry Reid and Barack Obama, at no time in our historical memory has a political party sought to weaken American standing in war and diplomacy abroad.

As I noted in my post, "Farley's essentially dishonest in his review," which was apparent in the baseless allegations he made in his essay alleging "the summary field execution of Afghan civilians" in the war in Afghanistan.

It should be no surprise now, then, that Farley acknowleges - in an essay today at the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money - his own unseriousness and shallow motivations for undertaking a book review of a serious study of American foreign policy - a book he knew in advance would fundamentally challenge his ideological beliefs.

Here's how Farley explains his approach to reviewing Party of Defeat, noting his response to an e-mail from Frontpage Magazine offering $1000 to formally comment on the book:

My first thought was "Have I read the book yet? Heh." My second thought was "$1000. That sure could buy a lot of whiskey sours." My third thought was "200. It could buy 200 whiskey sours, if I go to the right places. Maybe with a few Manhattans sprinkled in for variety." My fourth thought was "Hey, it could even pay for whiskey sours that I've already bought, and that are still hanging around on my credit card balance." It's fair to say, then, that I found the offer appealing from the get go.

I immediately IMed Matt Duss, who told me that the offer had been floating around the DC blogging/journalism community for a while. Duss (and others) had given thought to taking the deal, but then decided that engaging with Horowitz would grant him too much legitimacy. This, I thought, was true enough; it was the reason that Horowitz was willing to pay an outrageous sum for lefties to review his book. He was trying to buy legitimacy. The point was to create the illusion that there was something in Party of Defeat that was worth engaging with, and consequently that David Horowitz was a man of ideas, rather than a thug and second rate polemicist. As such, engagement with the work as meaningful scholarship could be fundamentally dishonest, in that it accorded the book a level of respect greater than the typical bar bathroom scrawl.

Given these sentiments, why accept the offer?

There was a certain comfort in the recognition that Horowitz' effort was transparent; taking the money to review the book was, in itself, subversive of the notion that Horowitz was a serious thinker. Of course, I would accept money to review a book that I had an interest in reading, but I would never read Horowitz were it not for the money.

Readers might carefully ponder all of this.

One thousand dollars is a great sum to write a brief book review, and self-interest alone might explain Farley's decision. Yet, if that's the only motivation, there's logically little need for an intellectual investment in performing what most would consider a professional obligation: to review the work with good faith and rigor. Yet, Farley's self-expose reveals nothing of the sort, as seen in his experience in first wading into the book after agreeing to write the review:

And so on a Monday evening I set out for the Mellow Mushroom with Party of Defeat and a yellow notepad. I ordered a pitcher of beer and a pepperoni, pineapple, and jalapeno pizza, and settled in, expected to read roughly a third of the book. And then, about halfway down the first page, I noticed a serious problem with my plan. The. Book. Is. Unimaginably. Terrible. You may think you can guess how bad it is, but you can't. It's Benji Saves the Universe Terrible. It's notes on each of the first seventy pages terrible. It's spitting up your valuable, valuable beer terrible. There's just nothing there. It can't be engaged with, any more than the homeless dude with the tinfoil hat can. It's a disaster, and I just couldn't understand how I could possibly come up with a thousand words that could conceivably be termed "engagement", and still have any pretence to intellectual honesty.

As I so often do, I sought solace in alcohol. I gave some thought to bagging the project, because I didn't think that the $1000 was worth having to do a genuinely dishonest appraisal. Then again, I'd spent some time and intellectual energy; I also really wanted the thousand dollars. Finally, I latched onto the idea of treating the book as if it were a work of historical fiction, or perhaps even the novelization of some crazy right wing movie.

I recommend that readers see for themselves what's so shocking in Party of Defeat. The introduction is here, and includes this:

What nation can prevail in a war if half its population believes that the war is unnecessary and unjust, that its commander-in-chief is a liar, and that its own government is the aggressor? What president can mobilize his nation if his word is not trusted? And what soldier can prevail on the field of battle if half his countrymen are telling him that he shouldn’t be there in the first place?

It was July 2003, only four months after American forces entered Iraq, when the Democratic Party launched its first all-out attack on the president’s credibility and the morality of the war. The opening salvos were reported in a New York Times article: “Democratic presidential candidates offered a near-unified assault today on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq War signaling a shift in the political winds by aggressively invoking arguments most had shunned since the fall of Baghdad.”

While American forces battled al-Qaeda and Ba’athist insurgents in the Iraqi capital, the Democratic National Committee released a television ad that focused not on winning those battles, but on the very legitimacy of the war. The theme of the ad was “Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People.” The alleged deception was sixteen words that had been included in the State of the Union address he delivered on the eve of the conflict.

These words summarized a British intelligence report claiming that Iraq had attempted to acquire fissionable uranium in the African state of Niger, thus indicating Saddam’s (well-known) intentions to develop nuclear weapons. The report was subsequently confirmed by a bipartisan Senate committee and a British investigative commission, but not until many months had passed and the Democratic attacks had taken their toll.[18] On the surface, the attacks were directed at the president’s credibility for repeating the British claim. But their clear implication was to question the decision to go to war—in other words, to cast doubt on the credibility of the American cause. If Saddam had not sought fissionable uranium in Niger, it was suggested, then the White House had lied in describing Saddam as a threat.

In the midst of a war, and in the face of a determined terrorist resistance in Iraq, Democrats had launched an attack on America’s presence on the field of battle. This separated their assault from the normal criticism of war policies.

The problem for Farley, seen in his original review, but also in his blog post, is that he refuses to engage Horowitz and Johnson at a genuine intellectual level. It's all a "conspiracy" to him, and thus easily dismissed as unworthy of rigorous engagement.

Yet, David Horowitz, et al., is hardly the first person to argue that the Democrats have relinquished any sense of force of backbone since the Vietnam era.

In 2002, a few presidential wannabes - like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards - and some Democratic partisans confused over changes in international politics - like Harry Reid - rode the tide of national outrage over 9/11 into a vote authorizing intervention in Iraq. Many others in the Senate did not. The House vote, further, saw a majority of Democrats oppose the legislation.

A good case could be made, therefore, that on a straight roll-call analysis, the party - with the exception of a few aberrant members - stood fast in its ideological framework in opposition to a war considered ill-conceived and hastily arranged.

Farley doesn't do this, however.

Instead, he attacks Horowitz himself as a wild-eyed bozo too crazed for a modicum of respect.

Indeed, as Farley admits at his post:

I decided simply to not engage at all with Horowitz' use of evidence; factual claims in the book were designed for "truthiness" rather than for truth, and trying to start an argument about Plame or McGovern or Reagan or whatever else wouldn't be productive.

To argue against "factual claims," it seems, wouldn't be productive, since Party of Defeat makes its case so well.

Farley basically throws up his hands in opposition to the book based on faith, and faith alone. Evidence in debate doesn't count when all-encompassing leftist ideology provides comprehensive, irrefutable answers to the universe. With Howowitz and Johnson as "truthers" - selling a conspiracy to justify a con of the American people - Farley can keep sucking back a few drinks and take the money and run.

And that's basically what he did.

Robert Farley pissed on David Horowitz. He wrote a cheap rebuttal to a genuine and serious work of critical research on the Democrats and Iraq, all because the book challenged untouchable leftist shibboleths. This is anti-intellectualism, at the least, and certainly outright fraud of the first order.

Farley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky's Patterson School. I know many untenured faculty members wouldn't put themselves this far out on a scholarly limb. No matter in this case, of course, as it's clear that Farley doesn't care one way or the other, not about reputation nor rigor.

This man's not only an academic mountebank, but a moral abomination as well.

Don't Blame the Neocons!

Alasdair Roberts has a ticklishly interesting article at the new Foreign Policy, "The War We Deserve" (by subscription).

He argues that it's foolish to blame the violence in Iraq on the Bush administration and a "small cabal" of neocons. In actuality, the American people are deeply implicated in the developments of American foreign policy over the last decade. Americans expect more of their government but don't like to sacrifice for a greater cause. Roberts argues that's an unrealistic way to fight a global war, and might even be deadly:

There’s an uncomplicated tale many Americans like to tell themselves about recent U.S. foreign policy. As the story has it, the nation was led astray by a powerful clique of political appointees and their fellow travelers in Washington think tanks, who were determined even before the 9/11 attacks to effect a radical shift in America’s role in the world. The members of this cabal were known as neoconservatives. They believed the world was a dangerous place, that American power should be applied firmly to protect American interests, and that, for too long, U.S. policy had consisted of diplomatic excess and mincing half measures. After 9/11, this group gave us the ill-conceived Global War on Terror and its bloody centerpiece, the war in Iraq.

This narrative is disturbing. It implies that a small cadre of officials, holding allegiance to ideas alien to mainstream political life, succeeded in hijacking the foreign-policy apparatus of the entire U.S. government and managed to skirt the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. Perversely, though, this interpretation of events is also comforting. It offers the possibility of correcting course. If the fault simply lies in the predispositions of a few key players in the policy game, then those players can eventually be replaced, and policies repaired.

Unfortunately, though, this convenient story is fiction, and it’s peddling a dangerously misguided view of history. The American public at large is more deeply implicated in the design and execution of the war on terror than it is comfortable to admit. In the six years of the war, through an invasion of Afghanistan, a wave of anthrax attacks, and an occupation of Iraq, Americans have remained largely unshaken in their commitment to a political philosophy that demands much from its government but asks little of its citizens. And there is no reason to believe that the weight of that responsibility will shift after the next attack.

Roberts notes that, ideologically, both parties converged on a model of "neoliberal" politics in the 1990s - a perspective which included a commitment to domestic spending restraint at home and the promotion of American-led trade liberalization abroad. Inherent in this model is the pursuit of individual interest and the downsizing of government. Roberts suggests George W. Bush firmly embraced the neoliberal outlook, and the administration's war policies subsequenty asked little from the public in terms of national sacrifice. Both parties are implicated, however:

It may seem extraordinary, given the experience of the past six years, to suggest that President George W. Bush’s administration pursued a Clinton-style strategy of accommodation to neoliberal realities. After all, key Bush advisors flaunted their determination to throw off the constraints that bound the executive branch. And the Bush administration’s policies have had cataclysmic consequences—in Iraq alone, there are tens of thousands dead and more than a million people displaced. How can we call this “small politics”?

However, we must first recognize the critical distinction between what the Bush administration intended to do, and what actually transpired. The material point about the planned invasion of Iraq was that it appeared to its proponents to be feasible with a very small commitment of resources. It would be a cakewalk, influential Pentagon advisor Kenneth Adelman predicted in February 2002. The cost of postwar reconstruction would be negligible. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz suggested that it might even be financed by revenues from the Iraqi oil industry.

Of course, there were critics inside and outside the U.S. government who warned that these forecasts were unduly optimistic. But the administration’s view was hardly idiosyncratic. There were many Americans who believed, based on the experience of the previous decade—including the first Gulf War, subsequent strikes on Iraq, and other interventions such as Kosovo—that the U.S. military had acquired the capacity to project force with devastating efficiency. Consequently, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the invasion and occupation of a nation of 27 million, more than 6,000 miles away, could be accomplished without significant disruption to American daily life.

Even the larger war on terror remains a relatively small affair, asking for little from its masters. Although U.S. defense expenditures have grown substantially during the Bush administration—by roughly 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms between 2001 and 2006—it is growth from a historically low base. In the five years after 9/11, average defense expenditure as a share of gross domestic product (3.8 percent) was little more than half of what it was during the preceding 50 years (6.8 percent). The proportion of the U.S. adult population employed in the active-duty military (roughly 0.6 percent) remained at a low not seen since before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This determination to execute policy without disrupting daily life was maintained even as it became clear that the war on terror was faltering. The U.S. “surge” of troops in Iraq beginning in January 2007, designed to wrest control of the country from insurgents, was advertised as a substantial increase in U.S. commitments in Iraq. In August, the New York Times called it a “massive buildup.” But by historical standards, it has been negligible. The United States had more boots on the ground in Japan 10 years after its surrender in 1945 and in Germany at the end of the Cold War. It deployed twice as many troops in South Korea and three times as many in Vietnam.

In 2003, the conflict in Iraq might reasonably have been described as George W. Bush’s war. In 2007, however, it has become a bipartisan war—that is, a conflict whose course is shaped by the actions of a Republican president and by Democratic majorities in Congress. The stakes are substantial: Continued failure in Iraq is bound to have tremendous human and diplomatic costs. Yet the range of policy options is still arbitrarily limited to a token “surge” or various forms of “phased withdrawal.” No major political actor, Democrat or Republican, dares to contemplate a genuine surge that would raise the U.S. commitment in Iraq to the level said to be essential by several military leaders before the invasion. Similarly, there has been no serious consideration of a return to the draft, despite strains on the U.S. military. This, the New York Times said—echoing the argument made by Milton Friedman during Vietnam—would be inconsistent with the “free-choice values of America’s market society.”

Roberts reminds us that the Bush administration's appeal to the public after 9/11 was to continue spending, to "Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed":

“One of the great goals of this nation’s war,” President Bush said immediately after 9/11, “is to restore confidence in the airline industry.” His administration quickly launched a “pro-consumption publicity blitz” (in the words of the Boston Globe) on behalf of the U.S. travel industry. The president starred in a campaign by the Travel Industry Association of America, designed, as one industry executive put it, to “link travel to patriotic duty.” Many Americans interpreted the campaign as a call to spend more money to boost the economy. “The important thing, war or no war, is for the economy to grow,” then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said in 2003.

I've been critical of the White House for not developing a more comprehensive approach to public relations, although I understand the administration's call for Americans to carry on as normal. But note how Roberts put the criticisms of the adminstration's "threats" to civil liberties in context:

Civil libertarians certainly think Americans have paid a large if intangible price in the rollback of their civil liberties. Here, critics also reach for analogies between the war on terror and earlier conflicts. They accuse the Bush administration of trampling on civil liberties in the name of national security, just as the government had during the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, and the domestic turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The steps taken after 9/11 were “chillingly familiar,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. The historian Alan Brinkley said the government’s treatment of civil liberties was a “familiar story.” In 2002 The Progressive said, “We’ve been here before.”

But we haven’t been here before. Infringement of Americans’ rights after 9/11—that is, actual rather than anticipated infringements—were different in type and severity than those suffered in earlier crises. Citizens were not imprisoned for treason, as they were during the First World War. Thousands of citizens were not detained indefinitely, as they were during the Second World War. Citizens were not deported, or denied passports, or blacklisted, as they were during the Red scares.

Were there serious issues about the denial of citizens’ rights after 9/11? Undoubtedly. But those violations often had a distinctly postmillennial character. New surveillance programs were launched in secrecy and designed so that their footprint could not be easily detected. In effect, government was adapting to political realities, searching for techniques of maintaining domestic security that did not involve obvious disruptions of everyday life.

Here's Roberts' conclusion:

Was the war on terror devised and promoted by a small cadre of neoconservatives? Perhaps. But it was also a response to crisis that recognized and largely respected the well-defined boundaries of acceptable political action in the United States today. In important ways, the war on terror is not their war but our war. The desires and preferences of the American people have shaped the war on terror just as profoundly as any neoconservative doctrine on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

That's a point the GOP candidates might keep in mind as they're mercilessly attacked by the Democrats and leftists for their "failed" foreign policy.

'Radicals' Are Racist Criminals

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "Driving America towards the abyss":

The crisis currently facing our nation is a crisis of faith – faith in the Constitution that has shaped our destiny, faith in the rule of law, and faith in the principle of equality before the law. The root cause of the lawlessness that is consuming our country is the monopoly of the executive power in Washington by a political party that has fallen under the control of the radical Left. This Left describes itself as “progressive,” but is focused on the goal of “re-imagining” American institutions and principles, in other words of dismantling the constitutional order that created the prosperity and freedoms that have shaped this country since its beginnings.

Having been born into this political Left and then rejected it, I have acquired an intimate perspective on its nature, and the threat it poses to the American future, which is grave. I was raised by Communists who always referred to themselves as “progressives,” and were sworn enemies of America and its institutions, as was I. We saw ourselves as warriors for social justice, acting on the “right side” of history.

We could not have been more mistaken. The “moral arc” of history is not “bent towards justice,” as progressives like to say. If it were, the 20th Century would be the most enlightened instead of the scene of the greatest atrocities and oppressions on human record. Worse yet, for this progressive myth, these atrocities and oppressions were perpetrated by progressives in the name of “social justice.”

The practical achievement of the revolutionaries was the dismantling of whole societies, and their reconstruction as national prisons, and slave labor camps. Supported by progressives everywhere, Communists bankrupted whole continents while killing more than 100 million people – in peacetime – in order to realize their radical schemes. Their atrocities and failures continued until the day they saw their progressive future collapse under its own weight. This failure was entirely predictable because as every similar attempt to “re-imagine society” and change it by force has shown, it is simply beyond the power of human beings to create a “just” world.

Forty years ago, a series of tragic events that I have described in my autobiography, “Radical Son,” stopped me in my tracks, and caused me to re-evaluate what I had believed until then. These second thoughts turned me against the cause to which I had been devoted since my youth, and which I now saw as a threat to everything human beings hold dear. Most of my generation of radicals, however, chose to continue on their destructive course. Over the next decades I watched the radical movement I was born into infiltrate and then take control of the Democratic Party and the nation’s cultural institutions, until one of its own, Barack Obama, became President of the United States.

From the moment I joined the conservative Right forty years ago, I was impressed – and also alarmed – by the disparity in political rhetoric used by the two sides fighting this fateful conflict. My radical comrades and I always viewed these battles as episodes in a war conducted by other means – even as our opponents did not. Our rhetoric proclaimed our goals to be “peace,” “equality” and “social justice.” But this was always a deception. We used terms that demonized our opponents as “racists,” and “oppressors” because we believed our goals could only be achieved by vanquishing our opponents and destroying America’s constitutional order.

The Constitution valorized political compromise and was built on the defense of individual rights – most prominently the right to own property. America’s founders regarded property ownership as the basis of individual freedom. As radicals, we regarded property as the root cause of the evils that oppressed us. Consequently, the principles we operated under were not the same as those we gave lip service to in order to win public support.

The Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained our attitude in a famous pamphlet called “Their Morals and Ours.” “Their” morals, he denigrated as bourgeois morals. They were morals based on class values that served the oppressors. One can hear the same sophistry today in the Left’s attacks on meritocracy and standards as “racist,” and in their demands for equal outcomes regardless of whether they are earned or not.

While “their morals” served a ruling class, “our morals” served the people, and therefore social justice. Because we believed these propositions, “our morals” were by default Machiavellian: The end justifies the means.

Trotsky’s pamphlet was, in fact, a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that there was anything amoral or immoral in this cynical outlook. He did so by denying the existence of moral principles, claiming instead that all morality was self-interested and designed to serve a class interest. “Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed,” i.e., to accept universal moral standards, Trotsky argued, “must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.”

But this is just an admission that “our” morals were indeed accurately summarized as, “the end justifies the means.” The future we imagined we were creating was so noble that achieving it justified any means to get there, which included the lies that hid our destructive purposes, and the atrocities they led to.

The full import of this belief was brought home to me in the spring of 1975 when our so-called “anti-war movement” forced America out of Indo-China, allowing the North Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists to win. For more than a decade, we had claimed to care about the people of Indo-China, championed their rights to self-determination and condemned the war as a case of American imperialism and American racism oppressing Asian victims.

By the time America withdrew from the conflict and abandoned its Indo-Chinese allies, I already knew that Communism was a monstrous evil. But I remained a supporter of the “anti-war” cause, and of the rights of the Indo-Chinese to self-determination. To defend the commitments I had made, I deluded myself into believing that self-determination meant the Vietnamese and Cambodians should be able to choose even this evil if they wanted. This was so much sophistry because I knew that the Communists would not give them an inch of space in which to breathe free. The end that justified my position was that I believed America was the world’s arch imperialist power and its defeat was an absolute good.

What I was not prepared for was the moral depths to which the movement I had been part of had sunk. These depths were revealed in the events that followed the Communist victory. When America left Cambodia and Vietnam, the Communists proceeded to slaughter between two and three million peasants who were “politically incorrect” and did not welcome their Communist “solutions.” It was the largest genocide since Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. In Cambodia they killed everyone who wore glasses on the grounds that as readers they would transmit the oppressive ideas of the past and obstruct the Communist future. But there was no resistance to these atrocities from the “anti-war” Left.

As the genocidal slaughter proceeded, prominent Leftists like Noam Chomsky provided cover for the Communists’ crimes by denying that the atrocities were taking place. More disturbingly, there was not a single demonstration to protest the slaughter by the activists who claimed to be “anti-war” and to care about the Cambodians and Vietnamese. This silence unmasked the true agendas of the movement I had been part of.

My comrades’ abandonment of the peoples they claimed to defend showed in a definitive manner that the anti-war movement was never “anti-war.” It was anti-American. It wanted America to lose and the Communists to win. Progressives had lied about the nature of their movement and its agendas in order to accomplish their real goal, which was the “fundamental transformation” of America and the creation of a socialist state. I had known this to be the case for many years, but had accepted the lies because they served what I imagined was a noble end. But when the lies led to the embrace of genocide, my eyes were opened to the realization that the movement I had been part of my whole life was evil.

On my way out of the Left, I spent several years re-thinking what I had believed, and trying to understand the nature of the cause that I had served. Perhaps, my most profound and certainly most disturbing conclusion was that revolutionaries were by nature – and of necessity – criminals, who would routinely lie and break laws to achieve their ends. Every radical who believed in a “revolution” or a “re-imagining” of society from the ground up, every progressive who believed in a “fundamental transformation of America” as Barack Obama described his own agenda on the eve of his 2008 election, was a criminal waiting to strike.

America’s Constitution includes methods to amend it, and therefore to reform the American social order when and where changes are needed. In making such changes there are procedures to ensure that these changes represent the will of the American people, and are done lawfully. But revolutionaries do not respect a constitutional order created by rich, white men, many of whom were slaveowners. Radicals believe instead that “social justice” requires them to dismantle the social order, and “due process” along with it. Radicals are not “reformers.” In the name of social justice, they refuse to be bound by the laws and procedures that an unjust and oppressive “ruling class” has created. The end justifies the means.

Before President Obama – a constitutional law professor – decided to break America’s immigration laws and grant 800,000 illegals resident status, he admitted to his fellow Americans on 22 public occasions that he had no constitutional authority to do so – none. Creating such an amnesty by executive order was illegal and unconstitutional. And he knew it. But he did it anyway because to him and his party, violating the fundamental law of the land was justified because the system that had created the law was oppressive and unjust – racist. In committing this crime against the nation he led, Obama was guided by a radical ideology that justified the illegal means as a victory for “social justice.”

As a former radical I understood how high the stakes had become with Obama’s election. Since the Right was defending America’s freedoms while the Left was paying lip-service to patriotic pieties but intending nothing less than the destruction of constitutional order, I also understood that the rhetorical disparity between the two factions posed a grave threat to America’s future.

In fighting this cold war, progressives regularly demonize Republicans as racists, white supremacists, insurrectionists, Nazis and traitors. Republicans respond to these reckless attacks by calling Democrats “liberals” and similarly tepid descriptions. For example, they describe Democrats as “soft on crime.” Democrats are not soft on crime. They are pro-crime: Democrat prosecutors have systematically refused to prosecute violent criminals; Democrat mayors and governors have released tens of thousands of violent criminals from America’s prisons, and abolished cash bail so that criminals are back on the streets immediately after their crimes and arrests; Democrat mayors did nothing to prevent the mass violence orchestrated by Black Lives Matter in 220 cities in the summer of 2020, provided bail for arrested felons, de-funded police forces, and instructed law enforcement to stand down in Democrat-run cities, which allowed “protesters” to loot and burn, and criminal mobs to loot and destroy downtown shopping centers.

Democrats regard the criminal riots that took place in the summer of 2020, as social justice. The riots cost $2 billion in property damage, killed scores of people and eventually thousands as their “De-Fund the Police” campaign triggered a record crime wave in America’s major cities. Democrats regard criminal lawlessness and mayhem as understandable responses to what they perceive as “social injustice” – courts and the law be damned. To them, mass lootings are “reparations,” and individual robberies and thefts a socialist redistribution of wealth.

If you are in a battle of words – which is the nature of political warfare – and you are calling your enemies “liberals,” portraying them as not really understanding the gravity of what they are doing, while they are calling you “white supremacists” and “Nazis,” you are losing the war.

Why are Republicans so self-destructively polite? Why do they fail to see, or to identify their opponents as the criminals they are – or, at least, when they are?

Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, Democrats have conducted a verbal war against white America. This war has been so effective that Gallup polls show that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are white racists. At the same time the Biden administration has made “Equity” a centerpiece of its policies and programs. “Equity” is a weasel word to cover a socialist agenda. The White House defines “Equity” as privileging select racial groups with government largesse on the basis of skin color – a policy that is racist, inequitable, unconstitutional, and illegal.

Even when it is the government doing the redistribution and not street mobs, “social justice” – the policy of equalizing outcomes among politically select groups, regardless of merit – is another name for theft. Redistributing income on the basis of race is not equity, it is racism. Joe Biden is the first overt racist to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson – who not coincidently was also a progressive Democrat. Yet Republicans avert their eyes from this anti-American travesty. Why don’t Republicans call Democrats out for their racism?

Over the years I gave a lot of thought to these questions, and eventually I came up with an answer that should have been obvious in the first place...

 Keep reading.

The Coming Democrat Congressional Elections Massacre

Reid Wilson, at the Washington Post, is not so bullish on Democrat chances in 2014.

See, "Is another Republican wave building?":

President Obama’s poll numbers are at record lows. The health care law that serves as the cornerstone of his domestic policy legacy is even more unpopular. And there are few chances to change the conversation among a skeptical public that isn’t happy with Washington.

Sound familiar? It should: The national political climate today is starting to resemble 2010, when Republicans won control of the House of Representatives by riding a wave of voter anger. Wave elections are rare. Only a handful of times in the previous century has one party racked up big wins. Democrats won big handfuls of House seats in 1930, 1932, 1948, 1958, 1974, 2006 and 2008. Republicans won back more than 40 seats in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1966, 1994 and 2010. And with nearly a year to go before Election Day, voters’ moods can change dramatically.

But the rocky rollout of the Affordable Care Act and President Obama’s crumbling support suggests another wave might be building. While voters usually punish a president’s party in at least one midterm election, they may be winding up to deliver another smack to President Obama’s allies on Capitol Hill.

Voter dislike of ObamaCare cost Democrats the House in 2010. It could cost them the Senate in 2014. The poll numbers hint at the toll the Affordable Care Act has taken on the Democratic Party. A CNN/ORC International poll conducted November 18-20 shows 49 percent of registered voters favored a generic Republican candidate for Congress, compared with 47 percent who favored a Democratic candidate. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted November 6-11 shows the generic ballot tied, at 39 percent each.

Historically, Democrats have held an advantage of at least a few points on the generic ballot, even when election results are a wash: Democrats held a six-point edge just before Election Day 2000 and picked up a grand total of one seat. Democrats led Republicans by one point on the generic ballot just before the 2010 elections, when Republicans rode to a sweeping victory.

And there’s no sign that Obama will become more popular. Presidents who see their approval ratings dip so dramatically in the second term rarely see their numbers improve. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s approval ratings never recovered after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal (Nixon, of course, didn’t stick around to see just how far his ratings could fall). George W. Bush’s approval rating sank in the spring of 2005, and continued falling through the end of his term. Obama’s numbers are starting to resemble Bush’s trend lines.

For much of Obama’s tenure, even voters who say they disapproved of his job performance still retained a favorable impression of the president. That’s increasingly not the case: In the latest Washington Post/ABC News survey, conducted earlier this month, Obama’s unfavorable rating, 52 percent, tops his favorable rating, 46 percent. It’s only the second time [pdf] the number of unfavorable impressions outweighed the favorable ones. Reaction to the bungled rollout of the health care law is overwhelmingly to blame. Already, the fallout has been evident: Public surveys in Virginia showed Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe (D) leading Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) by wide margins in the wake of the government shutdown. But Cuccinelli made the final weeks of the race into a referendum on ObamaCare, and McAuliffe’s support began to erode. On Election Day, McAuliffe won by just 2.5 points, a narrower margin than even his internal polls showed. Another week, and Cuccinelli might be governor-elect.

Democrats will say the Republican Party is in even worse shape than they are, and they have a point: In the October Washington Post/ABC News poll, just 32 percent of voters said they had a favorable impression of the GOP, compared with 46 percent who had a favorable impression of the Democratic Party. And Republicans still have not articulated a clear governing vision for the country, even a year after failure to do so emerged as a central criticism of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.

But...

Continue reading.

And even if things swing toward the Democrats' in coming months, the fact remains they've got to pick up 17 seats to flip the House, a difficult proposition with the incumbency effect as strong as ever. See Charles Cook, "Anti-Incumbent Fever Won't Oust Many Incumbents."

Karl Rove had an excellent analysis on this the other day at WSJ, "Can the Democrats Retake the House in 2014?"

As for the Senate, see Hotline on Call, "The Hotline's Senate Race Rankings: Democrats on Defense."

It's going to be big. I can't wait until next November.

FLASHBACK: From November 2009, a year after Obama's election, and one year before the GOP takeover of the House, "Payback is a Bitch: 'Political Climate for 2010 Not as Favorable to Democrats'."

Yep, it's a gonna be a bitch for those f-kers. Screw 'em. Make them eat the ObamaCare turd-pile.

McCain Running Strong as Democrats Tumble

I'm watching Howard Dean on CNN's American Morning right now. The DNC Chairman's trying to justify the party's new McCain attack ad seeking to smear the Senator's comments on a likely long-term commitment on Iraq.

Dean also confirmed the conventional wisdom that the Democrats' division heading into the summer could spell disaster for the party's fortunes in November.

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that presumptive nominee John McCain's holding up just fine, which seems counterintuitive, given how big a Democratic year this should be:

Why is this man smiling?

Arizona Sen. John McCain could understandably be scowling: He could face a more difficult political landscape than any presidential candidate in a generation.

Only 39% of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party he represents, the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows. A record 63% say the Iraq war he defends was a mistake. The disapproval rating for President Bush, the incumbent McCain has embraced, has hit 69%, the most negative assessment of any president since Gallup began asking the question 70 years ago.

Yet in what seems to be the most promising election for Democrats since 1976 — when the aftermath of the Watergate scandal opened the door for Democrat Jimmy Carter to win the presidency — the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows the presumptive Republican presidential nominee within striking distance of either Illinois Sen. Barack Obama or New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"Sen. McCain will not be a pushover in Ohio," cautions Ted Strickland, the Democratic governor of one of the nation's most important battleground states. "It will be a hotly contested race."

At least at the moment, McCain's personal qualities — his stature as a Vietnam war hero, reputation as an independent-minded Republican and persona as a strong leader — are trumping the significant policy disadvantages he faces in pursuing a third consecutive term for the GOP in the White House.

The protracted and increasingly bitter rivalry between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination is a boost for McCain, too.

The article goes on to note that 1 in 5 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents will likely vote McCain if Barack Obama's the party nominee, and in general election matchups, Republicans line up more solidly behind McCain than Democrats do for Obama. ("Nine of 10 Republicans backed the Arizona senator, compared with eight of 10 Democrats who supported the Illinois senator.")

All of this helps explain the crazed frustration on the hard left of the blogosphere.

Distorting McCain's record on Iraq isn't enough for some. Extreme partisans hope to portray neoconservative ideology as the present evil of the world:

Believe it or not, I’m not thrilled with this ad [the new anti-McCain "100 Years in Iraq" spot], and not because it hits too hard or is a little below the belt. No, my opposition to this ad is that it’s not hard enough; it doesn’t go deep enough.

Listen. We need to go beyond Iraq on this. We need to go after the ideology. I think it is imperitive to look past the political liability for Republicans that Iraq has become and start making the argument that Iraq wasn’t an isolated incident, that these people are more than willing and capable of causing the same kind of disasters elsewhere in the world.

That’s what I want to see in these ads, not just that Iraq was a mistake, everyone knows that, but there needs to be a massive movement to explain to the electorate A) why Iraq was a mistake and B) that neoconservatism is just about doomed to repeat Iraq over and over again for as long as we keep voting these people in office.

We should round it all off with a nice C) that things here at home are only going to get worse with each following war that these people keep thrusting us into.

We already got a majority of Americans with us on Iraq being a bad thing, we need to quit flogging the dead horse and move on to the next argument.

And that next argument is what? That a McCain adminstration's going launch American wars of aggression from Iran, North Korea, to Syria?

Such talk doesn't make much sense.

It's a combination of loathing for the forward exercise of U.S. military power (such as the current Iraq deployment), demonization of neoconservative ideology as an unmitigated evil, and extreme left-wing fear-mongering seeking to escalate their hatred of Republicans to the next level, a degree of frustration that's already indicated in attacks on the GOP as some neo-fascist regime of apocalyptic proportions.

Photo Credit: USA Today

America's New Isolationism?

Andrew Kohut offers an intriguing look at public opinion trends in rising isolationism:

Disillusionment with the Iraq war has ushered in a rise in isolationist sentiment comparable to that of the mid-1970s following the Vietnam war. Pew surveys have found as many as four in 10 Americans saying the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

This is a significantly higher percentage of people than subscribed to this view at the beginning of the decade. A rise in isolationism has signaled a diminished public appetite for the assertive national security policy of the Bush years and, in general, a less internationalist outlook. For example, in the summer of 2006, polls found majorities of Americans saying the United States was not responsible for resolving the conflict between Israel and other countries in the Middle East during the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

American public opinion is also extraordinarily partisan. Consider, Iraq. It remains number one on the public’s foreign policy issue agenda, yet there is hardly a consensus as to what to do next. While a late February Pew poll found a continuing majority of respondents (54 percent) saying the war was a mistake, opinions were evenly divided about how and when to extract United States forces.

About half of those surveyed (49 percent) said they favored bringing troops home as soon as possible, but most (33 percent) favored gradual withdrawal over the next year or two, rather than immediate withdrawal. Similarly, just under half (47 percent) said that the United States should keep troops in Iraq until the situation has stabilized. But those who wanted to “stay the course” were divided too, with 30 percent saying that no timetable should be set and 16 percent favoring a timetable.

What the candidates say about Iraq in the general election will be further tested by the huge partisan gap in responses: a 54-percentage-point divide between Democrats and Republicans about keeping troops in Iraq.

With rising concerns about the economy and jobs in particular, trade is a prime example of a tricky issue for the candidates, let alone the next president. While most Americans continue to think that global trade is a good thing, the number feeling this way is sharply lower than it was in the past. Just 59 percent of Americans say trade with other countries is having a good effect on the United States, down sharply from 78 percent in 2002.

Trade is a tougher challenge for John McCain than it is for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama because a key element in the Republican base — the business class — remains heavily pro-trade. This may explain why, as of this writing, Senator McCain’s official web site does not name trade as one of the 15 issues “of focus.”

While the American public is divided on Iraq, and increasingly wary about trade, it also remains divided on the so-called war on terrorism. A narrow majority (52 percent) continues to say it is right for the government to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists without first getting court permission; 44 percent say this is wrong.

The use of torture is a similarly divisive issue, with about half saying it can be justified often or sometimes when used against suspected terrorists to gain important information. A modest majority (52 percent) believes that the detainees the United States is holding at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are being treated fairly.

But again there is a wide partisan divide on these issues. Nearly twice as many Republicans as Democrats believe it is right for the government to conduct surveillance of suspected terrorists without court permission (74 percent versus 39 percent). The partisan differences in the treatment of Guantanamo detainees are nearly identical: 73 percent of Republicans say the government’s policies toward detainees are fair, compared with 39 percent of Democrats.

Obviously, on these — and just about all other foreign policy questions — Senator McCain and his Democratic opponent will be confronted with the daunting task of appealing not only to their bases, but also to independents, who have decidedly different opinions about these issues. And as we have already seen, both campaigns will be drawn into foreign policy, nonetheless, because Senator McCain will run on his experience and Senators Clinton and Obama will attempt to tie him to President Bush’s record. In turn, each side will work hard to show that the opposition’s way of thinking about foreign policy is out of touch with a moderate point of view.

Reading through Kohut's essay, there appears to be less isolationist sentiment than one might think. On trade, sure, job losses have created pressures among voters on the left and right to realign America's trade agreements to protect American jobs.

But an in ward turn in foreign policy on the Iraq and the war on terrorism is less pronounced. And for all the talk of which candidate is seen as best on international experience McCain holds his own against either potential Democratic opponent.

I've noted in a couple of recent posts that progress in Iraq is likely to help Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain (see here and here).

The Wall Street Journal 's new survey provides some support. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said John McCain has the right approach on Iraq, compared to 30 and 27 for Clinton and Obama respectively. McCain plans to continue the U.S. troop deployment for some duration, so for all the talk of isolationism, there's real evidence that Americans are committed to seeing victory through in Iraq, a priority of GOP foreign policy.

The Deep State Goes to War Against President-Elect Trump, as Dems Cheer (VIDEO)

Honestly, I don't think Glenn Greenwald is a good person --- he helped smuggle Edward Snowden's stolen NSA data into Germany, to Laura Poitras (and that's not mentioning his rabid anti-Israel politics) --- but I swear he's been doing the best writing on the Democrats spy-ops smear-ops to take down the incoming Donald Trump administration.

So, with the usual FWIW warning, at the Intercept, "The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer":

The legitimate and effective tactics for opposing Trump are being drowned by irrational, desperate ad hoc crusades. https://t.co/athCFT9IeO

— The Intercept (@theintercept) January 11, 2017

IN JANUARY 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further.

This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.”

Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss, as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry, and damaging those behaviors might be.

The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There is a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combating those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.

But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.

Beyond all that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy?

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Glenn Greenwald: Leftist Media Protect Hillary Clinton (VIDEO)."