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As Republicans retreat like beaten curs in the face of their implosion last night, to lick their wounds and fret about a future under Nancy Pelosi, they would do well to reflect on what brought them to such a sorry juncture.

The Party of Lincoln was supposed to be one of limited government, fiscal prudence and a balanced budget, a belief in the power of the markets, transparent governance, and a strong and sensible foreign policy. These principles were embodied in the Republicans’ Contract with America that helped usher them into power for twelve years. Notably absent from the Contract was any mention of divisive social issues like abortion or gay rights.

Shortly after their ascension to power, and increasingly so after Bush II came into office, Republicans threw the Contract away and most of their core principles along with it, adopting instead a scorched-earth policy based on delusions of having secured a permanent majority:

• Instead of focusing on dollars and cents, they resorted to socially divisive issues like gay marriage and Terry Schiavo to rally their base while leaving the rest of America cold.
• Their “win at all costs” mentality caused them to impeach a popular sitting president over a sexual indiscretion, severely poisoning the atmosphere in Washington and nearly eliminating the possibility of bipartisanship on any issues ever since.
• After 9/11, they squandered not just the goodwill of the world in the aftermath of the attack but also the nation’s prestige and ability to lead or pressure other nations through their pig-headed and misguided determination to invade Iraq without a plan or a clear set of goals.
• They became a rubber-stamp for a President with total disregard for basic constitutional rights.
• They engaged in fear-mongering tactics to win elections, raising the specter of terrorists on every street corner just waiting to pounce on Americans should Democrats ever come to power.
• Instead of nurturing the federal surplus handed to them after the Clinton years, they wasted it all and turned the surplus into humongous deficits, spending like drunken sailors while Bush failed to use his veto pen on anything except a stem cell research bill.
• They insisted on greatly worsening the federal budget by handing out tax cuts to those who needed them the least.
• They threw transparency in government out the window, letting their votes be bought by lobbyists and operations such as the “K Street Project.”

Many of the ideas of the Revolution itself were really good. What failed was Republicans’ ability to execute on them because of their self-entitled sense of having obtained permanent hegemony and the concomitant feeling that they no longer needed to be brought to account for their actions. It became sufficient for them to keep rallying their base, keep pushing wedge issues on the public, keep painting their Democratic opponents as weak on terrorism and wanting to coddle terrorists.

The Republican Revolution came to power because of an idea. It ended when the only idea left was how to keep power. As Democrats return to enjoy their own time in the sun, they would do well not to forget that lesson.

It’s one thing to lob bombs from the safety of minority status, it is quite another to lead. With Democrats sweeping the Republicans out of the House for the first time in 12 years, and probably picking up the Senate pending recounts in Montana and Virginia, what they just accomplished was the easy part. Now comes the hard part of leading the country out of the sorry morass in which it finds itself.

Let’s neither under- nor over-estimate the magnitude and meaning of Democratic victory last night.

The leader of the “under-estimate” crowd is the idiotic and disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who with a straight face told MSNBC last night that a Democratic victory in the House would make them nothing more than a “lame-duck majority;” whatever that means, it is infinitely better than being a minority which is what hopefully faces his party for the foreseeable future. I have also seen lots of bloggers, liberal ones especially, downplay the meaning of the election as having been limited to just a few corrupt officials, say it’s a “small step forward,” it wasn’t a landslide, and so on.

From whence comes this pessimism? Have we been out of power so long we are still too afraid to relish being in the majority, fearing that we might wake up any minute and find out it was just a dream?

When the Republicans ushered in their so-called Republican Revolution in 1994 with guns blazing, by what margin did they hold the House? The GOP led Democrats by 230 to 204, a margin that shrank in the intervening years and one that was won mostly by victories in the conservative South. How about now? Democrats picked up at least 27 seats last night without losing a single one (unheard of in modern memory even in 1994), many of them in the Northeast but also in all other areas of the country. That put the count at around 228 Democratic, 195 GOP, and 12 still undecided as of this morning. Pretty close to 1994 in reverse, huh? With that 230 to 204 margin the GOP, for better or for mostly worse, imposed a long period of Republican hegemony in Washington that didn’t end until last night. If that number was good enough for them, it’s good enough for Democrats.

On the other hand, let’s not over-state the case either. Democrats won more for being the anti-Bush than for the strength of their own vision, and nobody is claiming a revolution. I don’t see that as a bad thing. An old saw in politics is that when your enemy is self-destructing, you stand back and let it happen. Republicans were doing such a good job of imploding, and voters seemed so eager for a change, that there was no reason for Democrats to stick their necks out by proposing plans and visions that would subject them to hostile fire. Keeping mum on a specific agenda was therefore good politics.

Now the election is over, the Elephant is dead, and it’s time for Democrats to grapple with the reins of power. I do not envy them the huge mess they have been left with to fix: Iraq. North Korea. Iran. Global warming and accelerating environmental degradation. Corruption. An economy teetering on the edge of a nasty recession or worse caused by a flattening housing market, loss of confidence in the dollar, and massive federal debt and trade deficits. Oil addiction to hostile countries. Stagnant wages. Soaring healthcare costs. The imminent retirement of the baby boomers and the accompanying burdens on federal entitlement programs.

The problems are monumental, and the nation is looking to Democrats to start providing some answers. If they succeed, they will likely forge an enduring majority. If they do not, they will either return to minority status or exchange power every so often with Republicans. In a way the deck is stacked against them, since many of the problems that were created by Republicans will see their full fallout and consequences under Democrats’ watch, and they therefore stand to be unfairly punished in the future. But that’s the nature of politics, and Democrats will either cope or not.

As they struggle for answers, the more liberal leadership should not forget that they were brought to power on the backs of moderates and conservatives who wrested districts away from Republicans. The center-left forms the backbone of the new Democratic resurgence. These people, the Blue Dog Democrats and others like them, will have to answer to their constituencies again in the not-too-distant future, and you can bet these folks will push hard for the kind of centrist agenda that the DLC and Rahm Emmanuel espouse. This alignment towards the center is also good for the party because our gain of moderates (truly the heart of America) is Republicans’ losses of same, making them more than ever a minority party of extremists on the Right.

Democrats are off to a good start, promising in their first 100 hours to do things like raise the minimum wage and force pharmaceutical companies to compete and lower prices for the Medicare prescription drug benefit. They will not have much time to celebrate and measure the drapes before being called to account for their vision on how to fix the mess in Iraq.

They better be ready.

Every so often it seems that events conspire to drive a majority party from power. The most recent example was 1994, when a litany of woes joined together to kick the Democrats out of Congress–the healthcare debate, gays in the military, a federal money-laundering investigation.

Now it’s 2006, and it’s happening again. Absolutely nothing is breaking the GOP’s way:

• The Iraq war has been cemented in people’s minds as an absolute disaster of Bush’s incompetence, with many inputs from Bob Woodward’s book to the National Intelligence Estimate to generals testifying before Congress all honing the same message.
• The American public gets that the Iraq war has nothing to do with terrorism, except to worsen it by virtue of our own actions there.
• In the wake of 13 US soldiers being killed in 3 days, on top of thousands already killed, Bush comes out saying that the Iraq violence against our soldiers and each other will be nothing but a “comma” in the history books.
• We have been subjected to an unseemly debate on torture in which even Colin Powell has weighed in to oppose the barbaric approach of the Bush administration, a debate that most Americans understand shocks the conscience and tarnishes our values.
• Democrats are embracing the national security debate instead of avoiding it as they did in 2002 and 2004.
• The Dubai ports deal made Republicans look weak on keeping the nation’s ports safe.
• The weakness of the US position in foreign affairs as a result of the Iraq war is painfully obvious in our complete inability to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons development or prevent North Korea from testing a nuclear bomb, forcing us to resort to idle saber-rattling.
• The immigration debate pitted Bush against conservatives in Congress.
• The national debt and trade deficits are reaching stratospheric levels.
• The absolute bungling of Hurricane Katrina.
• Terry Schiavo.
• Harriet Miers.
• Opposition to life-saving stem cell research.
• Charles Schumer and Rahm Emanuel have emerged as effective generals of the Democratic rank-and-file, energizing campaigns and keeping the party on message.
• While the Dow reaches record highs on the basis of record corporate profits, people are watching their homes and real estate investments deflate like a dead balloon, job cuts are on the rise, employment figures are lukewarm, gasoline prices are volatile, and uncertainty about the future is high.
• And, of course, now there is the Foley-gate scandal that makes hypocrites out of the so-called party of family values.

This litany of trouble has the Republicans ready to concede a third of the fifteen seats Democrats need to take control of the House. The Senate was being pronounced as within reach of the Democrats even before the Foley scandal exploded (though it’s still an uphill battle). Races that were leaning Republican are now essentially tied as Democrats tie in the GOP leadership’s handling of the Foley matter to its “culture of corruption” theme. Bush’s bully pulpit has been rendered useless against the din surrounding the Foley scandal as he ineffectually tries to bring the conversation back to national security.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that recent events including the scandal have people less willing to see Republicans continue their control in Congress, by 41% to 18%. They favored Democratic control by 34% to 23%.

Even conservative commentators seem willing to throw in the towel and declare a Democratic victory. George Will says that the Dems should go into another line of work if they can’t win control of the House in November.

It’s too soon to count the GOP down and out, but time is ticking. Karl Rove has shown his masterful brilliance in energizing the conservative base and ensuring victory for the GOP–but his hands must be very full with this election.

Much of America and the rest of the world now wait for November with baited breath to see if we have the courage to break Republican hegemony, restore our place in the community of nations, and renounce the fascist agenda that has invaded Washington in recent years.

A new MSNBC/McClatchy poll shows Republican George Allen and Democrat Jim Webb in a dead heat for Allen’s Senate seat. Allen’s standing has crumbled in the wake of the “macaca” and other racial scandals.

I can’t remember another time in recent memory when a political “rising star” fell so quickly.

The stories just don’t stop coming. MSNBC has an exclusive report on a woman, Pat Waring, who overheard Allen loudly and repeatedly using the “n” word in the late 70’s as he prepared for a rugby match. This happened just before his first run for Virginia House of Delegates.

I agree with the woman in the article. He could have come clean about his past, admitted his repeated use of the word in the recklessness of his youth, apologized, and moved on. But no, he preferred to flatly deny it, which makes him a sitting duck for anyone who knows anything to the contrary. I bet we’ll get stories like this all the way to the election.

Allen is a disgrace to Virginia and to people of color. I can’t fathom how someone like him is still in office….though his presidential aspirations are probably toast, and that’s a good thing.

(The Allen campaign is fomenting allegations that his challenger Jim Webb also used the “n” word at one point. We’ll see what comes of that story, and if true is equally reprehensible, though I still consider Allen by far the worse evil for his consistent pattern of racism, from displaying nooses and confederate flags to the “macaca” incident to stuffing a decapitated deer’s head in a black family’s mailbox.)

Republican George Allen’s re-election campaign for Senate is crumbling, along with his ambitions for president. First there was “macaca.” Then came his defensive response to a question about his Jewish heritage, and his subsequent ludicrous claim that he wasn’t aware of it until now. Now witnesses are emerging to say that Allen repeatedly used racial epithets against African Americans in his younger years, and even shoved the head of a deer into the mailbox of the nearest black person during a hunt.

We’re seeing the real George Allen emerge now, especially in the way defensive, condescending way he is dealing about the questions regarding his past. This is a guy who has been photographed proudly with white supremacists, who has hung a noose in his office, who has spoken lovingly of the Confederate flag.

George Allen is and has always been a racist, and he can’t escape evidence of his true feelings anymore. Oh, he can try to hide by sponsoring useless and ultimately fruitless legislation to apologize for lack of harsher federal response to lynchings, and by providing lukewarm support for a formal apology for slavery. These are nothing but cheap ploys to deflect questions about his true racist past and feelings.

Hopefully Virginia will come to its senses and boot this bozo out office come November.

Interesting sign, huh?

The depths to which this years’ “Republicans Anonymous” will stoop to try to confuse voters about their GOP affiliation just never cease to amaze me.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Maryland GOP Senate candidate Michael Steele has come out with new election signs that say “Steele Democrat.” His camp says that the intent of the sign is to represent Democrats who will vote for Steele, something akin to saying a “Reagan Democrat.”

The misleading intent of the signs is clear: Steele wants people who don’t follow politics much to believe that Steele is actually a Democrat.

That’s shameful, not just for Steele but for the GOP itself. Is it really so cowardly in the headlights of a possible electoral trainwreck in November that it has to paint itself with blue stripes?

What happened to the resistance to Bush’s gross push for unlimited violations of the Geneva Conventions posed by a few supposedly brave GOP senators like McCain? Apparently it has dissolved into goo, because Bush got everything he wanted and they got nothing. Did McCain suddenly get cold feet when his resistance endangered his 2008 presidential prospects? Consider the terms of this new “compromise:”

• The bill would permit confessions obtained through cruel and inhumane interrogations by the CIA or military before 2005, but not afterward. Small comfort.
• Defense attorneys may challenge hearsay evidence received in coercive fashion in distant countries only if they can prove it is unreliable–something almost impossible to do when it is in writing and the defense cannot cross-examine the confessor. The rules of evidence traditionally bar hearsay evidence uttered outside of court (with some limited exceptions such as a dying man’s declaration of who killed him) because it is fundamentally unfair to enter evidence against an individual without his having the right to confront his accuser in court.
• It strips from defendants the right of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus allows a detainee to challenge his detention as unconstitutional. Without it, a defendant has no right whatsoever to appeal his detention in any manner and can be essentially allowed to rot in jail forever without ever going to trial regardless of his offense (if there even was an offense) or the manner of his treatment. This breathtaking step of stripping habeas corpus has only happened twice before–by Lincoln during the Civil War (later re-instated by the Supreme Court in Ex Parte Milligan), and during Reconstruction by Grant in South Carolina when taking federal action against the Ku Klux Klan. It is very likely the Supreme Court will rule that an indefinite suspension of habeas corpus without emergency justification is unconstitutional.
• The bill bars detainees from citing the Geneva Conventions or any international/foreign laws or authority on detainee or POW rights. What is the administration afraid of here?
• Bush is given the right to interpret the Conventions as he sees fit for anything that falls below the level of “grave breaches.” While McCain grandstanded his “victory” by saying that Bush would be required to publicly issue such interpretations, we already had White House spokesperson Tony Snow saying that such publication might not be necessary.

The entire exercise is disgusting. It desperately attempts to seal away what the US is doing and still claim it is abiding by its treaty obligations, when it is abiding by neither them nor the Constitution. I hope it’s only a matter of time before the Supreme Court steps in again and bars such gross violations of our values.

As for the “brave” resisting-come-rubberstamping GOP’ers…I really just don’t have words that suitably describe my scorn.

Members of Republicans Anonymous are at it again–that group of politicians so ashamed of their political affiliation that they can’t bring themselves to reveal they are Republicans in their ads and campaigns for fear of being branded with a “scarlet letter ‘R’.” Maryland Republican senatorial candidate Michael Steele is trying to sell himself off as just a puppy-loving guy with nary a mention of his political affiliation:

“Hey, me again, Michael Steele,” says the lieutenant governor, pretending to knock from the inside of the TV screen. “Soon your TV will be jammed with negative ads from the Washington crowd. Grainy pictures and spooky music saying, ‘Steele hates puppies’ — and worse. For the record, I love puppies. And I think you deserve better — some real ideas for change.”

He’d rather talk about loving puppies than about his record, which includes supporting the war in Iraq and opposing stem cell research. He doesn’t care to mention that Bush has raised half a million dollars on his behalf. He’d rather people forget he’s the second-highest ranking Republican in Maryland who was once chairman of the Maryland Republican Party.

Nope, this dope would rather cut and run from his party than tell the truth. But that’s ok…Mr. Steele, you can be sure we won’t let people forget whose stripes you really wear…and if Democratic opponent Ben Cardin is any good he’ll do the same. Even if you do love puppies.

Despite Bush’s every effort to try having the Senate enact his autocratic version of a bill for interrogating and trying terrorist suspects–even going to Capitol Hill himself yesterday–a small group of GOP Senators (Collins, Warner, Graham, McCain) is standing firm and refusing to let the administration trample the Geneva Conventions.

The issue is simple, really. Either we obey the provisions of the Geneva Convention and the rule of law, or we do not. Bush thinks that the “war on terror” gives him license to suspend just about every right that America holds dear (habeas corpus, right to speedy trial, right to know the evidence arrayed against you, right not to be tortured). It seeks to interpret the Geneva Convention in conformity with its wishes. These Senators understand that the Conventions apply to everyone, and that our failure to observe them undermines our moral high ground in the war on terror. It would also place our troops in jeopardy since our failure to adhere will give license to other countries to also not do so.

Conservative blogs such as this one are outraged at the “turncoats,” not being able to grasp why the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution might apply to terrorists.

Let’s see if we can describe it in language easy enough for them to understand: the war on terror is either a war, or it’s not. If it’s really a war, then the Geneva Conventions apply as against prisoners of war and its human rights requirements must be followed. Terrorists want to kill us no more and no less than any nation’s soldiers at war with us would want to do so, and their being terrorists does not exempt them from basic human rights accorded all prisoners of war. Spare me the blather that they’re different because they target civilians; there’s a list of of innocent women and children a mile long in Iraq who’ve been killed by American bombs (not to mention incidents like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam). We are America, not Taliban Afghanistan; we do not maim and torture regardless of the reason or intent of our enemies.

In regards to constitutional rights, not all terrorists are foreign nationals, some of them are Americans. For those that are, the Constitution does not distinguish between Americans in its granting of basic rights. All of our rights are threatened with extinction once we start to pick and choose who among us is entitled to the Constitution’s protections and who is not. Today it’s them, tomorrow it’s us–at the whim of a Chief Executive with no checks on his power. We can streamline warrant requirements, allow for better emergency response, make things faster, allow for quicker judicial review, weigh the benefits vs. burdens of intrusions on our privacy, and adopt other measures to fight terrorism…but we cannot give the president unlimited license to interpret, grant, and remove constitutional rights as he sees fit.

This is not about appeasement, not about being soft on terrorists. It’s about not forgetting we are all Americans and there are some values that cannot be given up without surrendering who we are as a nation.