The Hound Of Ulster

Ed Whelan WROTE a nice piece to use in talking conservatives off the ledge - at least as far as judicial nominations are concerned.

It doesn’t really address the valid (and also utterly unpredictable) question of whether or not Bush is going to go letfward in his “Legacy Hunting Stages.”

But it definitely makes the case that he will not be forced to do it. The changing of the guard does not require him to get soft, at least not in Ed’s opinion. Whether or not he will, though, remains to be seen.

A lot has changed since 1991, but the changes cut in both directions. The Democrats have gotten more unified — and nastier — on judicial confirmations since then, but the high-profile politics of a Supreme Court nomination enhances the case for confirmation of a strong pick. Opponents can’t rely on obscure procedures to block the nomination. They need to make their case openly, and in the Internet age, unlike with the 1987 nomination of Judge Bork, their distortions won’t go unanswered.

I hope and pray that Ed is right. I can’t see Stevens staying ’till he’s 88. And I’ve heard a lot about the fact that he wants to be replaced by a Republican president, since his appointer was a Republican. If that’s true, I’m sure he’d still rather have it be a Republican president who is battling a Democratic Congress.

Which means now is just about the right time.

This is a long war, and yet leading Republicans including the one in the White House have yet to articulate why it’s necessary. On the campaign trail, only Rick Santorum embraced the challenges that our country faces. Our other candidates and especially the Liddy Dole-led RSCC weren’t worthy of the era.

In the war of ideas, the White House has also been a disappointment. The president has never clearly acknowledged the stakes or even who our enemy is. At no point has President Bush called for sacrifice, or even encouraged more young people to join the military.

…

You add it all up, and the people are right to wonder why our boys are dying in Iraq. Because the president hasn’t made the mission’s importance clear, it seems like a folly. It seems like vanity. It seems like pride. In truth it is a fight for our very survival, but this has been an argument left to the likes of the Weekly Standard, the National Review and Victor Davis Hanson to make. We’ve tried, but we preach mostly to the choir.

The president has had the chance to do more, but as of yet he hasn’t chosen to do so. Has he lost faith in the American people? If so, then he more than anyone else needs to look in the mirror this morning.

David Warren WRITES about the potential post-election consequences in Iraq.

If Iraq is abandoned, the credibility of America and the West is lost. Iran’s hopes of regional hegemony are assured. The Americans will have cut and run after enduring less than one-twentieth of the casualties they suffered in Vietnam; and from a battle more consequential, for it is against an Islamist enemy that is rising, instead of a Communist enemy in decline.

It was a Democrat-controlled Congress that decided to sink free South Vietnam, by cutting off its supplies even of rifle ammunition after the peace treaty signed by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973. It was Congress that ordered all U.S. bombing halted — air strikes that could have made mincemeat of the regular North Vietnamese army, marching openly along the South’s main highways in 1974. The U.S. never lost the war militarily, and could easily have won it without self-imposed restraints. But the enemy was more ruthless, and the allied will to fight evaporated.

Why did it evaporate? For the same reason then as now. The “alternative America”, ruling from its ivory towers in academia, the media, and the entertainment industry, could not understand why anyone should die for any cause at all; could not distinguish between freedom and tyranny; and instinctively sided with any enemy of what they fancifully imagined to be “American imperialism”.

My 21st birthday happened to coincide with the final evacuation of Saigon. From my modest experience on the ground in that country, I knew what was coming next. The boat people were no surprise to me. I think that was the day I fully realized, in adult terms, that evil often prevails in this world. So this is nothing new.

The fate that will befall all those millions of courageous Iraqis, showing the dye on their fingers after they had voted — in defiance of all the terror threats — will not come as a surprise to me, either. They are being sold out, as the Vietnamese were before them. But the consequences of abandoning Iraq will come home to the United States and the West, in a way Vietnam never touched us.

Ed Gillespie SAYS we’ve been cleansed, and CLARIFIES.

We got some of our dirt hosed off of us by the voters. We shouldn’t have made the voters do it for us, but we did. It would be good if we stayed clean now.

Romney SOUNDS a similare tune.

Americans spoke last night and Republicans are listening. Americans have not become less conservative, but they believe some Republicans have. As a party, we need to remember who we are and the principles that have always led our party and our country to success.

We must return to the common sense Reagan Republican ideals of fighting for hard working Americans, lowering taxes, shrinking government, curbing out-of-control spending, promoting the traditional values of faith, family and freedom, and providing a strong national security with all the necessary tools to protect the American people and win the War on Terror.

Swannblog TRIES to come to grips with the future of the PA GOP.

The Republican Party in Pennsylvania is dead, killed by both the apparatus and those who’ve ousted Ronald Reagan’s spirit. Republicans in Pennsylvania, however, are very much alive: conservatives and moderates. I am a strong conservative with a libertarian streak, yet I realize the need for the big tent with those less conservative than me – hey, even moderates! All parties must understand that the GOP is a conservative party, and our platform must reflect that, but we must keep our eyes on a governing majority. That, folks, is Ronald Reagan and is the basis for the famous Eleventh Commandment. And we can do it.

Yeah, a charismatic leader would help: a strong conservative willing to build a governing coalition. Pat Toomey springs to mind, if he’s willing to fit the whole bill. And I’d like to see Toomey run for the seat to be vacated by Arlen Specter in four years; after that, Rick Santorum can run for governor. With a new Republican Party in Pennsylvania, built the right way, the scenario could work. Easily.

I would like to see Lynn Swann continue to fight for that for which he believes in whatever way he and Charena think would be best. He’s opened a lot of doors in Pennsylvania, and he was the first to walk through. Unbowed.

Michael Barone has a whole BUNCH of post-election, pre-sleep thoughts.

A final note on populism. In cycle after cycle, we hear that certain forms of populism–full-throated opposition to immigration and free trade–will sweep all before them. The 2006 results, at least as I see them now, provide less than full-throated support for this proposition. Two of the loudest critics of illegal immigration–incumbent J. D. Hayworth and open seat primary winner Randy Graf, both in Arizona, where illegals have been famously streaming through the border–both evidently lost. And in upstate New York, where National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds was in terrible trouble after the Mark Foley scandal broke, his Republican-turned-Democratic opponent Jack Davis also lost, in a region where there had been a huge loss of manufacturing jobs. Nativism and protectionism are political weapons that in a certain light look very strong, which seem to be gleaming swords that will slay all before them. But, again and again, they crack like glass in your hand. If nativism can’t work on the Arizona border, and protectionism can’t work in upstate New York, where can they work?

I’ll let Rush have the last WORD on this for today.

You can always count on the Democrats, at some point, to revive conservatism in this country by being who they are — and who they are is very liberal as we all know. The normal ebb and flow and cyclical nature of politics is obvious. It’s just so damn frustrating to have made such progress in 1994 and it happened here again what happened then. Two years after ‘94, the conservatives made the mistake of thinking that the country had become conservative, and they stopped being ideological, and they stopped teaching. They stopped leading a movement and began what they began. It happened here again. The assumption that: “Okay, conservatism is in power now. The people like who we are. They like who we are. Stop teaching.”

You can never stop teaching.

Perfect.

THIS is not a shock.

If we had been told a month ago that it would happen, it would have been a shock. But now, it just seems like “the icing on the cake.”

Allen went from a highly-praised, potential ‘08er to a political piranha - blowing what many considered to be an insurmountable lead, and completely destroying his presidential aspirations in the process.

And he has no one but himself to blame. His campaign was as ugly as they come. Americans still like to see folks on the high road, even if it is becoming laughably less traveled.

I would have been very unhappy voting for him if he had made a big push in ‘08. Now it looks like I will be spared at least that suffering.

Small consolation.

I’m not going to talk about the election any more today. Except to note this NOTE from Shea on nice losers.

I mention all this because I am proud to report that this is not the sort of response the losers in yesterday’s election seem to be exhibiting. Sure, a few people out on the fringe will always be there to discern the Endtimes and the Hand of Satan. But as a rule, we don’t seem to be seeing Righties checking themselves in to Aromatherapy Clinics to soothe their bleeding inner child. Nobody is suffering from Post-Election Traumatic Stress Syndrome as they did two years ago. Nobody is weepily pounding on to the their blog site a vow to move to Canada. No assessments seem to be forthcoming about how the American people are stupid, evil, and unworthy of the greatness of those they so stupidly defeated.

They say you learn more about a person’s true measure in defeat than in victory. I think that’s true. And I think it’s a measure of why, in the long run, this setback will not be permanent.

HERE is the latest from Orson Scott Card. Lots of fun stuff there, but the Iliad bit is the thing that really caught my eye.

Let’s face it. You’re never going to read The Iliad again. If, that is, you have ever read it. What’s the point? You don’t believe in all those gods, and you’ve already seen the movie Troy, which is way more coherent and action-packed than Homer’s version.

And if you do read it, thinking you’ll get the story of the Trojan Horse, you’re going to be disappointed. The Trojan Horse story isn’t in The Iliad. It’s in another work about the Trojan War.

I bet you didn’t know there were any other works about the Trojan War.

(OK, maybe you still don’t care that there were other works. But now you know it, whether you care or not.)

This is all leading up to telling you about Barry Strauss’s wonderful book The Trojan War. Strauss combines all the literary sources about the events of the war, and then compares them with the archaeological record, which has been growing clearer by leaps and bounds in recent decades.

The story he unfolds has a scholarly flavor sometimes, as he tells about conflicting sources or what might have really happened where the literary accounts are implausible. But he also allows himself some delightful — and clearly labeled — speculation and flights of fancy.

The result is an interesting narrative that does a good job of transporting us back to a culture that has long since disappeared, letting us experience events that have left their imprint on the imaginations and memories of millions of people in the generations since.

On the Dodger FRONT, Ned Colletti has made everyone in sight either an assistant to the GM, or an assistant GM. Nice to see the Logan White’s promotion, though. Don’t want that man getting away.

This SI ARTICLE is a great look at the FA market. Only a couple of those guys interest me. I can only hope Colletti is willing to keep his wallet in check. Spending because we can doesn’t solve anything. Getting Randy Wolf might.

And lastly, also from Shea, is THIS. The perfect end to a strange, crazy day.

THIS is anticlimactic, in some ways. After the events of last night, it seems small and quiet. Not enough balloons, confetti, or shouting to be important.

But it might actually be more important, at least if we are to bring any balance to this “three branch system.” Can we actually get a Supreme Court that is willing to fulfill it’s limited role?

I particularly enjoyed this section of Ed’s analysis.

Justice Ginsburg the newfound federalist also displayed remarkable chutzpah (or obtuseness): “up until now, all regulation on access to abortion has been state regulation and this measure is saying to the states, like it or not, the Federal Government is going to ban a particular practice and we are going to take away the choice from the states, in an area where up until now it’s been open to the states to make those decisions.” Does Ginsburg not realize that she joined the five-justice majority in Stenberg v. Carhart that deprived states of this very choice? Further, as Justice Scalia riposted: “The best example where [the federal] government has gotten involved in overriding what the states want to do is [Planned Parenthood v.] Casey. It seems rather odd for this Court to be concerned about stepping on the toes of the states.”

Ouch. Remind me never to be on the receiving end of a Scalia barb. (But don’t remind me of how unlikely it is that I would ever be in a situation to receive such a barb. I was once standing next to someone that was the target of such a barb. So who knows?)