This post dates to April 15, 2005.

We are winning.

That is a good thing.

We control the House, the Senate, the Presidency. The state level isn't much worse. I'm sure the Democrats will have a new idea other than Kill Tom DeLay some time before 2015, but that gives us a decade with which to squish them. We are blessed with dire opponents with the political savvy of whelk.

Politics, however, is readily comparable to an interminable street fight. One does not win a street fight by kicking one's opponent in the knee and yelling, Ha ha!. It is won by yanking out a spiked pipe and working over one's opponent while he lies cowering on the ground.

So to speak.

Which brings us to Kathy Castor, and indeed, those like her. It is incumbent on us to break these Democrat up and comers now. They are the Democrats' bench team, the faint glimmers of hope for a party on the downhill slope and careening for the bottom.

So we need to kneecap them now.

That long, slow slide to the bottom usually produces political cretins who at best get trounced and energize the activist wings of their parties, and all too often get trounced to no good effect. (Spare me the moralizing about Goldwater: No matter what else one may say of him and his effect -- deliberate or not -- on the Party, he was a political incompetent of the first order.)

Castor, by contrast (and metonymically), is not an incompetent. She has three things running in her favor: She is a capable candidate (a rarity for Democrats in this state); she stands out for honesty on a governing board astounding for its historic corruption; and because of her mother (who really should be ashamed for losing that race), has good statewide name ID. I give her better than even odds to make the House: Her primary competitors so far are incompetents, and her district is basically well-gerrymandered for Democrats (it went for Bush in 2004 but went overwhelmingly for Castor over Martinez, and Jim Davis never faced serious Republican opposition there). She's young -- under 40 -- and has already been bloodied in an election. She has great name recognition in district in no small part because she is recognized as the rare honest member of the Hillsborough County Commission. She will likely be able to tap some of the same fundraising sources her mother did.

She, and those like her, are the future of her Party. They are coming up in relatively safe or at most competitive districts. One decade of losing is not sufficient to break these talented folks of their attachment to the Democrat Party.

That job falls on us.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying we should fall prey to the sort of gibbering lunacy that drives some folks to pour perfectly good money into unwinnable races. Most House races, for example, aren't worth the time and effort, so well gerrymandered are they. What I am saying is that we need to strategically isolate races in which the Democrats' future is developing and crush them ruthlessly there. Think of it as poisoning your division rival's farm system.

There are, so far as I'm concerned, only three possible reasons not to adopt this approach:

If Castor (and others like her) are such capable politicians, why fight them tooth and nail? Isn't it a good thing to have good government, no matter the party label?

I call this silliness the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Fallacy. Moynihan had all the earmarks of good governance: A strong belief in right and wrong; a remarkable intellect; the ability to buttress arguments with logic and emotion; and bow ties. But for all the impassioned speeches he'd give, with citations to social science and statistic, when the vote came up, he'd vote party line, regardless of whether he'd just spent the last hour arguing against it.

It goes to the larger point: Political parties are simply too important to be spat upon often. Oh, sure, you can have self-aggrandizing, pompous, airheaded, cretins who'll buck the party when the cameras come a-calling, but even they usually fall in line in the end -- because they know that the Party controls and direct funds, chairmanships, committee appointments, fundraising opportunities, and to a greater and lesser extent, the apparatus a candidate or politician needs to survive. The also know that those who get out of line too much end up getting shut out of the caucus.

All of this is a long way of saying: You'll die of asphyxiation if you hold your breath waiting for these up and comers to substantively break ranks with their Party. And that, in turn, means that every one of them, no matter how well-intentioned, is another vote for Roe and Casey; another vote to organize the chamber along their Party line; another vote against letting nominees to the bench get an up or down vote; another vote, in other words, for most of their Party's plank.

If Republicans keep winning, maybe these capable young folks will switch sides -- it's happened before.

Yes, and maybe I'll put on thirty pounds of muscle and get drafted to play strong safety for the Miami Dolphins. Could happen, but not too likely.

Party attachment dies slow, especially when, as in Castor's case, you come from a long line of prominent Party members. While the odds are appreciably better than a whelk's chance in a supernova, they're significantly less than the odds of my selection to take Louis Oliver's old spot. And anyway, isn't this a fairly horrible thing to bank on? I'll hope my opponent's best and brightest eventually join me because they're tired of being funded and cared for by the minority Party -- specially funded and cared for, because they're the only glimmers of hope the Party has?

Nah. Not good enough.

If we neuter the Democrats too badly, the Greens might rise to take their place.

I call this "a gamble I'm willing to take." The Democrats are big boys and girls; if they can't take care of their own, they'll sink. Theirs is, however, the oldest political Party in the country; I rather suspect they'll hold on until they inevitably rise again (American politics being rather cyclical, really). Anyway, this is something of an absurd argument: Play to win, but not too hard, because your opponent might be too crushed to play tomorrow. Sure.

I understand that resources are finite (although that somehow doesn't stop us from wasting money on Ralph Nader's campaign for no good purpose); I understand that some of this will be money down the drain, as we cannot realistically hope to prevail in every one of these races; and I understand that failing in these races might be problematic in itself, because a bloodied but still standing politician is a more formidable candidate in the future.

The gamble, however, seems worth it. If we're playing this seriously, we can't play tiddlywinks and hope our opponents' future never comes to be. We need to yank out the knuckledusters and cut some throats now (metaphorically, of course), to hold on to the reins of power as long as realistically possible -- now, and twenty years in the future.

This dates to September 12, 2006.

Now, I happen to believe that the Republicans will hold the House and the Senate. Why? The Democrats picked almost as many duds this cycle as we did; the demographics and effects of the 2000 redistricting are still in place; and the Democrats are actually touting their surrender-monkey-hood as a selling point.

In other words, the Democrats are as stupid as ever. Thank God.

We would not, however, be in this pickle if the "Republicans" we elected actually governed as, well, Republicans. Let's rack up some non-achievements:

Spending: Let's not even go there.

The Budget Deficit: Ditto.

Holding the Party line on perhaps the most important cross-group issue of our day, the war on terror: Senators McCain, Graham, and Hagel, please pick up the white courtesy phone.

Substantive restrictions, or at least, the hints of them, on abortion: When pigs fly.

Immigration: Let me put it this way: This is not an immigration thread.

Stem Cells: Ditto.

Reducing so much as the rate of growth of the government: It is to laugh.

In short, every, single, last thing we send those jokers to do on the Hill, they at best do poorly, and usually don't do at all. (Amazingly, they still do it better than Democrats.)

But what's even more interesting is that if you look carefully, and imagine that each component of the Republican coalition is defined by primary-but-not-exclusive interest in one of those points, you'll see that every single faction is taking it in the chest.

The most critical part of coalition politics is, obviously, keeping the coalition intact and pointed in the same direction. In theory, the Republican coalition does this by giving, on a regular basis, some, but not all, of the things each faction wants; they are then inclined to look at the alternative, realize they wouldn't do nearly so well there, and stick with the pack. The point, in other words, isn't to make any faction happy; it's to keep each faction less unhappy than they'd be elsewhere.

As members of the Stupid Party, however, I think we can safely say that our elected representatives played hookey the day they were teaching coalition politics in school. Let's look at the one thing that most of the coalition agrees on, to some extent or another: Judges. Let's see, we got Roberts and Alito. We got some, but not all, of the judges Bush sent up. Where are the rest?

Oh, right. A group of Republicans led the fight to kill them, to protect their prerogatives. And that's the issue on which Republicans have performed best.

The dumbest part about the Party's poor performance on all things Republican is that it has each faction convinced that it's getting uniquely screwed. Had they done their jobs right, we'd all think we're getting equally screwed.

This is why, frankly, we're stuck debating whether the social cons got everything they could have asked (and should therefore get to the back of the line) in Bush's (limited) stem cell ban or his first veto (or is it Terri Schiavo?), when of course, at best, these were bandages on horrible wounds in our polity. Or whether the fiscal cons got tax breaks out the yin-yang, so they should just shut it. Or whether the small government types got theirs ... well, ok, in fairness, except for maybe the tax breaks, no one's making too much noise about them. Or the hawks are getting theirs with an uneven prosecution of a war in two failed Muslim states. And don't even get me started on the immigration folks. And so on. [Full disclosure: I think these divisions are artificial and stupid in the extreme, but that's a blog post for later.]

In other words, the continued success of the Republican coalition is driving the coalition into the ground, largely because the people elected by the coalition aren't acting very Republican. Hats off, folks. And a big round of applause to the Democrats, too stupid, too weak, and too lazy to put a spine into our Party. When historians talk about the death of the Democrat Party years from now, the very next chapter will be the death of the Republican Party ten years later.

This post dates to November 5, 2007.

It's another Giuliani/Huckabee diary. If just those five words are enough to turn your stomach, you should probably read something else.

Anyway: We're in the middle of something a lot of folks haven't really seen since 1980, and perhaps haven't seen in their lifetimes: A well-and-truly contested Republican Presidential Primary. Now, because we're unused to it, it's my theory that we don't remember how to react; and because the Party was a very different animal then, the coalition of groups who compose it have little to no institutional memory of how to resolve formational problems before they get out of hand.

Put differently: Depending on which candidate is ascendant at any given time, a lot of otherwise good-faith Republicans are threatening to take their ball and run away, because they don't know precisely what else to do.

I'm not going to sit here and argue that anyone must vote for this guy, or must not vote for that one; I'm not going to get into the middle of the what-happens-when-the-general-comes argument. I have enough headaches without engaging that.

What I'd like to do is offer every camp an insight into why we are where we are, and point to some possible resolutions of the problem. I would suggest that we need to get this done now, rather than, say, September 2008. So, if you have some time, read on.

I used to be a pretty fair hand at game theory, but as with so much else in my intellectual life, what sense I had for it at anything but the intuitive level has largely atrophied from disuse. I hope you'll pardon any obvious gaffes on my part as I try to work through this; but I really think it's the best analytical framework for this election, and I'm going to offer it that way.

I'm going to make two simplifications that I hope don't destroy the model, for explanatory purposes, and that will save a lot of "but ifs" sprinkled through the discussion. First, I'm going to assume that each group described below has more or less homogeneous beliefs, and internally consistent priorities, thereby allowing me to treat groups as an equivalent number of individuals. Second, while essentially, every participant in coalition politics has a slightly-to-highly uneven hand in the nomination process, let's simply assume that each has the same vote. Like I said, these assumptions glaze over a lot, but I'm looking for a basic model more than anything else.

Given that, here's where I think we are:

The "social conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is social issues -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, and probably some other things we don't need to rehash here. The "fiscal conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is money and market, i.e., spending, taxes, and government regulation of the market -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on taxes, government expenditures (and size), and government regulation of life in general but the markets in particular. There are of course other factions -- the "immigration conservatives," the "gun conservatives," the "liberty conservatives," etc. -- but I won't deal with those because (1) they complicate what's already a too-long blog post, (2) I think hyphenated conservatism is so much media hooplah, and (3) each of those groups, if they exist, can find something to adamantly dislike in either or both Mike Huckabee and/or Rudy Giuliani.

The problem we're experiencing is that Rudy Giuliani is currently the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and Mike Huckabee is making a poorly funded darkhorse surge. Both men, on paper, have great credentials; however, each has the potential, based on current pronouncements and past acts, to split off large, vitally-needed chunks of the party come election time, should he make it to the general election. For Rudy, it's the social conservatives; for Mike, it's the fiscal ones. Social conservatives, now warming up the signs for the thirty-fifty anniversary of Roe, are wondering why they give their time, effort, and boots on the ground to a Party that not only can't get Roe reversed, but that actually got it affirmed the last time it made it to the High Court, with Justices appointed by post-Roe Republican Presidents providing the critical votes to uphold that monstrosity. Fiscal conservatives, listening to Reagan's rhetoric about government being the problem and but rarely the solution, wonder why every Republican President since Nixon has presided over vastly increased spending, increased taxes, or both; why the Code of Federal Regulations never shrinks; and why a Republican Congress showed admirable fiscal restraint for about five months in 1995, then went a-porking.

In Rudolph Giuliani, the social conservatives see an avatar of all the things they believe wrong with the Republican Party: A greater emphasis on electability and belligerence than on protecting the unborn, a liberal (sorry, guys, it's true) on social issues that don't directly affect crime rates whose personal life suggests that we don't want to spend too much time poking at the Clintons this time around. In Michael Huckabee, the fiscal conservatives see all the morass that is "compassionate conservatism" without even the little motes of sunlight offered with, say, No Child Left Behind and Medicare D -- a bigspending Southern Populist who'll say, "I'm with the people, not with the powerful," and mean it, forgetting that in the Republican Party, we believe that the "powerful" are not merely composed of the "people," but that they, through extraordinary selfishness run amok, actually help the people.

Now, what makes this problematic is that all of this has been simmering for decades now, and the various members of the Republican coalition are rather wondering why they bother with all the effort if nothing comes of it. This is further exacerbated by having a President of whom both sides can say bad and good things (again), and of having on the other side of the upcoming v a woman whom both sides detest enough to actually cause blood-vomiting; in other words, the stakes are highest just when everyone's patience is worn thinnest.

And that leads to the game-playing. There's a complex series of calculations at work here, for each faction, relative to each candidate. Each decision made in this particular game could yield disaster for the moving faction; for the non-moving faction; and for the Party as a whole.

Let's take the example that's received the most ink (and pixels): The social conservatives who have threatened to vote third-party rather than vote for Giuliani. Say they don't follow through, and vote for Giuliani:

(1) The Party/Giuliani might decide it doesn't need to even pay lip service to social conservatives if they'll simply shut up and vote when called to do so, regardless of the candidate's record (ample historical precedent exists for this in the Democrat Party);

(2) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as the deciding vote in a close election;

(3) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as irrelevant in a landslide election, and elect to stay with a socially moderate message to keep the landslide voters on-board;

(4) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives, to whom it/he believes there was a need to pander, as the reason for a loss in a close election/landslide, and so decides to dump those social conservatives, as they were never well-loved to start.

Implicit in this, of course, is how the other player -- let's say "the Party as a whole" -- reacts both to the action by the social conservatives, and how the election turns out -- and that all of this is taking place behind a double-blind. But let's continue, on the "sit out" option, to show what the social conservatives have in store:

(1) After a narrow win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(2) After a landslide win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they don't need the social conservatives any more, and the social conservatives spend the next twenty years in the political wilderness.

(3) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(4) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that the Party's coalition structure needs to be totally revamped, and tosses the social conservatives out the door, forty years in the wilderness, etc.

The moving party -- the social conservatives -- not only doesn't know how their participation or non-participation will affect the election, nor how the rest of the Party will react, but the rest of the Party is clueless too.

The same thing might come to pass with the fiscal conservatives and Huckabee; just plug and chug and you can see the same kind of analysis. As an added bonus, both sets of players are playing for the highest set of stakes possible in a coalition: Perceived electoral significance. Take the Huckabee example: I'd submit that a true populist ticket could make a serious run at the Presidency. If successful, why would the fiscal conservatives matter? (As a son of Louisiana, let me go on the record and say if a true populist wins the Presidency, I'm moving to Poland.) On the other hand, maybe those fiscal conservatives, even if overrepresented on the internet, are a vital component of the coalition, and their absence means doom for the Party. The only way to know if you're gonna win at Russian roulette is to put the revolver to your forehead and pull the trigger.

All of this was to make a simple point: The fellow you're accusing of bad faith is not acting in bad faith; instead, he's playing a game maybe more complex than even he realizes, for stakes he considers worth it. More importantly, you are too. As we're going to need these people in downticket races, I'd respectfully submit we keep the "Hit the road" rhetoric to a bare minimum. We have a Wicked Witch to melt in a year, after all.

Running into the 1988 Presidential election, Bloom County -- for those of you who were even more children than I at the time, a left-leaning comic strip penned by, what else, an Austinite -- took to calling the two major party nominees the Wimp and the Shrimp. The joke -- with respect to one of only three one-term Presidents of the twentieth century -- took aim at the elder Bush's penchant for genteel, Rockefeller Republicanism; love of bipartisanship; and general image of softness, compared to the giant who came before him.

Little did we know that the truth of that image would come back to haunt us throughout the man's presidency, culminating (but hardly ending) in that great bipartisan moment in which President Bush (1) decided that everyone who'd read his lips scant years before had been suffering from mass dyslexia.

One of the great worries many of us had in 2000 -- aside from the fear that we'd soon have an android in charge of the nuclear codes, and that his alien masters would overrun us all -- was that the Wimp's wimpiness was congenital, and a dominant gene. This did not overly concern me, because, first, any idiot -- and George W. Bush is not an idiot -- could figure out what cost his father the Presidency; and, second, I watched the younger Bush absolutely annihilate that old crone Ann Richards, and not gently, either. Sure, he liked the bipartisan game, but he knew where the long knives were kept.

I maintain that I was right, but to a point; and the beginning of my error is the beginning of the explanation for the absolute fecklessness of the last two and a half years of President Bush's last term.

It is a commonplace analysis that the Bush Administration is actually a tale of two Presidencies: The first was staffed with Executive officers who could each have been President; remarkable for an attitude Hell-bent on establishing Republican dominance for a generation; characterized by a poorly communicated, but determined efforts to make absolutely certain that another September 11 never happened; and willing to pull out knives for use in impromptu surgery on the Democrats. The second term has been filled with Executive officers more notable for loyalty than competence; political missteps a-plenty; a squandered Congress; and even more sporadic attempts to fight, and marshal support for, a war that the Administration still holds vital. The difference, the common wisdom holds, is that the Bush administration (1) was too wounded by Katrina, (2) had lame-duck written on it in December 2004, (3) burned too much political capital on Harriet Miers and a badly prosecuted Iraq War, and/or (4) discharged too many good Executive officers for mere sycophants.

I say this is a mistaken analysis, if not in first premises, then certainly in its underlying understanding of the Bush Administration. I would submit that President Bush's administration has suffered from two, related, but not identical, problems.

First, although the left side of the political spectrum likes to imagine that President Bush and his administration are filled with relentless knife-fighters willing to cut any femoral to win, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that they're willing to play hardball on a tiny number of issues, and to give ground more or less everywhere else. While this might have been a viable governing strategy fifty years ago, the times have changed -- whether those times changed with Nixon, Reagan, or Clinton depends on your political perspective and your tendency to romanticize the past (and your party's involvement in it) -- and they have changed in such a way as to make bipartisanship on large issues more or less impossible. Because this Bush subscribes to his father's view of governance -- electioneering is for election time, governing is for everything else -- he has been wholly unprepared to deal with the world as it exists now. In other words, the single insight of the Clinton Administration worth noting for Republicans -- the need for a permanent campaign in today's media environment -- was and is not so much missed by this Administration as it is utterly repugnant to their way of doing things.

Think about it: Candidate Bush actually touched the third rail of Social Security reform. He suggested, let us be frank, privatization. He ran on it. He clearly wanted it. He talked about it. And come election time, he hammered on it. Then, when he finally had a Congress to work with; when he finally had his shot at ending the biggest boondoggle coming down the pike at us ... the term of art is "communications failure." Normal humans call it "silence." As a result, the Democrats -- then the minority, so for them, it's always campaign time -- campaigned against it. Republican Congresscritters, one of the latest evolved subphyla of invertebrates, naturally rolled over and played dead. In other words, the election campaign long over, Bush played soft, expected executive pronouncements (with the strength of a majority mandate behind him) to carry the day; the Democrats campaigned; and on the election of Which Social Security Option Wins, the Democrats won.

Any conservative -- any libertarian, any fusionist, any Republican -- with skin in the game has a similar tale to tell: A barnstorming, sincere Bush who charges out in front on a given issue, swinging for the fences come election time; followed by a quiet, almost passive Bush come governing time. Pick an issue; it's there.

This also goes a long way to explaining why the second term has seen a more withdrawn, less active President than the first term: Because there is no campaign coming. President Bush was out on the trail in 2002 -- making a critical difference there -- for a whole host of reasons, but undeniably to soften the terrain for 2004. In a development that I'm sure is still breaking a large number of moonbat hearts, there will be no Bush on the ticket in 2008; ergo, there is no need to campaign.

That silence -- that quiescence -- reflects the Bush family's somewhat patrician view of electoral and governing politics; and for that honorable, if somewhat (from today's perspective) daft reason, the Republican Party has one more weight on its back. (Fill in dozens of others as needed.)

Second, the related-but-not-identical problem is that candidate Bush made no secret of the fact that he openly disdained President Clinton's style of governance, which was, charitably, to publicly, loudly emote every time someone fell down and skinned his knee. Essentially, Bush said, you are wasting valuable, limited political capital; that capital must be hoarded for when you are swinging for the fences. If I may continue the baseball analogy -- and I may -- President Clinton's Administration was a story of constant political small ball: Here a hit, there a walk, oops, someone leaned into the pitch, pop fly, end of the inning. President Bush's administration is a story of putting the bat way above your shoulder, taking a lot of strikeouts looking, and when you get one clean over the middle or just a hair low and inside, swinging that bat for all you're worth.

I confess that even now I admire that approach to governance. That doesn't, however, eliminate its obvious flaws. In other words, you'd better damned well connect with one of those balls, preferably with the bases loaded, or you're gonna have a poem written about you and an out achieved by passing the ball over the plate three times.

Now, don't misunderstand: It seems beyond dispute that Bush -- candidate or President -- had a fundamental insight that Clinton -- adulterer or President -- lacked: If you keep wasting your time on small, ugly, inconsequential things, you'll never accomplish anything great. The story of 1993-2001 is nothing more than the story of a massive peace dividend unleashed as a result of the acts of 1981-1989, and a caretaker managing more or less nothing on his own, except a few things that fundamentally cheesed off his party's faithful, and and a handful of inconsequential things that enraged the faithful of his opponents. I say this not as a partisan, but as an honest observer: To what great accomplishment can William Jefferson Clinton point and say, I did that. Me. I wrested the direction of the country in the way I thought it should go, and for that, I am applauded, because I was right?

But behold the effect of playing an all-power lineup: A first term filled with landmark achievements, some awful, some great, some with a jury still trying to figure out who will be foreman; and a second term of strikeouts punctuated by a bare handful of home runs.

The fundamental insight that Candidate, and now President, Bush missed is this: Political capital, while assuredly not infinite, is not precisely finite either. It may be analogized to musculature: If you let it atrophy, you lose it; if you feed and use it, even minimally, you keep it. By failing to expend political capital on small things as well as great -- and there is a balance in this, to be sure -- the Bush administration is like the great warrior who felled his enemies with but a swing of his sword, and who has now gone to fat. He has lost his musculature because he so rarely uses it.

I would submit that in today's media environment, the only way to remain influential -- to retain political capital -- through two terms is to use what you have consistently, whether on offense or defense. Bush's failure to actually fire back at his opponents on a regular basis may or may not make him more noble, but it assuredly has left him enervated before them. Having been bludgeoned on social security reform, and lacking the quick musculature needed to fire back, this administration was gutted -- without basis in truth, but truth doesn't matter in politics or political perception -- by Katrina, and what came after. Lacking the will to constantly engage on the vital nature of the Iraq project, when the President elects to speak on it, he no longer commands a national audience, or even the opening clip on the evening news.

There is implicit in this the lurking suggestion that the modern media environment has made it impossible, or nearly so, to achieve a Presidency filled with great accomplishments; that 24/7 media and new media coverage has accomplished what a bloated bureaucracy could not, and has actually made it impossible for one man to stand successfully atop the Executive Branch. Perhaps this is true; perhaps not. That is something we will have to test with the next President, because the current one is -- sadly for those of us who remain fans of his -- pretty well done.

"I shouldn't take it personally. Because what (the Bush) administration was attempting to do was turn back the progress of the entire 20th century. They were not just after Bill Clinton - they wanted to undo Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt," Clinton said.

"They were on their way to Teddy Roosevelt. It was a bipartisan right-wing extreme agenda," she said.

You say that like it's a bad thing, Ms. Clinton.

So it appears that we are, indeed, bickering over the price.

Political speech is the right to call your opponent a dirty son of a bitch. We just lost that right, temporarily.

In other news, Democrats unwilling to commit political suicide.

It's gonna get wild, y'all. Keep your mind on your riches, baby. Keep your mind on your riches.

UPDATE: Or maybe they are. Attacking the AARP is either brilliant or utterly insane for these guys. Who else is with me in voting the latter?

Let's get this out in the open: Joe Lieberman is not a serious candidate for the Democrat nod. He's way too likely to think before opening his mouth.

Just for the record: Statements like

“It’s the seat of the American revolution,” DNC spokeswoman Deborah DeShong said of Boston, “and we hope it’s going to be the seat of another revolution, and that’s taking over the White House.”

are cute, and everything, but may be -- just may be -- why our politics has become so poisoned.

Every time someone mutters about the need for regime change, a coup, a revolution, whatever, when what they're actually talking about is a normal, legal election, they drag us a little closer to the brink. Words have meaning, guys.

I actually have a theory about this: Politics becomes warfare about once or twice a century. In the heady few decades after the revolution, Hamilton wasn't the only politician who took one in the chest from a rival. Congressmen went to battle -- I mean that precisely -- with each other on the legislative floor on the eve of the Civil War. The elections of 1876-1888 marked a high-point in the late nineteenth century's mudslinging. (The conventional wisdom, from which I see no need to depart, is that 1876 was so very bad, so very dangerous for the political health of the nation, that things toned down, fast, and that is the peace from which we are now awakening.)

Obviously, some of the century or so that we came through made this peace unusually tenable: Two World Wars, in a sense Three, a Great Depression That Shouldn't Have Been As Bad As It Was But There It Is, and massive economic growth from 1950 or so on, etc.

But it appears we're back.

I don't even know what to say about this any more. I do know this: Things will be, politically speaking, ugly for a little while.