Neptunus Lex

The (GOP) world is going to hell, Peg Noonan thinks. And it has been for some time.

The Democrats aren’t the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they’re finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They’re busy being born.

The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

It’d be tempting, but foolish I think, to write this off as just another bit of anguished, fin de siecle nostalgia from the Reagan-era speech writer. A talented woman once convinced that hers was the party of ideas. That great things were in the offing. Because this time she’s right. The GOP is heading for an epic shellacking in the fall elections - and they deserve it, even if their opposition doesn’t deserve to profit from their losses. In politics, like war, it is insufficient that those who have it coming to them lose - someone else has to win.

It’s the war of course, mostly. That and high oil prices, which may well be linked. And continuous stream of economic alarmism in the press. And the unremitting hostility of the cultural elites on both coasts.

The neatest political trick of the generation was the almost balletic shift of the Democratic Party solons from a position of support for the war to opposition of it. This required a fair amount of historical revisionism combined with the claim that many of them had been deceived by the President into voting for the war - the infamous “sixteen words” - to assertions that it had been grotesquely mismanaged, irretrievably bungled or not worth the cost of finishing in the country’s favor. In this they were abetted by a media tribunes wedded to the “Another Grim Milestone” brand of reportage. Not only because, waspishly certain that they had been misled in the run-up to the war they determined to wring their penance out in the adversarial reporting of it, but also because we - all of us - buy blood. Bad news sells. And news is, after all, a business. You don’t sell what the people want, you’ll lose your job to somebody that will.

They re-branded the country’s war as “Bush’s war” and then busily marshaled allies invested in the losing of it. Exhausted perhaps at fighting two wars overseas and in any case unequipped with the rhetorical graces required to prop up domestic support for a long war - always difficult in a democracy - the President himself essentially ceded the domestic battlefield to his enemies, emerging from the fortified citadel of the White House only long enough to veto congressional attempts at circumscribing his war powers. History will judge me, the president seemed to say, resigning himself to being a political punching bag in the here and now. To such a great degree that, having spoken some really general and rather inoffensive things about the perils of negotiating with terrorists and illusory advantages of appeasement in front of the Israeli Knesset, the outraged howls of those who nevertheless chose to be offended threatened to deafen anyone within a ten mile radius of the District of Columbia. It is the president’s role to be the target of outrage, they insist. A great deal of time and ink has been spent crafting that role for him. He will be permitted no other.

And it worked. Despite the fact that no one was lied to. Despite the fact that mistakes will happen in war - that great attempts come with commensurate risks, or else the achievement of them could not be qualified as great. Despite the fact that none of those things which now are called blunders - disbanding the old Iraqi army, de-Ba’athification, even an occupation strategy crafted around protecting coalition forces rather than setting the conditions for the security of the Iraqi people - were obviously bad ideas at the time. And while the cost of eliminating Saddam’s predatory tyranny and leaving behind something marginally better can be reckoned to the penny and drop of blood, the cost of leaving him and his poisonous prodigy in place to continue with their toxic schemes is incalculable. Although we do know this: If a nuclear mushroom cloud rises over the New York City skyline some day in not-too-distant future, we will know where it did not come from.

But I must stop there, before I commit the political sin of “fear mongering” - of suggesting there are those in the world that might try to target the US homeland with a horrible weapon of mass destructive power. Irrationals and irreconcilables who might try to kill us in our thousands, indiscriminately. Which everyone knows is preposterous. And anyway, it has become common knowledge that we create terror by fighting against it. It is a kind of modern day alchemy, formulated on precisely the same scientific basis as its ancient predecessor.

With the president declining to defend himself, and with GOP “leadership” stuck with his brand, you would think that some articulate man of principle would step up to carry the torch of freedom, democracy and security at home and in the world abroad. It is one of the strange ironies of today’s politics that one of the few men with the courage and moral authority to do so is former Democratic Party vice presidential candidate and current US Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn). Having been banished from the party of his birth for heterodoxy, but re-elected by a loyal constituency, he’s probably the only politician on Capitol Hill with absolutely nothing to lose and is therefore free to follow principle where it leads him. Which must be liberating.

Because there are very few politicians left in the GOP with the moral authority to do so, even if they were inclined to. They are not plagued merely by their attachment to power for its own sake, and all the sordid little compromises, profligacies and scandals that go along with such an attachment, they have lost their theory of government. Reagan’s dream of a small and non-intrusive federal government did not survive his own second term. Tax cuts - for the wealthy! - no longer stir the people’s soul. We are all willing to pay more out of our own pockets in order to really stick it to the Jones down the street, and who knows? Maybe get a little of it back from the government. “God, guns and gays” is no longer a branding point when your opposition falls all over themselves writing epistles on conversion, sticks a sock in the mouth of their gun control wing and the culture moves on. Gay marriage is a constitutional right, you see. It was in there all along, you just didn’t see it. You bigot.

And so the GOP is going to get creamed in the House, although conservatives - not quite the same thing - can console themselves in the knowledge that many of the new Democratic Party congressmen from formerly safe GOP seats will be anything but poster children for the progressivism. Thus, change.

In the Senate, Republicans must defend 23 seats to their opposition’s 12. Five long-time Republican incumbents are retiring, no Democrats. Four GOP seats will probably change hands: Virginia, New Mexico, Alaska, New Hampshire. Colorado and Minnesota are toss-ups. Maine and Oregon are GOP-leaning, but could be upsets. That’s a probable loss of eight seats, leaving the GOP with 41 if no one else stumbles at the gate. Just enough to sustain a filibuster, if not enough to positively shape policy.

Which is just as well, since the GOP doesn’t appear to have anything positive to say, just now - or at least, nothing positive to say that they could plausibly purport to believe in. A time in the wilderness might be just the ticket.

The election will soon be over (thank God!), true colors will soon fly, and over-reach will breed reaction. The wheel keeps turning.