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I do not know whether the Democrats will win the office of President in 2008 or not.
Walmart bashing, promises of worse barriers to trade (the free trade deals with Colombia, Ecuador and Peru seem to be the latest targets of the Democrats [the various Marxist terrorist groups in Latin America will be pleased] – with demands that these countries further cripple themselves with more “union rights” and other regulations) and even bigger subsidies for universities (which will push up costs again) and even more regulations on HMOs and insurance companies (which will also push up costs again), even more money tossed away on “No-Child-Left-Behind” (and other unconstitutional welfare state schemes) than the Republicans tossed away on them and…
I doubt that this agenda will still be popular after another two years of Nancy Pelosi and the rest pushing it. Indeed I do not think it is that popular now – I think the Republicans lost the midterms partly because of sleaze and Pork, but mostly because of “the war stupid”.
And by 2008 the great George Bush – Mark Steyn project to spread democracy to the Muslims will either be abandoned (and voters will forget it fairly fast once they stop seeing American soldiers dying on the television news) or there will be some evidence that it is actually a good idea – either way it is not going to shape the 2008 elections in the way it shaped the 2006 elections.
However, the Democrats may win. The power of the mainstream (i.e. leftist) media is vast (and the left are just as good as anyone else in using the internet – perhaps better than their foes) and the Democrats have huge amounts of money that are not hit by John McCain’s death-to-the-First-Amendment ‘campaign finance reform’. → Continue reading: 2012 – The great chance for liberty in the United States?
It looks like Congressman Rangel is at it again.
I guess he just thinks enslaving your fellow man is a great idea.
Our thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.
Not good. Michael Barone explains:
Almost all incumbent House Democrats voted against a free-trade measure as innocuous as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Protectionism has become a partisan issue, with virtually all Democrats for and most Republicans against. So you can score a Democratic victory, like this year’s, as a victory for protectionism. It will certainly have consequences. Trade promotion authority lapses on June 30 next year, and the chances that the Democratic Congress will renew it are close to zero. The Doha round of world trade talks is currently stalled and unlikely to be renewed in time for an agreement to be sent to Congress. In any case, the fact that the Agriculture committees will be chaired by Tom Harkin from corn-growing Iowa and Collin Peterson from the wheat-growing Minnesota Seventh District means that the 2007 farm bill will not meet the standards of any Doha agreement that could conceivably be reached. The lapsing of trade promotion authority will doom the regional and two-country trade agreements that special trade representatives Robert Zoellick, Rob Portman, and Susan Schwab have been negotiating. We won’t be moving toward more protectionism, probably. But we’re going to miss many chances to advance free trade.
The idea that any country has universal jurisdiction over citizens of other countries, and can try them for actions taking place in yet a third country, would be risible if it were not deeply offensive.
One would think the Germans, of all people, would exhibit a tad more humility in these matters, but if the assertion of universal jurisdiction is not symptomotic of a colossal arrogance, I do not know what is. You would have thought we kicked this nonsense out of the Germans during the ’40s, but I guess not.
It also makes the concept of ‘representative government’ rather irrelevant – after all, the Americans who are apparently now subject to German law never voted in any German election.
It does place our new Democratic overlords in rather an awkward spot; they loathe Rumsfeld, but I suspect that even they are reluctant to bundle him off to Germany for judgement by lefty Euros and miscellaneous anti-American yahoos. After all, if a Republican official is subject to German judgement, why, so might be a Democratic official, should the Rodham-Clinton administration find it necessary to stand up to the jihadis in ways that the neo-dhimmis of Eurabia find offensive.
With Democratic control of the Senate confirmed, one wonders what the next two years will bring on the domestic scene.
Its easy to say what will not happen: There will not be any form of tax relief or reform, or reform of entitlement programs. And no, I do not see expansion of such programs as reform. In short, it is hard to imagine anything happening that will advance the cause of limited government.
On the tax front, the only question will be whether the President will have the stones to veto a tax increase bill. Certainly the Senate, and in all probability the House, will be more than willing to send him one. Given this President’s indifference to the virtues of small government and his status as a lame duck with no re-election chances to blow, I think the odds are that he will sign it.
On spending, expect more of the same. The Dems’ main complaints about Republican spending have been that (a) it has not been enough (b) it has not been directed to Dem constituents and (c) it has not been accompanied by tax increases (this is what passes for fiscal responsibility in Washington these days). Will ‘compassionate conservative’ Bush veto spending bills because they redirect money to Dem causes rather than Repub? I can not imagine why.
Oh, expect knock-down drag-out fights over court nominations, especially if another Supreme goes down. In fact, I would expect any nominee to fail, unless they are a squishy statist who is willing to yammer on about how the Constitution is a living document.
Expect investigations out the wazoo, which should paralyze the executive branch (not that that would take much) and the intelligence community (hmm, bug or feature?) and produce lots of political theater, but in the end it will all signify nothing. These investigations are actually Pelosi’s best opportunity to divert and satisfy her nutty lefties (if she cares to do so). The alternative is to let them actually try to make policy (shudder).
A couple of issues to keep an eye on. The Dems have gone dark on the issue of gun control, but there is no reason to believe they do not still want it. One sign of their (over?)confidence in their position will be if they feel bold enough to come back out of the closet on this issue.
For a very early indicator of whether the Dems are serious about governance, keep an eye on who gets the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. The presumptive chair, Alcee Hastings, belongs to a very exclusive club – federal judges who were impeached and removed from office for corruption. If Pelosi gives him the job, then look for a wild ride for two years, because the inmates will truly be running the asylum.
After an election in which “although many individual races were close the cumulative effect was a thumping” I watched President Bush give a brief statement and then spend the best part of a hour answering questions from a room full of journalists many of whom are his sworn enemies.
Political leaders in Britain do not react to election defeats that way – the give a statement and perhaps answer a question or two (normally not) and then run away.
I may disagree with a lot of things about what President Bush has done (for example I think that he has made the entitlement program burden, about which he rightly warned today, even worse than it was before he came into office), but he is clearly a man of great courage.
I could not have done what I watched him do today.
With the election in the bag and the Democrats measuring the drapes in the House and likely the Senate, probably the most important question, which means of course the question that no one in the mainstream is thinking about, is how these election results will be perceived in the war zone.
The enemies of the West have been counting on ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ to deliver the United States to defeat. I cannot help but think that this election will give them great comfort and lead them to believe that Vietnam Syndrome has indeed taken hold. While I believe that there is less support amongst the populace for rapid ‘redeployment’ (this year’s code word for retreat) from Iraq than many believe, in the ‘perception is reality’ hall of mirrors that is domestic and international politics, the relentless pounding of this meme by the new Democratic leadership and their allies in the press will likely make it self-fulfilling.
If Bush gives the new Democratic leadership their way, then I think that the jihadis will be proven right, and they will ultimately succeed in outlasting the United States in Iraq. If they get their way, the US will withdraw under fire, the nascent Iraqi state will collapse into civil war, and we will see the spectre of helicopters evacuating the last few Americans from the Green Zone. The world-wide high-def broadcast of American defeat will do much to entrench our jihadi enemies and dishearten what is left of the West.
Very few Americans are anti-war. Most Americans are anti-losing the war. The Bush administration made the serious mistake of not fighting to win in Iraq, which in turn means the war dragged out past the (roughly) six year span that Americans will tolerate being at war. With the mainstream media still controlling the terms of discourse, and using that control to relive their glory days of bringing about American defeat in Vietnam, Americans got the sense that we were losing in Iraq. Americans hate a loser, and so they turned on the party in power.
The election will hearten our enemies in Iraq, and we can expect redoubled conflict in that country as they seek to entrench their gains in the American mindspace. The Democratic Congress will seize on this development to push for what they have promised, which happens to be exactly what our enemies want; namely, precipitous American withdrawal. If they get what they want, then the jihadis will have won this campaign, and I think we can look forward to a reinvigorated Islamo-fascist movement worldwide, with all the bloodshed and suffering that entails.
Not to worry, though. The minimum wage will be increased, redistribution of wealth will be accelerated, and many words will be hurled at the real threat, global warming. And isn’t that what really matters?
Well Nancy Pelosi and her friends are overjoyed – higher minimum wage levels, more government spending, especially on education and heath care (buy stock in the stem cell companies that the Democrats intend to increase subsidies to) – and an end to the timid Republican experiments in choice in schools, medical care and in pension accounts, more regulations (and efforts at world regulations – such as Barney Frank’s dream of a world government financial services regulator) and all the rest of it. And I do not expect President Bush to veto much (Captain Veto he is not – this is not the Administration of President Ford and William Simon).
Turning to the election itself:
It looks like an odd combination of some Fox people thinking a Senator was too old and tired and the Libertarian party have handed the United States Senate to the Democrats.
Conrad Burns looks like he has lost by a few hundred votes – he was denounced on Fox (on the O’R. Factor) as “too old and tired” to have any hope of victory. And the Libertarian candidate (Mr Jones) got 3% of vote in Montana (my guess is that some of those voters would have gone Republican, some stayed home, and just about none gone Democrat).
So one Fox News prediction, that the Libertarians would act as spoilers this time round, has been proved correct.
However, the Republicans deserved to lose. Their ‘compassionate conservatism’ (i.e. be soft on spending and wink at Pork) finally irritated the base so much that they stayed home. And Mr Foley did not exactly help either – Democrats may be ‘cool’ with man-boy stuff (Congressman Frank got away with the under-age male prostitution that operated from his home, and another Democrat got away with sex with House page years ago), but Republican voters are not cool with it. Perhaps these voters are ‘bigots’ but that is just a fact of life.
The money of Mr. Soros and others could be counted on (via various front organizations) to bring out the Democrat vote (and finance adverts – such as the tissue of lies that destroyed JD Hayworth in Arizona).
And John McCain’s ‘Campaign Finance Reform’ sometimes meant that some Republicans found themselves outspent (because spending by the leftist groups did not count as spending by their opponents).
And yes virtually all the newspapers and mainstream television acted as part of the Democratic party (Arizona was a good example of this in the House races).
But even where the Republicans had a friendly newspaper they lost – both seats in New Hampshire in spite of the ‘Manchester Union Leader’.
“It was the war stupid”
The voters are quite happy to use force overseas in order to (for example) kill or capture O.B.L. – but they are (for better or worse) not prepared to spend money and blood on some ‘War for Democracy’ in Iraq or anywhere else.
The neo-cons coming out just before the elections and sneering at President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as morons for the conduct of the war that they, the neo-cons, demanded was also unhelpful (and disgusting). Supposedly the war would have been fine if ‘smart people’ had been in charge – yes right. As I am part Jewish myself I will resist a Mel Gibson moment about the neo-cons – the sooner these backstabbers are forgotten the better. → Continue reading: The last great leftist victory in the United States
WASHINGTON, DC—After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday’s midterm election, taking all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, retaining a majority with 100 out of 100 seats in the Senate, and pushing political candidates to victory in each of the 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs.
The Onion notices the awful truth. Their overall election coverage is quite chuckle-inducing, too.
Update: All right, there are a couple of decent ones in there. I like Dr No.
(h/t: Avatar Briefs)
It looks like we have caused the Republicans a bit of grief:
So far, losing because of libertarians hasn’t caused Republicans to move toward the libertarians ideologically. But maybe things will change this time.
Our election results are available as they come in via our party headquarters.
For years I have felt alone on election nights with nothing to follow except the voting tallies and changing balance between the left and right wings of the ruling party. Kudos to LPHQ!
Over on Antoine Clarke’s Election Watch, I am running results and commentary on the U.S. mid-term elections tonight.
The most reliable source last time was RealClearPolitics. However, they’re admiting a huge range of possible outcomes in the Senate, from only two Republican losses, to six, which would mean a change of majority.
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