Two good posts from Matthew Yglesias. (A fellow canuck, btw. Maybe that's why he's so smart...)
The first deals with what the Dems should do if they pull off control of the House this November. Conciliation or retribution is the choice. Matt comes down on the latter and I tend to agree - not out of revenge, tempting though it is, but because the best way to reform the place is to air the sins of the past six years, expose them to the bright light of day, and tar those who committed them with the truth of their own misdeeds.
The Republicans' corruption of the political process and the rules of the game has been so grave and so threatening to the future progress of American democracy (and security) that merely forgiving and forgetting is not a sensible option.
And, lest we forget, the determination to take the high road - as reflexive an instinct as it is for some of us on the center-left - is never rewarded with a similar benevolence on the right. John Kerry found that out in spades two years ago. "Queensbury rules" only work if both sides honorably agree to abide by them. Our opponents are not honorable. They have demonstrated this time and again over the past 6 years. And our determination to look for fairness in the face of that recurrent reality is pure suicide. (Hell, I'm starting to sound like the President, only minus the waterboarding and hypothermia.)
Fire must be fought with fire - metaphorically anyway.
Here's the difference: their goal has been merely to win at all costs, ours must be to cleanse, reform, and renew American government by, as Matt says,
"rooting out the rot." Hell, maybe there's a slogan there...
His point is a good one - that the focus should not be on pulling punches so that we can win in the short term but on digging to the bottom and exposing the depth of malfeasance so that these Republican zombies cannot return from the dead 4 short years later.
Winning on the structural level is ultimately more important. Just look at the mileage the right has gotten out of Clinton's impeachment. In the short term, it cost them seats in the 1998 midterms - an historic rebuke. But two years later the black mark it left prevented Gore from running on Clinton's record (or overly complicated his efforts to do so), rewarding the right-wingers with the White House. And - until this past week - it had branded the Democrats as the party of moral failings and out-of-control libidos.
On that score, if today's
piece in the WaPo is any indication, the pile of corruption that the Delay-Hastert Congress has produced (with Foley merely the over-ripe cherry on top), may have muddied the libidinous waters a bit for values voters. We're edging back towards "a pox on both your houses" which, while it may not generate a flood of new votes for Dems, demoralizes the core of the new Rovian coalition. Drains the calcium out of their wingnut bones.
Matt's second post is on
Iraq - the real issue in this election, Foley notwithstanding.
He's right. The people are out in front on this one. Nearly 60% say that Bush lied his way into a war that they no longer want. It's ok for the Dems to say so. In fact, it's imperative.
