Making Excuses Before the Fact. Radical Rightists are already trying to put the best face on what they supposedly fear: rebuke by the electorate in next month's Congressional elections. John Podhoretz, Rightwing columnist for the New York Post, on October 6th complained about Democrats raising a sex scandal to defeat the Republicans, but saw a brite side:

THIS column is directed entirely to the sleazy, scuzzy, unprincipled and entirely Machiavellian Democratic political operative who helped design the careful plan resulting in the fingerprint-free leak of Mark Foley e-mails * * *

The one great irony is that if Democrats do prevail in November, everybody's going to know the election wasn't a referendum on Bush, which is what they most wanted. But you can't have everything.

So it is sleazy and scuzzy to reveal Republican hypocrisy on sexuality? It was fine for Republicans to impeach a President of the United States over his sex life, but not fine for Democrats to expose a Republican defender of children who was attracted to boys a little younger than strictly legal?
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I have already stated here my indignation over this tempest in a teapot, this country's insane attitude toward sex and "children" who aren't children at all but young adults. And I have stated repeatedly that I think Republicans are making much too much noise about their likely losing the House of Representatives, when there is so little play in the gerrymandered districts across the Nation for there ever to be much change, so they might well remain in power in both houses. But this takes the cake: now the Republicans are disowning in advance any judgment by the voters that the Bush Administration and its Rightwing Republican power base are taking us in the wrong direction and the people want a course correction.
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Elections mean whatever people believe them to mean, and if Democrats should somehow retake the House of Representatives, despite the gerrymandering of Congressional districts and the massive flood of money that Republicans have poured into re-election, Democrats must insist that their triumph is indeed a rejection of the Bush Administration and a mandate to take this country in different directions.
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One such direction must be to impose a Federal standard on the drawing of Congressional districts in every single state of the Nation, to forbid gerrymandering and require that computer programs that consider only geometry and raw population statistics, but nothing else, redraw all Congressional districts across the Nation, to make them as close to square as possible and still maintain equal numbers of constituents in each. While they're at it, Democrats should also set national standards for ballot access, to eliminate the many barriers to third-party presence in elections that many states — including, bizarrely, New York, in the Liberal Northeast — erect to keep elections a major-party monopoly. Uniform Federal standards must control Federal elections.
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No one knows how such reforms would affect the distribution of House seats by party, so Democrats will be taking a leap of faith in the good sense and sound judgment of the people in insisting that Congressional districts be square and that all parties have a chance to display candidates' names on the ballot, as finally to give democracy a genuinely "square" deal in a country whose major parties bravely champion democracy abroad — but do everything to thwart it at home.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,742 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:22 AM