A Well Deserved Defeat

On the other hand, this turned out reasonably well:

The American public served a resounding “F-You!” to the Republicans on November 7^th. While my affinity for the average, that is to say unprincipled, Democrat is comparable to my desire to concoct the Ebola virus, I get no small amount of joy in seeing Bush's “mandate” fall apart like the house of cards it always was. Additionally, like many Americans, sick of the rule of the party of Douche—to borrow from Trey Parker and Matt Stone—I consider the rise of the Turd Sandwiches to hold the prospect for amusement.

With the Democrats holding a fairly substantial lead in the House, and a similar though smaller advantage in the Senate, Bush will have a harder time finding that rubber stamp which Congress had been in the habit of giving to his agenda. He may in fact begin to veto the occasional spending bill, a hitherto singular event. Ironically then, the conservatives cannot be entirely displeased with a Democratic victory; deadlock is notoriously antithetical to the pecuniary desires of a less than thrifty Congress.

But all this shall come in due time. For now, I concern myself with discerning why the GOP suffered ignominious defeat. First, but not necessarily foremost, is the War in Iraq. Most Americans thought it a good idea to topple Saddam's regime; yet few had the will to make a longterm commitment to building a new democratic regime. For, despite our power, in some sense unprecedented in its scope and extent since perhaps the early Roman Empire, Americans, almost to a one, abhor the notion of empire.

In his book Colossus, Niall Ferguson highlights “three fundamental deficits that together explain why the United States has been a less effective empire than its British predecessor... the most serious of the three... [is] its attention deficit.” Ignoring the great many logistical problems which would prevent the re-building of Iraq to the tune of glorious democracy, the single biggest reason why the mission in Iraq will fail is simply that the American people do not have the will to “stay the course” and finish the job. They have now let Congress and by extension President Bush know this.

But while the War in Iraq was an important issue to the electorate, its influence is likely to be exaggerated. As one who occasionally reads what passes for conservative commentary these days, the one issue that the pundits continued to come back to was the War on Terror, the War on Iraq being a larger component thereof. And while the Malkins and Shapiros of the world are almost embarrassingly lacking in not only historical insight but also basic reasoning skills, it would be strange if someone did not find their cliché-strewn imbecilic columns to be of some value.

For Malkin and Shapiro, as well as all those other unfortunate “conservatives” who have felt compelled to support both Mr. Bush and his runaway Congress, have few weapons with which to defend. Aside from a mediocre tax cut—which, divorced from spending cuts, is merely a future tax on the nation's children—Bush has yet to enact a single “conservative” reform. Instead, he has spent more than even LBJ. And while the War on Iraq is not the least bit “conservative”, as I have previously discussed, grasping this point takes some degree of intelligence, an attribute severely lacking in those who continue to support the policies of their President.

This election then, was also a moratorium on the faux-conservatism of the neo-cons. Besides being bored with nation-building, many conservatives were sick of Bush's fiscal irresponsibility and embarrassed by his failure to take their concerns to heart. Bring on the Turds!