Perspective

The US military fighting in Iraq is a professional organization, not a conscript army, and it is without doubt the most skilled, restrained, and discerning force, as well as the most lethal, ever put into the field by any nation. The ridiculous media kerfluffle over a US Marine shooting a wounded terrorist in Fallujah has mostly lacked any realistic perspective on the conduct of close quarters infantry warfare. It also lacks realistic perspective on what "bringing evildoers to justice" has typically amounted to during wartime.

The liberation of concentration camps in WWII is a proud national memory for the American and British people, as well it should be. That memory does not, however, carry much notion of what that liberation involved. This Dachau Scrapbook article (by way of http://www.belmontclub.blogspot.com/) describes in words and pictures the actual events surrounding the liberation of Dachau by our Greatest Generation. This is from a larger site, but this page, plus the pictures and text linked by "continue" at the bottom, tell the story. It's worth remembering, too, that these events are trivial compared with those surrounding, for example, the liberation of Berlin by Soviet forces or the aftermath of the German surrender at Stalingrad.

Byron

Unconscious

Roger Simon describes the legions of affluent Christmas shoppers already descending on NYC stores. Of course, almost all of those folks voted for John Kerry. Much has been written about how Red State proles "voted against their own interests" in casting ballots for Bush. Yes, somehow, when elites do exactly the parallel thing, it is taken as a sign of enlightened higher principle, not false consciousness.

In fact, of course, it is precisely the same point being made in both cases: That presidential elections are about much more than social class loyalties and money. If the self-appointed left intelligentsia want to better understand the behavior of their fellow citizens, as well as their own behavior, the first thing they should do is to shed their kindergarten version of Marxism.

But they won't, because they have no alternative moral-political schema to replace it.

Bush Victory

This was an old-fashioned, world-class butt kicking. White House, Senate, House, the whole deal top to bottom and inside out. And that against a President who was extremely vulnerable and eminently defeatable.

The leadership of the Democratic Party made the mistake of enabling their extremist Moore-on, Move On wing during this election (outsourcing at its worst), and now they may face a Hobson's Choice. They either try to continue that poisonous relationship, which would involve moving the party even further left and further into oblivion, or they toss the moonbats over the side and run the risk of a strong third-party movement on their left.

The alternative possibility is that Hillary Clinton (who carefully minimized her involvement in this debacle) will be able to move the party toward the center without alienating its left wing. This would be a good outcome for the party and the country. But Hillary's negatives are very high, and there is no guarantee that she can win a national election against a strong GOP ticket (Giuliani, Rice, McCain, etc.).

As it stands, the Democratic Party has little to sell that people find attractive on the merits. Their pitch this time was about 90% anti-Bush, with the high-profile positive proposal being a massive expansion of government health insurance that everybody knows would be utterly DOA on Capitol Hill. As somebody wrote the other day (Steyn?), the Democrats got their tank filled during the New Deal and are still trying to run on the old fumes. That's a product of their own success -- most of the New Deal agenda got enacted long ago --combined with a failure innovation and creativity since then.

Unless the Democrats come up with some kind of interesting agenda of new ideas, they are going to be stuck with winning an occasional election only because the GOP has screwed things up too egregiously. Nothing about that scenario leads to a political movement with any prospect of consolidating power and leading the nation over any significant period of time. That will depend on developing an agenda of interesting, attractive ideas. The question is whether the matrix of interest groups that the Democrats are wedded to have the party so hamstrung that innovation has become impossible in most policy areas.

Not that long ago, the GOP was in a similar situation, only worse. It had become a party of privileged seat warmers, satisfied with coasting along on the backbench sidelines. Extricating itself required a series of humiliating electoral defeats, a leadership coup d'etat, and years of wandering in the think-tank wilderness reassessing the intellectual and ideological foundations of failed conservatism. They discovered that there was really no mystery why the existing moribund mélange of deadend positions and weary, retrograde ideas had little attraction for anybody outside of a few corporate boardrooms, the local country club, and the DAR. Only when that was recognized and admitted could an idea-driven conservative revolution begin.

The Democratic Party does not need better version of Karl Rove, or slicker media spokesmen, or personally more attractive candidates. What it needs is a leadership purge and an intellectual overhaul. Without that, none of the cosmetics are going to matter.

Byron