The reasons given by Brooks, Powell, Adelman, Hart, Kmiec, Buckley et al for their political apostasy and announced intentions to vote for a radically left-wing, one-year senator (he has spent the other three years since 2004 running for president) from the heart of the Chicago Daley machine, not to mention a highly problematic circle of friends and no actual accomplishments on his record, seem to center a lot on their distaste for McCain’s vice presidential running mate.  It seems that Governor Palin hasn’t been quick enough on the draw for them with a nice smooth lie, in the way glib con artists like Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack himself are when asked a “gotcha” question. 

This rationale doesn’t stand up terribly well when examined outside the newsrooms of the New York Times and MSNBC, and most of the explanations for the planned votes are embarrassingly bad.  I think that I can offer a better rationale for All The Best Strange New Respect “Conservative” People (e.g., rich, East Coast, Ivy League, non-religious, you get the idea) to vote Barack:

1) He is against expanding foreign aid- Barack’s half brother in Kenya, George, lives in a dump  on twelve dollars a year and The Vacuous Garment has never sent any kind of aid  over there to him.  If Barack can ignore his half brother, surely he can tell Egypt to take a hike.  

2) He is very strong on the real estate business- With the current housing market crunch, you know how important that competence and understanding of real property markets is to our economy.  He found a way to buy his mansion in Hyde Park and get an extra large yard for a bargain price by hard bargaining with Tony Rezko, who happened to buy the lot next door at the same time in one of those amazing Chicago coincidences, and he knew how to get a bunch of Chicago slums rebuilt at little or no cost to the developers.  Someone who knows how to get a good deal is just who we need taking care of the $700 billion market financial re-capitalization project.  Perhaps Vivian Jarrett or Tony Rezko could replace Henry Paulson? 

3) He is experienced and judicious handling other peoples’ money- For example, out of his meager campaign funds of $600 million, the big party at Invesco Field was only $5.3 million- that’s less than 1%.  That kind of frugality and stewardship is vital to our budget future as new federal spending is considered.  I’m sure that he would limit the costs of his inauguration to only 1% of next year’s couple trillion buck federal budget.

4) He is also experienced and judicious in not giving handouts to the poor- such as, for example, his beloved Aunt Zeituni about whom he wrote in his first memoir; she lives in a slum in Boston.  We need that kind of tough-minded discipline to get away from all this “I feel your pain” stuff and stop the giveaway programs.  Lack of charity begins at home! 

5) He rejects government controls and excessive regulation- why, even after an initial kowtow to the politically correct gods of speech suppression, he courageously changed is mind in favor of freedom, and broke away from the repressive yoke of FEC campaign finance limits.  It takes guts to recognize your opportunity to buy the election by getting a lot of fraudulent credit card donations on-line plus foreign money from Palestine previous misguided error in saying you would abide by the campaign finance law, and instead stand up for free speech!  Power to the (rich) (or, bundled trial lawyer-donating) people!

6) He is loyal to his friends- Loyalty and friendship are very important to traditionalist conservatives.  The Vacuous Garment may not be big on family, but he could easily have thrown unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers under the bus, where the distinguished “Professor of English” (actually, Prof of Education) would have been crowded and squeezed, sharing the space down there with Obama’s grandma and Pastor Wright.  Instead, Barack showed true intestinal fortitude and support for his old friend Prof. Ayers by simply denying that they had ever had any kind of relationship. 

7) He is careful and doesn’t rush into things.  The thoughtfulness that David Brooks noticed, when discussing the essentially naturalistic (the generic “higher power”), economically socialist, quasi-pacifism that Reinhold Niebuhr sold as a form of theology and Christianity, is shown by all those courageous “Present” votes in Illinois and in the US Senate.  Sen. McCain seems to be deluded into thinking that courage is adhering to an unpopular position if you believe it is right and it costs you to stand firm.  But, rather than permitting himself to be rushed into taking a position that some voting group might not approve, Obama stands tall and takes the heat from both sides of most issues- neither the “tastes great” nor “less filling” group is completely happy with him.  Feeling very strongly both ways is lonely- and Obama is willing to cope with that loneliness to avoid pushing the wrong positions.  What character!

8] He would spare no effort to fight our enemies- We know that he is absolutely willing to do battle against enemies because His campaign has never backed down from a fight against evil.  For example, as represented by Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, or someone from Fox News unfairly describing what he has said and written in the past.  Fight the smears!

9) He is strongly in favor of national securities- In this age of challenges to the global financial system, we are seeing that governments have found it necessary to inject new capital into the system.  For example, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were treated as quasi-government companies (“government sponsored entities” nor GSE), then there was the effective takeover of insurance giant AIG, the purchase of p[referred stock in the nine largest US banks, and so on.  When the national government owns these stock shares, or “securities”, we use the term  “national securities” to describe the financial stake the federal government has in these companies.  It requires one with a strong affinity for federal government power to really appreciate the possibilities associated with national securities.  For example, the government could order these banks now to only make loans to poor people who can’t p[ay them back, thus fulfilling important social goals…..  (‘What? You mean ‘national security’?  Like bombs and offing terrorists or murderous dictators ?   Um, uh, to quote the late Gilda Radner as Emily Litella, ‘Nevermind.’”- if you don’t get it, check this out)  Disregard the above.  If we are attacked by bad guys, the UN will take care of us.

10) He opposes government interference in business, especially health care mandates- Barack won’t stand for government getting into private business affaires and mandating certain business practices or medical treatments.  In fact, he is a stickler for preventing civil or criminal liability for medical malpractice if an obstetrician chooses to treat or not treat a patient (well, a “mistaken” 5 minute old baby is sort of a patient…. isn’t it?).  Government should stay out of business!

Now that we have endured a thoroughly unbecoming series of hissy-fits by the Elitist Right, I have a statement to make.  With full reverence to Chairman Bill, whom I sort of quote:
 
I would rather be governed by one hundred random people in the Wasilla phone book than by the news departments of ABC, CBS, NBC, PBC, the NYT, the WashPo, the LA Times, and the editorial staffs of the New Republic and the National Review (well, if Jay Nordlinger was around, I’d take him, but keep him far away from China policy, and Mark Steyn doesn’t count).

I am a mere foolish, unworthy wage slave in the flyover zone.  I rejected the overture from Yale when I was in high school, in favor of attending the local (large, national research) university because my parents were not well-to-do, and I knew that I would have to work my way through school.  I was too sensible to take out loans for college.

Unlike David Frum, I am not a beneficiary of a millionaire family who married into a prominent journalism family, and went to Yale and then Harvard law.  Unlike Jeffrey Hart, I am not hostile to religion, and on those grounds a total apostate to every philosophical tenet I ever held throughout my working life.  Unlike Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan, I am not envious of another far more accomplished woman, and don’t confuse extemporaneous glibness and the ability to lie with impunity on the spot (Joe Biden) in an unusual situation for intellect and ability.  Unlike Colin Powell, I don’t let my personal grudges over being deservedly fired by the president overwhelm my ability to think and reason coherently and thus dictate my political views.  Unlike Christopher Buckley, I did not get my writing career kicked off by being introduced by a famous parent to the glitterati of New York publishing and then use the relationship thus established to write sophomoric parodies that are outshined every day of the week by Scrappleface’s Scott Ott, nor did I then sleep with my publicist, have an out-of-wedlock child, later abandoning my wife and daughters to essentially live with a young woman half my age.  And unlike Kenneth Adelman, I am capable of expressing, in terms not laughable on their face, why I support the candidates whom I favor in this election. 

In fact, I have a guilty secret.  I still like and admire George Bush, and would vote for him again in a heartbeat, in preference to any of the alleged Republicans listed above.

I think that it is time to take the Republican Party away from the New York-Washington-Ivy League cabal and put it back in the hands of people who live more then three hundred miles inland, who work in some field besides journalism and punditry, who watch football and thus understand why the rest of us like it, and even go to church regularly, not being persuaded that the god who counts is looking at us fromt he mirror.  One fairly well-known Republican once said “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow-Republican”; well, since I have heard nothing but “ill” about Palin for the last two months, I am returning the favor.

By the way, our small family includes one successful accountant, a trained lawyer with two other post-graduate degrees, and two college professors at world famous universities.  We all went to public schools, and then to unfashionable state universities.  Somehow, we managed to muddle through in spite of such handicaps. 

And we are completely disgusted with the petty elitism that has been revealed (it was there all along, but apparently well-disguised before the emergence of the Threat Of Palin) during this last three months. 

Uh, so who’s Steve Edelman, you ask?  What mortgage broker, risk pool derivatives firm, Wall Street bank, politician does he represent?

None of them, of course.  This is far more insidious a conspiracy than that! 

Back in the late 1950’s, the pop sociologists were all bloviating about a book by Vance Packard called The Hidden Persuaders.  Its premise was, essentially, “the devil made me do it”.  We are all helpless, manipulated by psychological forces we don’t perceive because they flash past so fast that they subliminally impress our minds with messages we absorb, but are simply not aware we are taking in.  Of course, this was a screed against Madison Avenue and the advertising business, this being the same era as the other rebellions against post-war conformity- The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, screeds against “built-in obsolescence”, etc.

Even though this was overblown conspiracy stuff, the basic principle still applies and always will.  Many years ago, a very wise entity, intimately understanding of human nature, said (paraphrased from Exodus 20:17): “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.”

What?  That’s the entire basis of modern economies!  Better Homes and Gardens, In Style, Southern Living, This old House, Extreme Makeover, Martha Stewart, Bob Vila, you name it.  Virtually everything out there, whether advertising or entertainment, is predicated on making us jealous of somebody’s house.  Maybe not my next-door neighbor’s tarpaper shack, but certainly the place over in that other neighborhood.

So Moses described the issue a few years back as “covetousness”.  In the 20^th century, we called it “Keeping up with the Joneses”.  Today, we call it “getting our fair share of the American Dream”, usually via a maxed-out MasterCard, and, for the last few years, a second, third, and fourth mortgage layered onto our tarpaper shack down in the wrong end of town.

And that brings us to Steve Edelman.  I first realized how insidious and dangerous he was when I read a comment by the perfesser on Instapundit to the effect that his beloved Instawife, upon returning home from a medical procedure, relaxed by watching HGTV to learn how to “accessorize a room”. 

Here we had the World’s Richest Blogger, and his highly educated spouse, living high in Knoxville with Mazda sports cars and audio-video equipment to rival a cable TV network, and they have HGTV up on the new flat screen digital television.  All because of Steve Edelman, the former local daytime TV host-turned-producer, who creates and films the lion’s share of HGTV programming from his San Francisco headquarters.  

To quote from a news story “His company’s shows currently airing on HGTV include Color Splash, Curb Appeal, Designed to Sell, Decorating Cents, Design Remix, Double Take, FreeStyle, House Detective, Landscape Smart and Sensible Chic, plus three new ones that recently premiered, Sleep on It, Get It Sold and Find Your Style. Edelman’s series on the DIY network include Bathroom Renovations, Fresh Coat, Home Transformations, Weekend Handyman, Wood Works and Kitchen Renovations.”

Nineteen shows on 24 hour a day cable TV, all planned to make you want to take out an excess mortgage and overpay your income to get a house that matches a gated community.

Isn’t this one of those situations where the FCC should step in?  At least, to forbid my wife from watching any more HGTV?  (Please?)

Having failed to derail Sarah Palin as an unfit mother, surrogate mother, one who fires personal opponents for their principled refusals to fire innocent state troopers, adultress, library book-burner, etc., the general focus of the enlightened glitterati, is settling in on “Creationist Nut”.  In this situation, the leftist hyperpolitical class (led by Andrew Sullivan, urged on by e-mails from the TVG campaign*) is joined by the agnostic libertarians, including otherwise good guys such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Prof. James Lindgren of Volokh, who are usually pretty rational and fair-minded guys, but seem to go crazy around this topic.  The source of that “problem” (it surfaced in a debate- see the volokh post above) is twofold:

1) Ms. Palin believes in God, as an apparently practicing evangelical Christian.  If you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, it sort of follows that you believe that there is a God somewhere to be the Son of.  The other inconvenience is that if any of the Biblical stuff is not utter nonsense, one must presume that this God isn’t helpless or standoffish toward Earth.  If He is capable of Doing Things, the most obvious initial hypothesis is that He might have had something to do with the appearance of life on Earth, since we are having some trouble sorting that out.

2) In her campaign a couple of years ago, Governor Palin stated that school kids might benefit from hearing different theories and discussing them (the debate referred to above).

After assuming office, of course, Palin did not throw out the biology and evolution curriculum nor force Adam and Eve down the throats of wide-eyed schoolchildren.  However, the meme has been established, and lacking any decent ammunition, the media interviews henceforth are bound to include “gotcha” questions encouraging her to either lie about her views or commit political suicide with the legacy media by adopting Bishop Usher’s (preposterous) time line.  

There is another way for Ms. Palin to handle such a question, and it has the advantage of being correct.  When the supercilious inside-the-beltway or New York reporter asks “Governor Palin, do you believe in evolution?” she should answer as follows.

“Well, BrianKatieCharlieMattDiane, let me put it this way.  Like 80% of America, I do believe there is a God.  But that is just my belief.  It isn’t provable and it is not falsifiable.  But if I am crazy and superstitious by believing in God, so are most of my fellow-citizens.

“The question is, what about where we all came from?  Well, some people believe that God made everything with a wave of His hand, others believe that God basically set evolution in motion and let it happen.  Others believe that everything occurred by purely natural processes.  I certainly can’t tell you how, because the naturalistic processes scientists themselves don’t agree- that is the real controversy that is never mentioned, and all sides of that controversy ought to be taught, not the so-called “God versus nature” issue.

“Some people, such as Richard Dawkins, are pure Darwinists, and believe that change among species came very gradually.  Others, such as Stephen J. Gould, said that that was impossible, so they offered a theory that there were sudden jumps in progress.  Still others, such as Dr. Kauffman, believe that both Dawkins and Gould are wrong, and everything can be explained by ‘self-organization’, like the way crystals or snowflakes develop.  Each of these groups explains in detail why the other groups’ theories are impossible based on the fossil record, length of time needed, and probability.

“So, I’m just going to wait to comment until they can all agree on a story.”

*The Vacuous Garment, refers to a certain candidate for President

Tony Blankley wrote a column reacting to the Democrat “You Tube Debate”.  Among his impressions was this summary of the Iraq Surrender Auction, where each candidate was offering a different deadline for withdrawing US troops and turning Iraq and Afghanistan over to al Qaeda and the Taliban: “How quickly would you retreat from Iraq? And here, the candidates had clearly been doing earnest research before the debate. Gov. Bill Richardson said he could get all the troops out in five months. Sen. Christopher Dodd claimed he could do it in seven months, while Sen. Joe Biden was insistent that it would take a full nine months to a year to move American troops and civilians down the two-lane road through Basra to the sea”.

Over at CaptainsQuartersBlog, the indefatigable Ed Morrissey posts a colloquy from the Senate debate over the congressional Democrats’ legally-doomed attempt to kill the First Amendment by taking over the broadcast radio industry.  The discussion, and indeed, Sen. Coleman’s impassioned speech, discuss the internet and alternative media. 

 What I didn’t see, though, and is almost never mentioned, is the original rationale for the prior regulatory regimes of the broadcast industry.  When the FCC regulated TV and radio under the original “fairness doctrine”, the justification was the limited bandwidth of the RF spectrum- you had, for AM radio, a range between 560 kilocycles and 1,710 kilocycles that could be sliced into piece only so thin before the signals were interfering with one another.  If you allowed stations to broadcast from bands that were too close together, you couldn’t hear either one- in  the Captain’s own market, there are AM stations at 1500, 1530, and 1570; using an old dial (variable capacitor) tuner, it was almost impossible to zero in on one.  This meant that over the total AM range, you couldn’t squeeze in much more than about 20 stations within one 75 , mile radius of the transmitter tower- and even then weather conditions and nightfall would further cause overlaps.  For TV, you had channels 2 throught 13, later expanded by the UHF band, with radio, the FM band added more stations.  But today, if you are in a big city and want to play your IPod through the car radio, it is difficult find a free frequency. 

Thus, the FCC could with a straight face assert that the limited bandwidth required that licenses granted to broadcasters carried an added responsibility to devote a certain portion of broadcast time to public service, and to represent all points of view.  The public could challenge the license renewals if the station was perceived as not meeting that standard.  And, as many have said, the issue was not that people couldn’t meet the standard, it was that it was far easier to avoid the headaches and simply not air anything that was controversial.  Hence, we got a steady diet of public service announcements disapproving of drugs, smoking, pollution, and all that.

That rationale is not only weak, the reason that the courts began to slice away at it, and Reagan eventually issued the order recognizing reality, it is now technologically irrelevant, because bandwidth is unlimited already by means of alternative media, and will soon be completely unlimited.  That is because of the conversion from analog to digital.

  Few people are aware that all of the cable channels, even the analog channels, are provided in a range of roughly two channels of standard broadcast television through sophisiticated frequency management methods.  That alone substantially increased the number of offerings available.  Analog satellite, those big ugly six or eight foot dishes that swung through the sky from horizon to horizon, showed the way- you could, with proper expensive and complicated equipment, squeeze a lot of stations into more limited space by having more than twenty TV stations on one satellite.  With a lot of satellites up there, now we could access even more signals. 

 But, now when you take digital data streams, the examples being XM and Sirius radio, and Dish and DirecTV (DirecTV founded by Cap’n Ed’s former employer in California) you only need one main satellite and one backup to broadcast hundreds and thousands of signals through each “pipe”.  This works the same way as your cell phone (wireless) or the Internet (hard line or wireless) does- the TV or radio signal is digitized, the signals are compressed, and multiple signals are stacked onto one carrier wave, then decoded by the receiver.  You can do that now if you have a good Internet broadband connection- but soon all of the broadcast TV signals will convert to digital, and you will be able to receive thousands of high definition digital channels packed into the space that formerly could only accommodate old TV Channel 4.  

Where TV goes, radio will follow- at some point, standard AM or FM radio will conver to digital signals, and you will get hundreds of stations all non-interfering, between AM 700 and AM 900, freeing up the rest of the bands for things like universal Internet wireless and the like.  Any fiction like the FCC’s former rationale for regulating the airwaves for “fairness” is revealed as the lie it is.  

And Sen Durbin knows it.  He’s just trying to throw some speed bumps in front of Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, and their colleagues who keep bringing up impertinent things like facts, history, what they said last year, etc.

Forget the Global War On Terror (GWOT).  Of course, my advice isn’t needed, since the entire Dem caucus, along with Republican senators Warner, Domenici, Alexander, Lugar, and Hagel already have.  They propose to substitute regional “diplomacy”, which seems to mean asking Iran and Syria to help provide political cover as we flee and leave the cradle of civilization to their civilized control.  That makes the new name the “Global Talk On Terror”, or “GTOT”.

 Ironically, Minnesota’s junior senator, Barbara-Mikulski-clone Amy Klobuchar, who has been casting about looking for Her Signature Issue, seems to have been inspired by that “Gee, Tot!” acronym, and she has unveiled her Global War On Toys as the only appropriate use of American power.  And she has been joined by the distinguished Sen. Durbin in being Outraged.

 This perfectly mirrors 21st century America, as we strive to emulate the glorious 20th century military and diplomatic record of France.  After all, It’s For The Children.

The archives for this blog are at: mnkurmudge.blogspot.com

I think I understand the deeply-rooted dreams of my fellow citizens, and the vision is not encouraging. The only acceptable military goal today seems to be the Powell Doctrine of military engagement: take a sledgehammer (”overwhelming force”) to the international problem, but only provided that-

a) no one anywhere in the world objects, and
b) you can be assured of “total clean victory”, complete with dancing in the streets and V-E celebrations, in less than a year.

That’s a great strategy- it avoids all the tough problems associated with those enemies who simply refuse to cooperate. As in, well, they fight back. Or refuse to surrender. Or, pretend to surrender, but also covertly fight an on-going guerrilla war.

Unfortunately, the bad guys in Iraq have decided to be obstreperous and resist. This has led to the usual American reaction- if the millennium doesn’t come by the day after tomorrow (we aren’t so bad as to expect the millennium in the morning; we’ll give it at least two days), we quit!

Our time horizon is measured in biennial terms- every election cycle brings out another occasion to find excuses to declare victory and go home. Sort of the way the Russians did in Afghanistan after a decade of fighting the mujahideen. And these are the same people who (correctly) criticize corporate CEO’s for making strategic decisions based on quarterly financial reports and the associated effects on the company’s stock price.

Look past the fact that a lot of the “more (American) troops” fervor is fueled by some members of the careerist general officer class of the US Army (not the Kaplanesque “Imperial Grunts”, but the high-ranking heavy armor bureaucrats who got passed over for promotion), in its ongoing war against Rumsfeld to prevent military transformation (that is, a shift from 1975 European warfare doctrine and force structure to something a bit more useful in today’s world); the logic simply doesn’t hold.

Read all the arguments of those who are supposedly in favor of the GWOT- from Lowry to Kristol and beyond, and note that almost every proposed “new” strategy is based on wishful thinking in the attempt to speed up the clock by turning up the heat. Win now, so we can declare the war over and get back to border security and reducing government spending (fat chance). Or, understandably, focus on Iran, as though that were somehow a severable issue. Or made easier when you don’t have a few airfields and divisions right next door ready to pounce if needed.

I have a secret for everyone: if you want to bake bread, it takes 30 to 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Running the oven at 600 degrees doesn’t bake the same bread faster, it simply produces something very different. Something inedible.

A better analogy is recovery from an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear of the knee, the dreaded “reconstructive knee surgery” you hear about so often in football. In this case, a small bundle of collagen fibers woven together sort of like a guy wire cable, runs from the back of your thigh bone (femur) to the front of your shin bone (tibia). It is small, but has a very important job- when you straighten out your leg, it prevents the quadriceps muscle (the big “one”- actually four- on top of your thigh) from pulling the shin bone forward and locking the joint as the kneecap serves as the lever fulcrum for the contraction. The hinge joints for the knee are on the side- the medial and lateral collateral ligaments. For a variety of reasons, they can get injured, but they heal very nicely by themselves simply left alone for about six weeks. The ACL is the Big One; God simply didn’t make it to deal with some of the stresses applied by modern athletics.

When the injury occurs, the time scale is unforgiving. The good news is that we can come back and be about as strong as we were before getting hurt. The bad news is- it takes a year to get all the way back. Period.

No matter who your doctor is, no matter what you do, you won’t be yourself athletically for just about 12 months. There are some few freaks of nature who may come back sooner, taking a big risk on revision surgery (check the story of Rod Woodson), but for all of us “normal people”, we are looking at a year of recovery to get back to what we did before the injury in the same way.

Why? It is simple- tissue healing is all biochemistry, which simply requires the chemical elements, and the time, in order to work.

When the knee is first injured, everything is swelled and inflamed. You almost cannot see the injury because of all the extra fluid and blood, so you wait a few weeks before surgery to get the knee to “calm down”. When all of the trauma except for the torn ligament has subsided, you can have the procedure, usually by replacing the ACL with tissue from a cadaver, or from the middle third of your patellar ligament (often wrongly called the patellar tendon), or a piece of the hamstring muscle folded over to get to the right length. At each end, a little plug of bone is cut out and left on the new graft, because the easiest way to heal it is to drill a little hole in the bone of your femur and tibia, and tap the graft bone plug into the hole, fastened further by a titanium screw, rather than try to heal “new”collagen onto bone.

When you wake up and the anaesthesia wears off, it hurts, but at that point the graft is about as strong as it will ever be- theoretically, if you could forget pain, and the inflammation was gone, you could go do almost anything at that point, provided the screw holds.

However, the body also immediately starts to tear down the new ligament, literally dissolving it biochemically and turning it into a different type of collagen (sound like Iraqi society yet?). After about 6 weeks to three months, it is very weak, as the tissue breakdown process is almost done, but the conversion to the right version of type 1 collagen is still in process, and that goes on for about a year to get to 90% and much longer for more.

This doesn’t change or speed up, no matter what you do. The National Football League has lots of money ready for the genius who figures out how to heal and rehab an ACL repair in six weeks. But you can apply heat, ultrasound, prednisone and other antiinflammatories, hyaluronic acid, glycous amino glycans, insulin, alkaline phosphatases, TGF beta, HGH, you name the growth or metabolic factor.

You can hire the world’s best physical therapists, bring in the best exercise machines. But if you overdo the rehab exercises, you actually damage the repaired joint.

No matter what you do, there is a natural process that only plays out at its own pace. Just like baking bread.

So, throw money at Iraq (or not- Speaker Pelosi would owe a lot to a lot of constituencies). Some added cash might help somewhat in some places, or it might also cause more corruption opportunities, create a colonial-style addiction, and permanent dependency.

Go ahead, send “More Troops! More Troops!” Fine, add more US targets to shoot at; but the US military believes that what they need are more Iraqi troops- who are not infiltrators or beholden to bad guys. Cleaning that group out and training more and more takes… time.

The government? After several decades of direct ethnic and religious subjugation, building trust and believing in the democratic process while fighting against the agendas of the bad guys (Sadr’s Mahdi Army, Iranian-linked SCIRI, former Baathists, etc.) takes… time.

The message is that everything here that needs to be done to produce something in the end that is better, takes time. At least another five years, more likely ten.

And, as we see frpom the polls, America may not be ready to pay that price. We may not believe that it is necessary- we forget now, but we weren’t ready in late 1944, or 1864, either.

And looking at home front today, it is clear that the price in blood and cash is nothing like it has been in any prior war, but we are still whining, louder than ever. As the sainted Dr. Sowell said, “frivolous politics”. I have news for you- if you really believe that fighting back against the fundamentalist Salafist and Wahabi terrormasters causes more terrorism long run, you also believe that the NutRoots only oppose Bush because of Iraq.

It is times like this that you can be happy to be 50 rather than 20, so you have a better shot at avoiding dealing with the long term consequences of failing to seriously address terrorism, social security reform, and the like. Just remember- I told you so.

Time.

If you enjoy cheering for an underdog – for the sort of pathetic soul that doesn’t have a chance in hell of coming out on top – then join the Washington, D.C. Republican Party. I don’t think anyone from their headquarters would take offense at that – they pretty much admitted in their letters soliciting volunteers and financial contributions this fall that they had no real hope of victory, and therefore wouldn’t be making any promises.

Of the voting population of the 550,000 or so residents of the nation’s capital, about three-quarters are registered Democrats. This means that the outcome of yesterday’s Democratic primary elections actually decided all the races. (The Republicans held a primary yesterday as well, but as none of the candidates were in contested races, nor do they have any hope of winning, it received little attention and little press.)

What this means for me, a registered Republican and resident of Washington, is that I’ve never had a say in the election of my city’s leadership. All the races are decided before I ever get to vote.

Of course, I’m likely not getting much sympathy on this point from registered Republicans living in other heavily Democratic districts, but my situation is different for one very important reason: local government is all we’ve got. There’s no turning one’s hopes to the Senate or the Gubernatorial races, which even in the most solidly Democratic or Republican states can still be turned after a few years of electoral discontent. Remarkably, D.C. government has never been vulnerable. No matter how many times our schools fail, we top the charts in murder rates, or our leaders get arrested, this city is safe for the Democratic Party. It boggles the mind.

It should be evident, above all else, that the two party system with primaries and general elections has failed in DC. What we need instead is something more fluid, that allows all the candidates to run simultaneously and be judged on their merits, with no party monikers attached. A primary could narrow the field to a handful of candidates, then elected by plurality in a run-off election. This is the only way I can think of to get someone eminently qualified like Tony Williams, Republican candidate for Member of Council in Ward 6, his due consideration by the voters.

Running the local government doesn’t require a commitment to national party platforms: a stance on Iraq or musings on global warming. The solutions Washington needs actually don’t have much to do with the famous institutions we house – they’re much closer to home, and deal with things like getting kids to read, taking lead out of the water, and stopping the omnipresent violence. On security issues, we cooperate with the federal government anyway – it is, after all, their fault we’re such a hot target and their institutions that need protecting. What we don’t need is the two-party system restricting our voting, narrowing our choices, and preventing the (sadly vast) numbers of knee-jerk, party-line voters from thinking about what’s best for our city.

For the left, the solution to all of DC’s many and varied ailments is statehood. “Taxation without Representation” claim our license plates, co-opting the familiar revolutionary refrain for the cause to get two extra guaranteed Democratic seats in the Senate. I can’t imagine why else they would think statehood for an area so small – with portions of it necessarily the domain of the federal government – is a good idea. And speaking of taxes, I can’t even imagine what it would take to support a full “D.C. State” government, even in miniature. I already pay out to the district at almost the same rate as I do as the feds, and that’s just to support our cancerous city council.

In fact, statehood would solve none of our real problems and create plenty of new ones, but without that step, we are left with a conundrum: we in the district don’t have voting representation in Congress. And the rare District Republicans, well, we are likely among the most disenfranchised voters in this country. So little to vote for, and no choices to make.

What I’d like to propose in place of Statehood is the partial annexation of D.C. by the state of Maryland. Now, I couldn’t really blame them for not wanting to take us on, but ignoring that objection for a moment, consider how it might work. Historically, there’s a sound argument for such a move: the land that is D.C. now was carved out of Maryland. It was to be a perfect diamond-shape, but Arlington and Alexandria were never ceded (as they were promised to be) by the Commonwealth of Virginia. So in terms of our neighbors, Maryland makes more sense geographically. Politically, Maryland also tends to go Democratic. Sticking D.C. into politically more conservative Northern Virginia could only lead to resentment, as our population tried to vote the state out of the government of its natural inclinations. But our votes backing up the Senate races in Maryland would only serve to widen the margins, not change the outcome.

My plan is not for us to simply re-join Maryland. Instead, I would propose that we share her Senators (and perhaps her Governor as well, though this is by no means necessary): we would vote for them, and they would act on our behalf. We would then be given our own, voting member of the House – we would be “the District district.” Our local government would then continue to run our schools, city government, police force, etc. This way, we get a say in national issues, but we are not turned into a mini “city-state” (heh), with all the questionable repercussions that could entail.

Republicans would still be in the minority, of course, but even in Democratic strong-holds, things can happen that change the balance and lead to the occasional Republican senator. Consider Norm Coleman, for example: a Republican senator from the only state in the Union to vote for Mondale.

I see real solutions here – compromises that could take away the overwhelming sense of disenfranchisement felt by many of the people of D.C., of either party. What’s more, these two systems combined would give us Washington Republicans something that we haven’t ever had before: hope.