Weekend Funnies: The 'What Really Matters' Edition

Quote of the day from Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh-

"One of the last soothing Republican election platitudes perished Wednesday night, when the New York Times published its final poll before Tuesday's reckoning. Nearly 75 percent of those surveyed said they believe Democrats will scale back or end the U.S. military commitment in Iraq if they take back Congress, and not coincidentally, they favor Democrats over Republicans in the election 52-33 percent.

That yanked away even the threadbare security blanket some Republicans have been clutching in the closing weeks of the campaign -- the notion that a Democratic win isn't a mandate for change, because the Democrats haven't put out a coherent platform, on the war or anything else...

...The fabled 'Democratic disarray' is actually overstated on this issue. It's true there's no single Democratic position on Iraq; it's true there's plenty of intraparty debate. But it's also true that most congressional Democrats favor a timeline for troop reduction and a disengagement plan. Even the cautious Nancy Pelosi, who has worked hard not to let the GOP make the election about 'San Francisco Democrats,' recently released a six-point post-election action plan that puts the party behind 'the phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2006.' It's an easy contrast with President Bush, who's been preaching only "stay the course" -- even if in late October, at the end of the bloodiest month for American troops all year, he tried to lie about it. Even in the final days of the campaign, Bush continues to embrace the despised architect of the botched war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, making the stakes in Tuesday's election even more clear, and the comparison with Democrats more stark...

...On the eve of what looks as though it might be the biggest Democratic victory since 1992, I'm feeling a little bit somber. Because on Nov. 8, it will be time to figure out how to get out of Iraq, and it won't involve victory, for anyone.

Still, I'd rather have Democrats in control of Congress as we begin that awful task. Long after all the votes are tallied, the election-spending totaled up, the ads rated, the exit polls examined, I think we'll find that the most crucial election-season event this year was the publication of Bob Woodward's 'State of Denial.'...

...Reading 'State of Denial' was unexpectedly disturbing for me. It made me realize that the only thing worse than my angry liberal bubble (in which I'd assumed that Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice either didn't know or didn't care about the chaos in Iraq) was learning that in fact some of them did know, a few of them even cared -- and they still couldn't make a difference in stabilizing the country or fighting the insurgency. Watching Powell and Richard Armitage, and then to a lesser degree Rice and Stephen Hadley, try to challenge Rumsfeld's iron grip on Iraq, and on Bush's perception of it, was incredibly depressing. It was another Hurricane Katrina moment -- if Katrina showed their incompetence domestically, 'State of Denial' documented it in Iraq, and the consequences have been even deadlier. This week brought even more confirmation that victory, or even 'peace with honor,' is virtually impossible in Iraq, with the news that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered U.S. troops out of Sadr City, where they were seeking a missing U.S. soldier. It puts the lie to Bush's simplistic formulation 'As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.' Maliki is standing up, the United States is having to stand down while its soldiers are still in danger, and the odds are looking good that in the end we'll find that we exchanged a Sunni tyrant for a Shiite.

There are plenty of reasons, besides the war, that Republicans seem headed for an epochal defeat on Tuesday: the Mark Foley scandal, Jack Abramoff and all he touched, even, belatedly, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and how it exposed our homeland insecurity. After years of Republican dominance in Washington, we learned once again that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Powerful Republicans gamed the system to get money, sex and power, even as they tried to tell their evangelical Christian base they're different. Thursday brought a new Republican sex scandal: Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and founder and leader of the Colorado Springs-based New Life Church, resigned his post after a male prostitute claimed he'd had a three-year relationship with the Christian right leader (although Haggard denies the affair).

I'll confess to enjoying that spectacle: watching a party that's built a base on gay-bashing come undone over gay sex scandals? Justice is rarely so swift or sweet. But the chaos in Iraq that's contributed to the Democrats' likely victory on Tuesday is a different story. They have a mandate, all right, but it's a sobering one."

Amen on that last point.

[Related reading:
AP: Iraq urges calm ahead of Saddam verdict
-ABC News: Cheney: 'Full Speed Ahead' on Iraq
-Editor & Publisher: 4 Leading Military Papers: 'Rumsfeld Must Go'
-Washington Post: Possible Iraq Deployments Would Stretch Reserve Force]