Dan Saltzman ……………. 55,072 57.81%
Amanda Fritz …………….. 23,500 24.67%
Sharon Nasset ……………. 5,425 5.69%
Chris Iverson ………… 4,906 5.15%
Lucinda Tate …………. 2,902 3.05%
Michael Casper ……… 2,241 2.35%
Watchman ……………. 1,224 1.28%

I look at these election results for City Commissioner, and I say, do you realize what this means?

One Thousand Two Hundred Twenty Four People looked at the ballot and said, “You know who can really move this city forward? That Watchman! Who we need is Watchman!”

It’s a riddle wrapped in a puzzle bumping up against the darkness.

Of a gate.

WASHINGTON, DC—In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”

Sounds like a parody, but alas:

Indeed, some Democrats worry that the worst-case scenario may be winning control of Congress by a slim margin, giving them responsibility without real authority. They might serve as a foil to Republicans and President Bush, who would be looking for someone to share the blame. Democrats need a net gain of 6 seats in the Senate, and 15 seats in the House. “The most politically advantageous thing for the Democrats is to pick up 11, 12 seats in the House and 3 or 4 seats in the Senate but let the Republicans continue to be responsible for government,” said Tony Coelho, a former House Democratic whip. “We are heading into this period of tremendous deficit, plus all the scandals, plus all the programs that have been cut. This way, they get blamed for everything.”

I have this image of Nancy Pelosi and Ron Emanuel, sitting hunched over at DCCC headquarters election day. They have the numbers tallied up as election night runs over to the Pacific Time Zone — Alaska and Hawaii are assured, and all of California’s results come in. Piling up the numbers, they find Republicans — 217, Democrats – 217.

They stare at the results of Washington State Congressional Race #5, where Cathy McMorris is the Republican incumbant against Democratic candidate Peter Goldmark. They fret when Goldmark takes they lead, their hopes spring eternal when McMorris pulls ahead. At the end of the day, when the margin is, say, 34 votes that requires a recount procedure, the DCCC frets about to figure out how to create a PAC organization that would obscure the ties to the Democratic Party, to fund McMorris’s recount fund.

Sigh.

As these things go, the answer is “I guess”, but it’s really not how you proceed in a political game. Perhaps the best outcome is to get a majority of one (which I guess means Goldmark will just have to win after all) in the House, than have Henry Cuellar switch to a Republican, thus ending up in the minority by one with the Democrat that was, at this time famously in the liberal part of the political blogosphere sitting on the Republican aisle during Bush’s State of the Union speech, a newly minted Republican. In the Senate, the ideal would be to win FIVE SEATS… you win every piece of elected government in 2008.

Sigh again.

Float us back to the last time the Democratic Party supposedly would have been better off losing than winning: 1976. By way of explanation, Tim Vanaugh has a review of the book Decade of Nightmares : The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America in the latest issue of Reason magazine. By way of explaining the book’s furor:

We know now that inflation was on the verge of being whipped, that double digit interest rates were a relic of practically medieval economic thinking, that urban decay was a passing phase in the renewal of American cities, and that the Soviet Union was one Yakov Smirnoff routine away from the old folks’ home of history. But at the time, such problems seemed chronic, and they were joined by countless smaller terrors to create a sense of chronic dread. A nation of latchkey kids was either being driven mad by angel dust or getting abducted by brainwashing cults. Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic were mutilating cattle in the country-side, while in urban areas the 60s problem of “white flight” had escalated into a vision of American cities in violent, unmanageable, apocalyptic decline. Iranian maniacs weren’t just keeping 52 US citizens in captivity, they were, in the hysterical phrase that made the career of the supposedly unflappable newsman Ted Koppel, “Holding America Hostage”.

[…] It was this mood of compounding horror, as much as the standard explanations of stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis that made stout Reagan more attractive than pusillanimous Carter. Again, Jenkins brings back a nuance lost to history; the brimstone, apocalyptic strain that underlined Reagan’s famous sunniness.

Frankly, every era has its fire and brimstone shunned just below the surface. That era we call the 1950s, remembered fondly by cultural conservatives and thought of as an age of peace and security and Economic Prosperity, was an age when Everybody was out to get you, subversives were everywhere, Subversives were EVERYONE with any slight difference than your Wonderbread white self, and the Ruskies were going to bomb your house and your neighborhood (so maybe we better bomb them before they get around to the “We Will Bury You”). As for the 1990s, I like to say that there was this sort of giddy half-self aware of its falsity nature of its apocalyptic nature — nobody really believed in the Y2K bug, and we all smirked at the X-Files and Art Bell, entertaining the notion but not buying it.

Popular history largely ignores the important policy linkages between Jimmy Carter , the deregulating architect of the anti-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, and Ronald Reagan, the bumbler behind the “Reagan Recession” and the disasterous mission in Lebanon; but in retrospect there are important ways in which Reagan’s revolution preceded his presidency. […] Much of the working class not only drifted from the Democratic Party but turned passionately against it — a development liberals lament and conservatives applaud, neither considering the degree to which these voters remained unchanged in underlying habits and attitudes.

Keep in mind the continuity, and…

One contrafactual Jenkins doesn’t consider is that had Wategate not irradiated the Republicans, it’s likely the GOP would have remained in the White House through the end of the 1970s and paid the price for the decay of the period.

Since Nixon was incapable of not being a corrupt vindictive paranoid bastard and was incapable of not involving orchestrating the Watergate burglary, a better historical “what if” is, if Ford had squeaked by Carter instead of Carter squeaking by Ford, the GOP would have paid for the price of the disasters that fell upon us all during that period, and the organization, whatever that is, of the Democratic Party would have been in better shape in the 1980s.

For what that is worth. But only maybe.

Now, the problem with this “Losing By Winning” strategy is that it’s coinciding with the attack on the Howard Dean “50-state strategy”, the suggestion that the Democratic Party run in and out of areas where the Democratic Party has become dormant and decayed, and try to build it up into something. The now famous quote from Paul Begala is “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.” It’s the Professional Baseball analogy passing by an impressive trade for an all-star in favour of trading to beef up your Farm System.

As it were, you would think it would be embarrassing for the Democratic Party if they picked up — say — a mere half dozen seats in a year where the Congress has an approval rating in the twenties. You would think they would realize how these things look.

The problem here is that there appears to be a mentality within the Democratic Party to do neither, and amble forward awkwardly, consolidating nothing but their modest levels of power within the system. Theoretically these politicians believe in stuff and believe that the nation would be better served with specific political tenants in place. Say, for example, you would think they would believe that Goldmark would better serves the fifth Congressional district of Washington State than McMorris — as an example of that absurd situation I postulated back a ways on where their mentality would take us.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

George W Bush… Thy name is Nixon.

As per the CIA… There is something Oedipal about what’s going on here. It took a Salon column to bring this home to me, but… the CIA is George Herbert Walker Bush’s baby. Rummage through the Weekly Standard’s line against the CIA, right-wing radio, and take a look at the “purging” that’s taken place.

I first knew about Oedipus, somewhere in my early teens, from The Doors song “The End”. You know, Jim Morrison bails out “The Killer Awoke Before Dawn. He put his boots on. And he took a page through the ancient gallery and he walked on down the Hall!” … “Father — yes son — I want to kill you.” “Mother, yes son… I want to…” Unintelligible on the album, but apparently according to that book Nobody Gets Out Here Alive, in concert with his mother in attendence Morrison made a point to prolong the use of the “f” word here.

Really. Who’d have thought the man would kill himself at such a young age?

Okay. Never mind. Cleanse everything with “Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine,” and move on. The West is the Best, I hear.

According to the oh-so-reliable “Capitol Hill Blue” (ahem) from a few months back, Bush’s inner circle shrunk to Condi Rice, Laura, and his mom. But Capitol Hill Blue works off of our prejudices and lingering suspicions. Still, Capitol Hill Blue works in the way of showing where the Zeitgist works us toward. When the History of the Bush Presidency is written, Oedipal will have many references in the index page.

Word on the street is that Karl Rove is being Indicted this week. Thursday it will be made public, if my understanding of how the news-media is manipulated. (You release news on Thursday evening if you want the public and the talking heads to talk about it all weekend and linger in everyone’s head the following top of the week; you release it Friday evening if you want it to be buried.) This goes back to one huge part of both the Nixonian impulse to pubish thy enemy and the Oedipal instinct to destroy your dad’s Institution… Joseph Wilson.

Everything rolls back to two items here, early on in the controversy. An episode of “Buchanan and Press” where a figure of some credibility more or less named by not naming Scooter Libby. And Joseph Wilson at an event presented by…

Um… Jay Inslee, Congress-critter of Washington State… once upon a time of that famed Fourth Congressional District, but he fled that district for greener pastures, and now serves Suburban Seattle…

Where Wilson named Karl Rove and said he knew what he was doing when he named Rove. I can’t google quickly the exact quote so I leave it at that.

Nothing much more needed to be said about it. The discrediting effort of Joseph Wilson has always looked to me like a Rube Goldberg Machine, Oscam’s Razor need not apply, because everything suspiciously just drifts back to those two early-in-the-game events.

Doomed voice. Doomed background music. Emphasis on the “says”.

“Eric Sten says he’s ‘Standing up for Portland’.”

Wait. Wait. This is good. I know the final sentence of this ad already! Okay. Is it “Maybe it’s time for Eric Sten to quit standing up, and just sit down.”?

aaaannnnddd, after the typical litany, we get to…

“Maybe it’s time for Eric Sten to quit standing up, and just sit down.”

Bingo! Bool-yah! And Woot!

Gawd I love these political advertisements sometimes. Just cut and paste and let her rip!!

I mulled over this book, Three Presidents and Their Books: The Reading of Jefferson, Lincoln, & F. D. Roosevelt, at a book store a few days back. I shrugged it off. Why Jefferson, Licoln, and FDR? Why not, say, Teddy Roosevelt?

Never mind. The books we associate with the current president are My Pet Goat, which isn’t really a book but is a story within a Reading Primer, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, his answer to a question of what his favourite kid’s book was/is, a book published when Bush attended Yale. (Maybe he read it to his kids, and liked it then? Who knows?) Then there’s that book on Acheson he said he was reading during the 2000 campaign, and when quizzed on stammered in a way suggesting that he obviously had not read it. And there’s Michael Crichton’s book of fiction, an attack on Global Warming that Bush praised as Science.

I looked over the Clearance pile of books. A lot of political books have a short shelf-life. It seems to be an obligation these days for a politico seeking the president to release a book just prior to his presidential campaign, and so what does one do with a book by Lamar Alexandar, or for that matter Dan Quayle?

But the books that I have to wonder about are, say, this:

Bush Country : How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane, by John Podhoretz.

Jee whiz, that book looks out of date these days. Can we tap our fingers at John Podhoretz and ask his thoughts on the “driving of liberals inane” with the “great president Dubya” these days? Oh how the Worm Turns! And churns.

Here are the great “crazy liberal ideas” that he dispels in this book:

#1: Bush is a moron. #2: Bush is a puppet. #3: Bush is a fanatic. #4: Bush is Hitler, only not as talented. #5: Bush isn’t protecting you. #6: Bush wants to bankrupt the government. #7: Bush is a cowboy. #8: Bush is a liar.

I thought Bush wanted you to think he was a cowboy. Or at least, he wanted the “red-staters” to think he was a cowboy.

Other than that… I’ve got nothing. I’m thinking of writing a long dissertation on Bush’s puppet-act, but…

Maybe I’ll wait for his approval rating to jump up to 35% before I do that. It seems like I’m just kicking at a corpse at this point in time.

“I am astonished as anyone has ever been that anyone is running for public office in Alabama on that platform,” he said.

Okay. I’ll give you three guesses on what platform somebody is ASTONISHED that a man is running in THE STATE OF ALABAMA for public office on.

The clock is ticking.

Democratic Party leaders are wondering what to do about a candidate for attorney general who denies the Holocaust occurred and wants to “reawaken white racial awareness.”

I don’t know where this “astonishment” comes from. After all, as the song goes, In Birmingham, we love our governor. But maybe I’m just exhibiting a bit of anti-Southern prejudice here.

Actually, this candidate does a double-whammy that I’d thought was impossible. Not only does he embarrass the great state of Alabama, but he embarrasses Atheists.

Larry Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, made an abortive bid for the AG job as a Libertarian in 2002, but only recently have his views on race and the Holocaust come to light.

Which is what Atheism (and the more commonly held Secularism) needs down there in the Bible Belt: an association with Anti-Semitism and White Power. Did he found this organization before coming fore-bore public with his other views which, frankly are probably only slightly more controversial for Alabama than his Atheism?

Darby said he will speak Saturday near Newark, N.J., at a meeting of National Vanguard, which bills itself as an advocate for the white race. Some of his campaign materials are posted on the group’s Internet site.

“It’s time to stop pushing down the white man. We’ve been discriminated against too long,” Darby said in the interview.

The answer to the question of “what to do about him” is simply to have the other guy win the primary by as large a margin as possible, and then move on, never speaking to this guy again. It may be only a slight embarassment if he ends up in double digits, as oppossed to the regular band of misfits that crawl about in the back of election campaigns across the country with one or two percent of the vote. As it were, the Democratic Party of Alabama is crying over a man with twelve percent support in a poll with a five percent margin of error, and for all we know the bulk of the support comes from people who love the name “Darby”, or just know this sign and agree with the sentiment:

With or without the vaguely creepy white suit and hat.