Kansas Evolves, Progressives Devolve

Kansas Evolves: Yesterday in Kansas, "conservative" Republicans lost a couple of seats to Republican moderates on the State Board of Education. As a result, pro-intelligent design language is going to be taken out of state education guidelines. The campaign against intelligent design reflects some cultural/political bedrock. As right-wingers grow more powerful, moderates are drawn more toward the liberal positions of the Democrats. The liberalizing of moderates has been developing in the northern suburbs since Clinton's first campaign. Now, it's spreading to the wheat belt.

Progressives Devolve. The blackface picture of Joe Lieberman in the Huffington Post was much more disgusting than Mel Gibson's anti-semitic and woman hating rant. I hope Jane Hamsher gets a chance to reflect on her bedrock "latent racism" while she looks for another line of work. She certainly has no business writing about politics.

The "progressive" movement needs both to stop being so white and to start coming to grips with its own involvement in the history of American racism. Why are none of today's writers for Huffington Post black? Why is there no "progressive" agenda on American racial issues? Why don't "progressive" and African-American leaders cooperate very much in the anti-war movement? Why do I hear of so few left-wing African-American blogs? Progressive white Democrats talk a lot about the craven spinelessness of the Democratic political leadership. It's time they integrated the bedrock of their politics. Right now, they're clueless.

Iraq Really Devolves. Conditions in Iraq have deteriorated so much that top generals like Peter Pace and John Abizaid testify that civil war may be imminent. That's as good a sign as any that Iraq has gone beyond civil war. The question now isn't whether the Saddam leftovers or the al-Qaeda global terrorists can overthrow the Maliki government; the question is whether any government is sustainable without 130,000 and whether or not we have thrown the Iraqis into a Somali-like abyss. The best solution may be to just partition Iraq into three countries and admit that Iran was the big winner in the U. S. invasion.