New Sand Castles on the Right

One thing you can't say about the right-wing is that they're not boring. In the two weeks since the election, they've developed several new rhetorical sand castles to deny any significance to their defeat. Some of them would sound almost plausible if the right hadn't claimed that Bush's two percent win over Kerry was a landslide. Here's a partial run-down.

The Six-Year Itch. This is the idea that two-term administrations normally lose a lot of seats in Congress during their sixth year and that Republican losses were about the same as average. But it doesn't quite work. Two of the administrations cited, FDR's and Lyndon Johnson's, were working with huge Congressional majorities which shrunk in their sixth year but were far from disappearing altogether. The other case was the Eisenhauer administration, but Eisenhauer's losses might be considered a re-affirmation of the long-ruling Democrats rather than a repudiation of Eisenhauer. To the contrary, the 2006 election was a decisive repudiation of the Bush administration for its failures in Iraq, the Republican Congress for its endless scandals, and the right-wing for carrying the Republican Party's water.

Republicans Got Away From Principles. Under Bush, the Republicans have not only not been the party of small government, they engaged in significantly more domestic spending than the Clinton administration. According to current Republican commentary, this means that Repubicans were trying to buy re-election rather than govern according to principles. What the right doesn't acknowledge is that their principles are costly. To get tax cuts and other controversial bits of legislation through Congress, the Republican leadership had to bribe both moderate Republicans and some conservative Democrats to get their votes. There was no way around it. They had to give out tons of pork. Otherwise, they wouldn't have had a governing majority at all. David Stockman had to do the same thing to get Ronald Reagan's first budget passed. It's a curious irony, but the Republicans will always practice very big government as long as they are so devoted to the right-wing ideology of small government.

Conservatism Didn't Lose. According to the right, Heath Shuler of North Carolina is the poster boy for the new Congress. Because Shuler and a couple of guys from Indiana are more conservative than Nancy Pelosi, there wasn't an ideological shift in Congress. That's a big mistake because there has been a profound shift away from moderation. Because the GOP beat up so badly on Democratic moderates in 1994 and 2002, the Democratic caucus is much more liberal than it was when Bill Clinton became president. I seriously doubt that Nancy Pelosi will have to use her whip skills to get minimum wage legislation, medicare reforms, and repeals of oil company tax breaks passed in the upcoming session.

Leaving Iraq Would Be Worse. The right has finally gotten around to admitting that the situation in Iraq is a disaster. But, they insist, things will get that much worse if American troops are withdrawn. Of course, it's increasingly hard to see how things can get much worse. Yesterday's gruesome attack on Shiite Sadr City in Baghdad was followed by today's even more vicious revenge attacks. Our 15,000 troops in Baghdad aren't making any more impact on the sectarian conflict than Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline are making on the history of music. Likewise, a combined American and Iraqi operation has taken five months to retake half of Ramadi. Michael Fumenti of the Weekly Standard finds reason for hope in the painfully slow progress and exults that the patrol he was embedded with captured three suspected "bad guys." But three bad guys a day doesn't keep the spectre of failure away. The American mission in Iraq is looking more futile all the time.