Two via Misha. First, I wonder how comes it that nobody noticed this BEFORE the election:

BAGHDAD — Across the capital Wednesday, Iraqis balanced their hopes against fears about how U.S. policy will change on the ground in the wake of the Democrats’ overwhelming victory in congressional elections and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s sudden resignation.

Rasha Tariq, 23, a college student, said she found herself near tears when she awoke Wednesday morning to the news that the Democrats had won the House and were on the cusp of taking the Senate.

Tariq said she worries the Democrats’ victory will mark the beginning of a gradual U.S. pullout from Iraq and the disintegration of what little order is left on the dangerous streets of Baghdad.

“If it was up to the Democrats, we would still be living under Saddam’s tyranny,” Tariq said in an interview Wednesday in the Sadoun Street shopping district. “I’m afraid that this change is going to affect the American presence in Iraq. I don’t want them to leave.”

Best get over it, sweetheart — the Sheeple have spoken. But this is the one that’ll really break your heart:

“I hope you are satisfied with what you have done…

Today in the mess hall, where there is usually jovial conversation, there was silence, long faces, and broken spirits… Everyone, to include all American soldiers, marines, sailors, airmen, Iraqi Nationals, Bulgarian Soldiers, etc, etc… was speechless, tired, demoralized and stunned…all ate in eerie silence…

Last night, while we watched the press conference with the President, there was utter disgust, and the common feeling amongst us all that we soldiers are now the loneliest people on Earth…we fight an enemy over here, and we have a country full of enemies to go home to that are our countrymen. We watched President Bush say his own political funeral, our commander and chief…as well as ours…He tried so hard to spin it, but…well…there is no way to soften such a morale blow.

While you sit and Monday morning quarterback what we work so hard to do for you out here, just know that the spirit of your team is wounded….. YOU liberals, you America have done a great job of demoralizing us…Thank you.

Do us a favor though, when we do come home, spare us the ceremony…We all now know that it is a bunch of crap, and what you think of us…”

I’d try to come up with something flippant and sarcastic here, but the morning after Veterans’ Day, I think it would behoove me to maybe be a bit more serious for once.

First of all, we need to be honest about a few things. Everywhere I looked this week I saw people optimistically expressing the hope that the Repubs will be back and better than ever in ‘08. Hate to burst any bubbles, but it ain’t gonna happen. What we saw this week was the collapse of a governing coalition that had been in place since 1994, and had taken more than twenty years to build. We won’t build another in a mere two years; it just ain’t possible. What I expect to see happen instead over the next several years, not just two, is a further splintering.

See, this coalition, like all others, was made up of disparate elements that were forced to lay aside certain disagreements and differences in order to pursue the larger aim, which was to loosen the grip of a progressively more strangulating Leftist chokehold, before they could put the finishing touches on remaking this country in the Eurosocialist mold — a long-term and farsighted project to turn this country into something the Founders would neither recognize nor approve of. As such, said coalition was never going to be anything more than temporary, and should not have been taken for granted. But it was.

Meanwhile, the Leftist project has been incredibly successful, on almost every front. Ordinary people here take big-government depredations for granted now that the Americans of even as recently as the 40s and 50s would not have stood still a moment for. Whether you’re talking about mandatory seat belt laws, smoking bans, federal control over the education of America’s children, or gun registration and control, the soft totalitarianism of the nanny-state Left has made astonishing and unlooked-for inroads over the last forty years, insinuating itself into the very fabric of our culture by means of the usual dishonesty and subterfuge.

And taking things for granted is one of the gilt-edged sins we’ve seen a lot of this past year in another context too. Were we disillusioned Righties really hubristic enough to think that we could just “let the Dems win,” take a two-year holiday from history to clean up our own outfit of its plentiful deadwood, and then, the Dems having spent those same two years bickering among themselves and making no moves whatever to consolidate their own power, expect them to just hand the wheel of the ship of state back over to us, the rightful commanders, with no fuss whatsoever? Can we possibly have been so arrogant?

Apparently so, because that’s exactly what some of us (and I’m not excluding myself here, mind you — I made a good many intellectual errors and overestimations of our power and appeal in the runup to the elections myself) have done, and are still doing.

Everybody seems to be trying to put plenty of pretty makeup on this pig we’ve brought home, but I believe it’s a mistake to do so. Despite the piteous way some of us are currently trying to reassure each other and themselves, the Dems have learned plenty from their time in the political wilderness, and they’re just as intent on pursuing their Leftist agenda as they ever were. But they’ve learned how to mask it pretty well. They’re every bit as stupid and insane as we thought, but they’re not nearly as inept as we hoped. There’s a reason Nancy Pelosi was nowhere to be seen in the news media in the final week or two before the election, folks. There’s a reason that a goodly number of the Dems’ takeover class have at least paid lip service to some conservative ideals. But when it comes to more government programs to buy votes with, higher taxes on the productive class to pay for ‘em, and more restrictions on individual liberty, believe me, these new “Purple Dems” will snap right back in line with their older, more guileful guiding lights when called upon to do so.

There are plenty of reasons for the Dems to be optimistic about the future, or at least the next decade or so of it. The American political pendulum seems to swing in twelve year arcs, and guess what? The Right’s twelve years are now officially up, starting its slow rightward pull as it did in 1994. The always-fragile coalition is well and truly broken now, and the disillusionment with the Republican Party felt by many libertarian-leaning independents is not going to be glossed over by picking a fresh face to be the Senate Minority Leader. Many of those votes are lost to the GOP forever; many of them are going to be disillusioned not just with the Republicans but with the political process as a whole. Either way, the idea that a newly-energized, more conservative GOP is going to come riding up on a white charger in ‘08 to save us from our own ‘06 folly is one of two things: naive or presumptuous.

And in the meantime, Bush is eagerly doing his part to help add perhaps as many as 10-20 million new straight-ticket-Dem voters to the rolls with his dangerous illegal-alien amnesty efforts. It is to weep.

And let’s not fail to pay a bit of attention here to another of last week’s big winners: the LLMSM. We just had a practical demonstration of how much power they still wield; we’ve all underestimated them, but this go-round they really came through for their ideological partners, the Democrats. This election was a kick in the teeth for the Right blogosphere in more ways than one: before, we may not have been quite as influential as we liked to kid ourselves we were, but as of January the willing ears we had in the offices of the Speaker and Majority Leader will be shown the door.

Speaker Pelosi will be reserving her attention for Kos, Kevin Drum, and Hate-rios; Allahpundit, Malkin, Ace, and the rest of us will be at the kitchen entrance begging for the merest scraps of disdainful regard from our new Congressional leaders, and will be getting little enough of even that. Imagine: a major ethics violation of some sort originating in a Dem Senator’s office, not merely a dumb tempest-in-a-teapot like the Lott affair, and the Right blogs scream bloody murder over it. Does anybody out there think for a moment that the guilty party will be bothering to even apologize — much less step down — in response to any outcry we may raise? If so, you’re fooling yourselves. The glory days of Rathergate are now past. Not that we won’t or shouldn’t all keep right on plugging as before, but we have to expect that our effectiveness and influence has now been sharply curtailed.

• The Dems will show their true colors over the next two years, and the American people, in shocked revulsion, will realize the mistake they’ve made and come back to the Repubs in ‘08.
  Response: What, they were holding back up till now?

• There’s a new kind of Democrat, more conservative, more reasonable, and they’ve finally climbed off such weary old Dem hobbyhorses as gun control.
  Response: Think so?

• They weren’t really serious about their cut and run rhetoric.
  Response: No more so than Iran’s leaders are about destroying Israel, I’d guess. And no less, either.

• When these liberal Dems confront the realities of actually governing, their extreme-Left hatemongering tendencies will be tempered, and they’ll be forced to move in a more rightward and patriotic direction.
  Response: So then we can expect them to become as sober as Ted Kennedy, as judicious and thoughtful as John Lewis, as reasonably bipartisan and conciliatory as John Conyers, and as patriotic as Jim McDermott, right?

I’m sure y’all are beginning to see my point here.

Look, I’m not saying we all ought to be morose, and I’m not saying we all ought to give up either. But this current wave of forlorn optimism is not based on any sort of reality, and as such we ought not be struggling so desperately to hold onto it. We need to look at this setback — a severe one to be sure, and one that we’re going to find it very difficult to undo — forthrightly and without evasion. Constitutional government in this country is gone. It’s not coming back; too many Americans simply don’t want it. That’s flat. We’ve been fighting a rearguard action against creeping socialism in this country for a long time now, and that isn’t going to change. Hell, even the Contract with America crowd didn’t manage to eliminate the NEA — much less the Department of Education.

But if a rearguard action is the best we can do, then that’s what we MUST do, and the reason for it is encapsulated in that anguished e-mail from the American soldier above: because we owe. Even if we can’t win against these bastards, we can’t stop fighting them for a moment. They’re all set to betray our soldiers in Iraq — who have struggled so valiantly against not only the terrorist enemy there, but against too-restrictive rules of engagement that don’t allow for hot pursuit of the enemy into his haven in Iran — even now. They’re going to render three thousand American combat dead meaningless with a stroke of the budgetary pen after the first of the year, and we all know it. The Dems are supremely indifferent to the meaning of that betrayal, and the lasting harm to American security that will be done by it — but we must not be.

Screw “getting along” with these scumbags; screw any “new tone,” screw bipartisanship, screw “working with our new partners across the political aisle.” We have to fight them and obstruct their easy transit through the corridors of power every minute, in every way we can. They’ve done the same for us these past six years, after all. The least we can do is return the favor, by any means we can manage it.

FUCK Nancy Pelosi, FUCK Howard Dean, FUCK all socialists, and FUCK the flag-burning, America-hating, soldier-disrespecting, Constitution-trampling, national-security-weakening, dictator-coddling, Jew-hating, terrorist-fellating liberal Democrats. We must fight them. We owe the American troops who have been so horribly let down by this past week’s elections that much.

Honeymoon, my ass. Ask your LLMSM yapdogs for one, pal; you won’t get a millisecond’s worth from me. If you Lefty asswarts thought things were nasty during the Clinton years, let me hip you: you ain’t seen nothing yet.

And that’s a promise.

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
– Barry Goldwater