...and voters know it. And Republicans are unable to tell people otherwise.

Economies go through upturns and downturns, bascially no matter what is done by government. However this does not mean that government has no effect on the economy.

If after siz years of tax cuts, the economy finally experiences an inevitable (and fairly weak) upturn, it's just as easy to argue that the tax cuts delayed the upturn and weakened it. And I think this is the case.

We have soaring deficits and failing companies and we have declining wages and people getting poorer and we have stagnant development and less innovation. This is the same as the Reagan years, when the same supply side idiocy was tried as well (and when we were also told what a booming economy we supposedly had, even as jobs drained out the ecomony and went overseas).

Tax cuts don't spur economies, they simply allow rich people to pocket their money and not have to reinvest it.

This country should be able to do a lot better than the kind of growth we've had.

...victory is impossible, and defeat will be calamitous.

Thanks a lot, Frum.

...the oil companies can go back to charging full price for gasoline again.

How soon will it go back up over three dollars? Or even four?

...is for Hugh Hewitt, not Mallard Fillmore.

"Unbiased Media Chicken," is the giveaway, I think.

...he made it clear that Senatoral candidates who didn't respond to attacks within 24 hours would not get any money from his committee. So the rest of the Democrats do seem to have learned something.

Lessons we've learned:

We need to fight back, and fight everywhere. (And that's what Howard has taught us.)

Competition is good. The Lamont/Lieberman fight didn't hurt the party at all, but may have helped it by making Democrats focus on being Democrats.

George W. Bush is the best campaigner Democrats have ever had. Everywhere he went, Republicans lost.

Lessons we still need to learn:

How to present a coherent and unified message to the country.

How to talk and think at the same time. (Please, Kerry, take note.)

...then the question is, who will be the new puppetmaster?

Oh my God, it might be Nancy Pelosi. If the Republicans are ready to cut George Bush loose, and if Bush doesn't want to submit to his Dad James Baker's advice, then Bush might have to throw himself to the Democrats and do what they tell him to do. Otherwise Bush may end up all alone in the White House with no support at all, and no idea what to do next.

Bush could end up his presidency being Nancy's poodle. I'm not sure I could bet against that.

We broke their country and we smashed their pre-existing government and social order. The Iraqi people were left in a state of near anarchy in which insurgents and militias could prosper and grow.

Iraqis rarely see American soldiers. We don't provide security for Iraqis. We don't protect Iraqis citizens who help us. We don't protect the Iraqi soldiers who are supposed to take over from us. We don't catch, stop, or prevent insurgents from setting off suicide bombs or kidnapping people or cutting off their heads.

We have given the Iraqis no chance to create a stable society. The reason is because we have put in too few troops to maintain order and because we are too busy protecting the safety of our troops at the expense of their mission.

To protect our troops and to keep our casualty rate low (for political reasons), we've allowed torture and acts of mass reprisals against Iraqis suspected of insurgent activity. We've killed innocent families at roadblocks and we've destroyed towns and we've raped women. And we've done this while being holed up as much as possible inside the safety of our 'green zone' and bases.

We've managed to save the lives of a few of our troops by essentially making it impossible for them to complete their mission--which is an absolute waste of their lives when they do die or become wounded. And the irony is that the casualty rate (the dead plus wounded) is in fact not much better than Vietnam.

We're not going to get out of this mess too easily. We are going to pay a price for this folly one way or another, whether we stay on or pull out. We may just pay it in shame and loss of prestige. We may pay it in terrorist attacks for years and decades to come. But we will pay.

...seems to have some connection with reality.

However, the statement that we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here shows that he still has a way to go before he reaches a state of complete sanity.

The people we're killing in Iraq are not the people we have to worry about. They were never the ones we had to worry about. The people we DO have to worry about are the survivors who will be left over. They are the ones who will be tough, smart, and bitter, and they will be fully trained in all the arts of killing us and hating us. There is no telling what they may do to us in the years and decades to come.

Remember that we were attacked on 9/11 as a direct result of the war in Afghanistan--the one that the Soviets fought. And recall that at that time we were actually on the side of the people who eventually attacked us. The first war in Afghanistan turned out to be nothing less than a proving ground for our enemies and the current war in Iraq will probably turn out to be an even better proving ground.