President Bush and McCain, the front-runner for the next presidential nomination, in pressing for a surge of 30,000 more troops, will have trouble finding support from more than 12 out of 49 Republican senators. ''It's Alice in Wonderland,'' Sen. Chuck Hagel, second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me in describing the proposed surge. ''I'm absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly.''

What to do about Iraq poses not only a national policy crisis but profound political problems for the Republican Party. Disenchantment with Bush within the GOP runs deep. Republican leaders around the country, anticipating that the 2006 election disaster would prompt an orderly disengagement from Iraq, are shocked that the president now appears ready to add more troops....I checked with prominent Republicans around the country and found them confused and disturbed about the surge. They incorrectly assumed that the presence of Republican stalwart James Baker as co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group meant it was Bush-inspired (when it really was a bipartisan creation of Congress). Why, they ask, is the president casting aside the commission's recommendations and calling for more troops?

Even in Mississippi, where Bush's approval rating has just inched above 50 percent, Republicans see no public support for more troops. What is happening inside the president's party is reflected by defection from support for his war policy after November's election by two Republican senators who face an uphill race for re-election in 2008: Gordon Smith of Oregon and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Coleman announced his opposition to more troops after returning from a trip to Iraq before McCain's.

MR. BROOKS: If I could say something about internal Republican politics and about this show. I hope Josh Bolten, the White House chief of staff, was watching Gingrich this first half of this show. Gingrich said, “Unless we fundamentally restructure what we’re doing in Iraq, we will not win.” He is not far off from where a lot of Republicans are. Probably where most elite Washington Republicans are.

So what’s going to happen? These Republicans do not want to run in 2008 with Iraq hanging over. They never want to face another election like that. So at some point, six months, eight months, there’s going to be men in gray suits. There’s going to be a delegation going into that White House saying to President Bush, “You are not destroying our party over this.” And Bush will push back. But that’s going to be the, the tension. Talk about world—American support for the war, it’s Republican support in Washington for the war that the president needs to worry about.

Another senior Democrat, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, said one option under consideration would be for lawmakers to vote on denying the use of funds for any increase in the U.S. deployment. Officials said late Monday night that the Massachusetts Democrat was preparing legislation that would require Congress to approve the deployment of more troops, and was hoping for a roll call on the topic swiftly — before any increase is implemented. More broadly, Reid signaled that Bush's expected call for an additional $100 billion for the war would receive close scrutiny from newly empowered Democrats. "We have a platform we didn't have before, Leader Pelosi and I, and we're going to ... focus attention on this war in many different ways," said Reid. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., suggested over the weekend using Congress' power of the purse to restrain any troop buildup.

“I do not believe that sending more troops to Iraq is the answer,” said Brownback. “Iraq requires a political rather than a military solution. In the last two days, I have met with Prime Minister Maliki, with two deputy presidents and the president of the Kurdish region. I came away from these meetings convinced that the United States should not increase its involvement until Sunnis and Shi'a are more willing to cooperate with each other instead of shooting at each other.”

The slow demise of the national Republican Party just took a turn for the worse. Hard to believe that the GOP’s prospects could actually become more bleak after two years of unrelenting bad news, but it has.

Republican senators are now turning their rhetorical guns away from Democrats and toward one another. A few conservative Republican senators, whose votes usually cheer me up during bleak political times, are actually accusing Virginia’s senior senator, John Warner, of providing comfort to terrorists....

The message from the Bush administration seems to be this: “Thanks for carrying our water on this miserable war for four years. Now we’re going accuse you of helping terrorists.”....

It’s one more reason I have grown increasingly distraught over the GOP’s direction in recent months. The president is prepared to take his administration and his party over the cliff to prove that he right about Iraq—even if most of his generals and the majority of Americans disagree....

At some point, GOP senators and congressmen need to understand that this war is no longer a battle between Republican war heroes and Democratic 60s hippie freaks. The lines have now been blurred by Bush’s bungling war strategy. Now we find ourselves in a fight between war heroes and war heroes. Former secretaries of Navy and former Vietnam POWs. Conservative Republicans and protectors of the president.

That may not be so bad for George W. Bush in the short run, but it is a disaster for Republicans in 2008 and beyond.

Conservatives had better wake up before all the gains made by Ronald Reagan and the 1994 Revolution are lost. The clock is ticking.

Luntz views 2006 election defeats as ominous portents, GOP congressional leaders see only transitory setbacks and now dwell on bashing Democrats.

Like Cassandra of ancient Troy, Luntz's prophecies of impending disaster have been both accurate and disregarded. Republicans never have been that comfortable hearing critics in closed conferences. He is not invited to such meetings today. "They do not want to hear the truth," Luntz told me. While truth-telling is celebrated by Republican reformers who include presidential front-runner John McCain, it is a decidedly minority view in the GOP....Luntz is not alone in his gloomy prognosis. Republican pollster Bill McInturff believes his party underestimates the 2006 outcome, and he thinks the GOP outlook is as dangerous as it has been "at any time since Watergate."

"I was going to talk about John Edwards but these days, you have to go into rehab if you say the word 'faggot,'"

When you see her in such a context, you realize that she truly represents the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism, especially among the young. The standing ovation for Romney was nothing like the eruption of enthusiasm that greeted her.

Being a gay man in a crowd that cheers a woman denigrating someone for being a "faggot" is an educative experience. Seeing college kids line up to worship her tore me up. These kids deserve better. They're young and smart enough to be interested in conservatism - and this is what they are getting? From a stage where two presidential candidates just spoke? I guess I've been a bit of a smug ironist who just got mugged by conservative reality.

“My level of concern and dismay is very, very high,” said Mickey Edwards, a Republican former congressman from Oklahoma who is now a lecturer in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “It’s not that I have any particular problem with the people who are running for the Republican nomination. I just don’t know how they can run hard enough or fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the Bush administration. We don’t have any candidates in the field now who are compelling,” Mr. Edwards said, adding: “It’s going to be a tough year for us.”

Presidential obsession du jour for anxious GOPers: Does Fred Thompson's announcement that he's in remission from lymphoma mean that America's favorite lawyer-turned-lobbyist-turned-movie-actor-turned-senator-turned-TV-actor is more likely or less likely to join the 2008 hordes? I'm betting on Option A, especially since early reaction to Thompson's revelation ranged from the blasé to the encouraging. And, while I obviously am hoping that Republicans are nutty enough to nominate someone in 2008 who'll prove utterly unelectable in the generals--like Kansas Senator Sam Brownback or, better still, Newt Gingrich--I wouldn't mind seeing Thompson jump in and shake things up a bit.

It's not that I find Thompson's politics any more appealing than say, John McCain's or Rudy Giuliani's. (As for Mitt Romney, God only knows what his politics are--or how many times they'll change between now and Iowa.) He consistently voted for guns, against gays, for tax cuts, and against abortion rights. But Thompson has one thing to recommend him that his Republican opponents don't: a long-standing reputation for lacking any passion, zeal, or vision for governing. Plus, he's said to be just the teensiest bit lazy. This was the rap on him over a decade ago, when I began cataloging his many charms for a Washington Monthly piece predicting that he'd make a helluva POTUS candidate if he could just find himself a good wife (something he has since done), it remains the rap on him today, and it is by far my most favoritest thing about good ol' Fred. Seriously. I get a little nervous when confronted by any presidential aspirant itching to transform society as we know it. (Just look what Team Bush has wrought trying to democratize Iraq.) So my idea of a top-notch standard bearer for a party whose views I find increasingly unpalatable is one too lazy and too apathetic to cause much trouble should he actually win.

"This could become an issue in the GOP presidential primaries. Mr Libby has done nothing whatsoever morally wrong, and is being punished for being on the wrong side of a rogue independent prosecutor trying to criminalize disagreement over national security issues.

On the GOP side, the wusses will settle for President Bush pardoning Mr Libby after the 2008 presidential elections. The base, and all decent people, will demand that Mr Libby be pardoned now (as Fred Thompson has called for).

The GOP cannot let the liberals start imprisoning people because of policy differences. If President Bush does not immediately pardon Mr Libby, this will be another reason (as if there weren't enough already) to break with him, and let him meet his future fate, by himself, against the massed liberals and left, totally alone, for all time.

Toral"

I FEEL TERRIBLE for Scooter Libby's family. Millions of Americans feel terrible for Scooter Libby's family. But we can't do anything about the injustice that has been done. Nor can we do anything to avert a further injustice looming on the horizon--Judge Reggie Walton seems inclined not to let Libby remain free pending appeal.

Unlike the rest of us, however, George W. Bush is president. Article II, Section Two of the Constitution gives him the pardon power. George W. Bush can do something to begin to make up for the injustice a prosecutor appointed by his own administration brought down on Scooter Libby. And he can do something to avert the further injustice of a prison term.

Will Bush pardon Libby? Apparently not--even if it means a man who worked closely with him and sought tirelessly to do what was right for the country goes to prison. Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino, noting that the appeals process was underway, said, "Given that and in keeping with what we have said in the past, the president has not intervened so far in any other criminal matter and he is going to decline to do so now."

So much for loyalty, or decency, or courage. For President Bush, loyalty is apparently a one-way street; decency is something he's for as long as he doesn't have to take any
risks in its behalf; and courage--well, that's nowhere to be seen. Many of us used to respect President Bush. Can one respect him still?

William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard.

Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations. The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

---

The release of the memos that the Senate Republicans want to suppress was cleared by Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Greg Craig, and then was stopped when “all hell broke loose” inside the Obama administration, according to an article by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff. Newsweek attributes internal opposition to disclosure of the Bush-era torture memos to White House counterterrorism adviser and former CIA official John O. Brennan, who has raised arguments that exposure of the memoranda would run afoul of policies protecting the secrecy of agency techniques and has also argued that the memos would embarrass nations like Morocco, Jordan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Egypt, which have cooperated closely with the CIA in its extraordinary renditions program. Few informed independent observers, however, find much to credit in the Brennan objections because the techniques are now well-known, as is the role of the cooperating foreign intelligence services—any references to which would in any event likely be redacted before the memoranda are released. Moreover, the argument that the confidence of those engaged in torture—serious criminal conduct under international and domestic law—should be kept because they would be “embarrassed” if it were to come out borders on comic.

---

No decision was taken at that Republican caucus meeting whether to filibuster or not, though Cornyn was generally believed to support filibustering Johnsen and potentially other nominees. Johnsen has met recently with moderate Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both of whom are being lobbied heavily by colleagues and religious right groups to oppose her nomination.

Both Koh and Johnsen are targets of sustained attacks coming from right-wing lobbying groups. The Daily Beast previously reviewed the attacks on Johnsen, while Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has catalogued the recent attacks on Koh. Former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson recently endorsed the Koh nomination, calling the Yale dean “a man of great integrity.” But connecting the Obama nominations to the Bush torture memos escalates the conflict toward a thermonuclear level.

Besides the ugliness of the attacks, what the Republicans are doing is really unprecedented. First, the President has traditionally been given deference in the choice of his advisors. If some President wants to have someone in his cabinet, the presumption is that he ought to be able to do so, absent illegality or some sort of manifest incompetence. For the Republican Senators to hold these appointees up not for those reasons, but because they disagree with their policies, is just wrong; if this happened every time a new administration came into office, the opposition party would filibuster half the nominations and no one would never govern at all.


Second, what the Republicans are trying to do is to dictate to the President a matter that is purely his prerogative: deciding whether or not to unclassify documents. This is insane: it's as though Obama threatened to withhold funding for the Senate unless Mitch McConnell fired some staffer he didn't like. [UPDATE: Adam Serwer points out that it isn't even optional: a judge has ordered that the memos be turned over.]

LIMBAUGH: We're going to go to Chicago. This is Charles. Charles thank you for waiting and for calling. Great to have you here. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks Rush. Rush listen, I voted Republican and I really didn't want to see Obama get in office. But you know Rush, you're one reason to blame for this election, for the Republicans losing. First of all, you kept harping about voting for Hillary. The second big issue was the torture issue. I'm a veteran. We're not supposed to be torturing these people. This is not Nazi Germany, Red China, North Korea. There's other ways of interrogating people, and you just kept harping about, it's okay, or it's not really torture. And it was just more than waterboarding. Some of these prisoners will killed under torture.

And it was crazy for you to go on and on like Levin and Hannity and Hewitt. It's like you're all brainwashed. And my last comment is, no matter what Obama does, you will still criticize him because I believe you are brainwashed. You're just -- and I hate to say it -- but I think you're a brainwashed Nazi. Anyone who can believe in torture has got to be -- there has got to be something wrong with them.

LIMBAUGH: You know --

CALLER: And I know Bush wanted to keep us safe and all of that but we're not supposed to be torturing these people.

LIMBAUGH: Charles, if anybody is admitting that they are brainwashed it would be you.

CALLER: No, no, Rush. I don't think so. You, Hannity, and Levin are all brainwashed --

LIMBAUGH: Charles, you said at the beginning of your phone call that you didn't want Obama in there. But you voted for him because of me.

CALLER: I didn't vote for him. I voted for McCain. I voted Republican.

LIMBAUGH: Oh, so you're saying I turned people off --

CALLER: You turned people off with all this vote for Hillary and all this BS.

LIMBAUGH: That was Operation Chaos. That was to keep the chaos in the Democrat primaries --

CALLER: It didn't work and what we have with you Hannity Levin and Hewitt is sour grapes. That's all we have. And believe me, I'm not -- I'm more to the right than I am to the left.

LIMBAUGH: Oh, of course you are.

CALLER: I am.

LIMBAUGH: Of course you are. You wouldn't be calling here with all of these sour grapes if you weren't.

CALLER: Well I'm tired of listening to go on and on with this --

LIMBAUGH: I don't know of anybody who died from torture.

CALLER: We're not supposed to torture people. Do you remember World War II, the Nazis? The Nuremburg trials?

LIMBAUGH: Charles, Barack Obama --

CALLER: What's the matter with you? You never even served in the military. I served in the Marine Corps and the Army.

LIMBAUGH: Charles, Barack Obama is president of the United States today because of stupid, ignorant people who think like you do. You pose - you and your ignorance are the most expensive commodity this country has. You think you know everything. You don't know diddly squat. You call me a Nazi? You call me someone who supports torture and you want credibility on this program? You're just plan embarrassing and ludicrous. But it doesn't surprise me that you're the kind of Republican that our last candidate attracted. Because you're no Republican at all based on what the hell you just said right here.

In this piece, I intend to explore some of the figures and influences who may help turn the fortunes of the Republican Party around after two of the most devastating election cycles in the party's history.

For leadership or renewal, we need not look too closely at the party's congressional leadership. The management styles of the two parliamentary leaders of the Republican Party, John Boehner in the House of Representatives and Mitch McConnell in the Senate, seem to be more based on partisanship for the sake of partisanship as opposed to formulating policy for the sake of rebuilding their shattered delegations in the House and Senate. As a good American friend said to me just a few days ago, the Republican 'leadership' in the House and Senate are "paralyzed", simply waiting for the Obama administration’s policies to somehow become unpopular, "and that won't translate to victory".

In this past crisis, for instance, Obama should have been working from a substantial base of knowledge, as both he an Joe Biden served on the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee on African affairs. HA reader Morgen, who posts occasionally at Verum Serum, discovered that when the subcommittee met to discuss the issue of Somalia and piracy over the last three years, both the President and VP were no-shows.

---

Maybe he could have attended even one of the meetings listed above before the crisis erupted in order to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Plumber for Sale

I favor a major overhaul of America’s tax system. So why do I object to Joe the Plumber’s advocacy on that subject? Well, I find it objectionable to cast oneself as a champion for regular Americans, only to exploit the misplaced trust of the most credulous among them.

Or put it another way: imagine if an American operative out of uniform were captured by the Iranians tomorrow. Imagine he were put into a coffin for hours with no light and barely enough air to breathe, imagine if he were then removed and smashed against a plywood wall by a towel tied around his neck thirty times, imagine if he were then kept awake for eleven days in a row, then kept in a cell frozen to hypothermia levels, and then waterboarded multiple times, after which he confessed to being a spy trying to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. Would you believe that intelligence? Would Krauthammer? Would you believe both that he wasn't tortured and that the information he gave was reliable? That is what an otherwise intelligent human being is asking us to do not just in one case but in hundreds, in many of which the prisoner actually died under interrogation.

Would he also insist that what was done to the prisoner, however awful, could not be called torture under American law and the Geneva Conventions? Now imagine that the International Red Cross eventually got access to the prisoner and judged his treatment unequivocally torture; and that the Iranians claimed that since they merely applied "an alternative set of procedures" in order to gain critical intelligence that might have prevented a nuclear accident or sabotage, and remain in compliance with international treaties.

Mark A. Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, argues in a Washington Post op-ed (" The CIA's Questioning Worked") that justification for the Bush administration's techniques is there for all to see in a memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel dated May 30, 2005, one of the four made public.

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

Ah, the Library Tower. The thwarting of al-Qaida's attack on it was a favorite talking point of President Bush (though he sometimes called it the "Liberty Tower"; for the past six years, its formal name has been the U.S. Bank Tower). Because the Library Tower is in Los Angeles, the al-Qaida plot to bring it down is sometimes confused with the Millennium Plot, a separate plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Day 2000—supported but not organized by al-Qaida—that came much closer to fruition. The Library Tower, designed by I.M. Pei, stands 73 stories high and is the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi. Sheikh Mohammed initially planned to crash a jetliner into it on 9/11 as part of a scheme involving not four but 10 passenger planes on both coasts. Osama Bin Laden vetoed that as too ambitious and scaled back the plan to focus on New York and Washington. After 9/11, Sheikh Mohammed still hoped to execute the attack on the Library Tower and, working with a Southeast Asian al-Qaida affiliate (the aforementioned Hambali), recruited four terror cell members to carry it out.

---

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

How could Sheikh Mohammed's water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration "broke up" that attack during the previous year? It couldn't, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn't realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter.

What I do know, however, is that I’m sick to frigging death of people – self-identifiedly conservative or otherwise – whose reaction to the ongoing revelation of what our government and its representatives did post-9/11 is to say, Oh, well, I’m really opposed to torture, and clearly there were some cases where a few bad apples crossed the line, but we were just trying to do our best, and national security is really important, and these people are pretty awful people after all, so despite the fact that I’m really opposed to torture I’m still okay with what our government did.

NEWSFLASH: If you’re okay with all or most of what our government did, you’re not opposed to torture. Really. It’s that simple. At this point, being head-splittingly outraged by the post-9/11 actions of our government and its representatives is a necessary condition on being an opponent of torture.

5 Baldwin
ID: 310261322
Mon, Jan 21, 2002, 11:37 It strikes me that these are people who would gladly infect themselves with some pathogen [ala 12 Monkeys] in order to infect a whole military base so the surgical masks are more likely there to defend against a bio-attack. Then again a country on the brink of total starvation may already have severe TB or other infectious disease problems.

The photo of them kneeling down also includes a guard inside the cell so it's not hard to see why the prisoners would be asked to assume a non-threatening posture until he finishes his inspection. Now if we find out they were sensory deprived and forced to kneel for days on end we are dealing with a whole nuther animal.

Every time you openly support the practice of torture, you effectively negate any claim that you oppose it.

Can anyone tell me, is there any place in this forum where Boxman or Baldwin have come out and expressed outrage at their government's torture of detainees on American custody?

The president looked into the audience and singled out Jeremiah Denton, an American pilot shot down by North Vietnamese troops and imprisoned for eight brutal years. He was beaten, starved and thrown into solitary confinement. In 1966, during a televised propaganda interview with a pro-Commie journalist arranged by his captors, Denton was pressured to condemn American wartime "atrocities."

Instead, Denton stood by his country: "(W)hatever the position of my government is, I believe in it, I support it, and I will support it as long as I live." Denton pretended the camera lighting bothered his eyes. With his clueless jailers surrounding him, Denton looked into the lens, blinked his eyes in Morse Code, and covertly broadcast the truth to the world -- Jane Fonda be damned -- by spelling out "T-O-R-T-U-R-E."

It was as though beginning with Senator Jeffords’s decision, Republicans turned a blind eye to the iceberg under the surface, failing to undertake the re-evaluation of our inclusiveness as a party that could have forestalled many of the losses we have suffered.

It is true that being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of “Survivor” — you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you’re no longer welcome in the tribe.

---

I have said that, without question, we cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates.

In that same vein, I am reminded of a briefing by a prominent Republican pollster after the 2004 election. He was asked what voter groups Republicans might be able to win over. He responded: women in general, married women with children, Hispanics, the middle class in general, and independents.

How well have we done as a party with these groups? Unfortunately, the answer is obvious from the results of the last two elections. We should be reaching out to these segments of our population — not de facto ceding them to the opposing party.

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.

It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, “We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only ‘litmus test’ of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.” He continued, “As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.”

Purity. That has been the response by a number of Republicans to Sen. McCain's defeat by President Obama: focus on ideological purity. And how is it going? Well, it has cost us the Senate. We spend a lot of time defending a failed Vice Presidential candidate. Sen. DeMint proclaims "I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don't have a set of beliefs," so that the Republican party can be safely ignored by everyone. Republicans already can't stop a bloated, inefficient stimulus package because they aren't offering any realistic alternatives. Oh, yeah, and a recent poll has the number of folks self-identifying as Republicans below 30%.

Heckuva job, folks. (But ask us about our tea parties!)

It is time to face facts. Even if it were popular -- and it's not -- the purest form of conservative ideology is not going to reverse this trend. No party has returned from the wilderness by becoming an even purer version of its losing self. Ideology doesn't fix roads or defend the country. "No" is not a plan, "I'm angry" is not a winning message, and a hodge-podge of wedge issues is not a policy. Plus, the wedge on one issue -- gay marriage -- is reversing. (As a supporter of gay marriage, I'm grateful for that.)

Parties get elected, first, because they are perceived to be competent. That is, they have practical ideas that appeal to a broad swath of voters. Messaging is secondary. You can be the best damn outside the beltway Army of Davids there is, but that's all window dressing. It is what is inside the window the counts: what you say you will do, not who you are or where you live. (Put another way: When the grass roots win, it's not because they are grass roots. The grass roots win the same way as anyone else: by convincing other folks that they are right.)

Although the point is sometimes missed, Obama's campaign was a model for this. Obama had great messaging -- hope & change & unicorns, hooray! -- but messaging wasn't Obama's foundation. Obama proposed solutions to problems that actual people actually had. Health care. Jobs. Education. The environment. I didn't agree with many of Obama's proposals, but he had them and he talked about them endlessly. This is what he was going to do to solve your problem, bud, however vaguely-worded this might be.

Republicans, on the other hand, were saddled with an unpopular President, unpopular policies, and a candidate who claimed the title of maverick but had to shed his maverick-i-ness to placate each Balkan (too easy -mith) in his party base. Pragmatic responses to kitchen table issues? Not so much. How about a tax cut that no one can really explain and then some health care plan we'll figure out later .... Plus, I totally heard from someone that the other dude's a secret Muslim.

This didn't work because it never works -- and the fault is not McCain's, entirely, but also the fault of a party leadership and faithful that rallied behind George Bush and Dick Cheney for eight years of drift and incompetence. I'm not asking Republicans abandon their core principles. What I am asking is for Republicans to stop talking about their principles and start putting those principles into practice -- something that many Republicans are loathe to do because it requires them to make their principles practical. Focus on delivering government services that people want in a way that they want them; y'know, governing.

Hennen: Some people are wringing their hands saying, “This is an example of why the party needs to change, to hear the message of Specter,” that, as Colin Powell said, the Republican Party needs to moderate. Do you think the Republican Party needs to moderate? Is that the message of the Specter defection, or the state of the party these days?

Cheney: No I don’t. I think it would be a mistake for us to moderate. This is about fundamental beliefs and values and ideas ... what the role of government should be in our society, and our commitment to the Constitution and Constitutional principles. You know, when you add all those things up the idea that we ought to moderate basically means we ought to fundamentally change our philosophy. I for one am not prepared to do that, and I think most us aren’t. Most Republicans have a pretty good idea of values, and aren’t eager to have someone come along and say, “Well, the only way you can win is if you start to act more like a Democrat.” I really think we go through these cycles periodically Scott, and I’ve been through them before.

Yes they say the opposite and then create the tools to do exactly what I said. It's a tactic Obama uses all the time. Disarm the opposition, tell them what they want to hear, and then clobber them just like everyone expected.

For example, Obama is happy to say he supports a constitutional right to bear arms, and we all know he has no intention of appointing judges who feel that way.

For example we all know Obama is for gay marriage. Gay activists allow him to pose on the fence, because they know for sure he is on their side and will appoint judges who will do their dirty work for him.

...But Tree, PD and the euthanazia lobby had scientiologist George Felos and his hand picked doctors against her.

Terri had cutting edge doctors doing wonders with the brain damaged, on Terri's side...

Really all you needed to do was read the enzyme test result that showed that she did not have a heart attack, to see the official version of events was bogus.

Or look at her broken body bone scans riddled by abuse from her husband.

Or ask the six nurses who paid the price of losing their jobs to tell you she was not braindead and was responsive.

Or you could have taken the word of a professional brain scan reader at Codeblue.

Or you could have considered the word of over 50 doctors willing to testify in court that she was not PVS.

Or you could have considered why the forces of euthanazia in this case refused to allow MRI's

In the course of my conversation with Dr. Morin, he made reference to the standard use of MRI and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans to diagnose the extent of brain injuries. He seemed to assume that these had been done for Terri. I stopped him and told him that these tests have never been done for her; that Michael had refused them.

There was a moment of dead silence.

“That’s criminal,” he said, and then asked, in a tone of utter incredulity: “How can he continue as guardian? People are deliberating over this woman’s life and death and there’s been no MRI or PET?” He drew a reasonable conclusion: “These people [Michael Schiavo, George Felos, and Judge Greer] don’t want the information.”

Or you could have considered the FDLE agents who felt Micheal Schiavo should have been held criminally liable. And who were shut down by a corrupt Bernie McCabe.

Or you could wonder why Michael pled for funds to rehabilitate her and then a month after the award ordered that she be refused all care.

Or you could wonder why both a lawyer and a doctor in that case tried hard to get Michael charged with murder.

Members of the House of Representatives have introduced a resolution seeking to declare 2010 as "The Year of the Bible."

The bill was introduced last week by Rep. Paul Broun [perhaps best known for having compared President Obama to Hitler -Steve Bensen] a Republican from Georgia, and co-sponsored by 13 other Republicans.

The bill states , among other things, that "the Bible has inspired acts of patriotism that have unified Americans, commemorated through shared celebrations such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas."

The bill seeks to have the president designate 2010 as the Year of the Bible and "to issue a proclamation calling upon citizens of all faiths to rediscover and apply the priceless, timeless message of the Holy Scripture which has profoundly influenced and shaped the United States and its great democratic form of Government."

President Ronald Reagan proclaimed 1983 as Year of the Bible.