Schadenfreude

Well, about time! Just so long as we don't get carried away with it!

I was struck by several things:

• How close the Montana Senate Race and the NM Representative races were. I thought these would be blowouts by the Dems.
• How much of a blowout the Rhode Island, Tennessee, and even the Missouri races were. I thought they would be razor-thin.
• I hoped Webb would win Virginia, but I'm surprised he actually seems to have pulled it off.
• Schwarzenegger's margin is freakin' huge. Angelides just couldn't get a grip.
• Pombo's gone! Yay!
• Lieberman's not gone! Damn!

In other news, Donald Rumsfeld has resigned. Both he, Bush, and Cheney never seemed to grasp that they were not fighting dead-enders in Iraq, and they did not have sufficient endurance and force on the ground to prevail. I wonder if they grasp that even now? Defeat comes hard to the proud!

Troop levels were deliberately kept low enough not to provoke a domestic Vietnam-style backlash, at least for a while, but imagine trying to control a violent country roughly the size of California with only 140,000 troops. It doesn't work. The Iraq War has now lasted as long as World War II. Stalemate or defeat are the only two options left, and stalemate is looking untenable.

The critical difference is knowing about the enemy and what makes them tick. In World War II, the American military leaders knew vast amounts about their Nazi counterparts (although much less about their Japanese foes). I wonder how many American military leaders know who their enemies are in Iraq, and who is Shiite and who is Sunni? Do they even care? Probably seems like an undifferentiated mass of crazy people to them, I suppose....

Cheney's apparently gone hunting again today. Take that frustration out on the quail. Show 'em who's boss.

Here are selections from Salon's coverage of the evening on Fox News:

There was denial. There was bargaining. There was lashing out. There was an apparition of the undead. There was a wacky racially coded moment. There was cannibalism (if only among liberals). But I could have encountered most of that in certain relatives' houses, where the drinks would have been better and the oaths more colorful.

Fox has never been so boring. For most of the evening, Brit Hume had the bemused, faintly condescending demeanor of the veteran TV newsman who has been reduced to anchoring the weekend local news in Bakersfield or Binghamton. He'd announce that yet another porcine congressional Republican was going down the slippery slide toward a future on K Street, defeated by some heartland Democrat nobody's ever heard of, as if he were discussing the garden show on Palisade Boulevard and the times for Sunday Mass at St. Stanislaus'. The first actual candidate we got to hear thank his family was Joe Lieberman. Yes, it was that boring.

... One-time right-wing hero Rick Santorum was the first Republican senator to fall, and beyond that first news bulletin his name was not mentioned during the five hours or so I watched of Fox's election coverage. Defeated Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine was barely mentioned either, although his victorious opponent, Rep. Sherrod Brown, was described by Hume, with evident distaste, as a "true-blue liberal" and an "out-and-out liberal."

... Barnes and Kondracke acted irritated by the whole evening, as if the historic electoral upheaval they were witnessing was essentially a routine event and anyway, dammit, if they didn't make their Georgetown dinner dates on time the merlot would all get drunk by other people (possibly Democrats). Barnes insisted that "there was no ideological component" to the GOP's ever-worsening defeat, and that the widely despised Iraq war was not an ideological issue. That sounds smart until you think about it. In plain English, I think that means: Absolutely everyone has finally grasped that the president is an idiot.

... Then, as must happen on all Fox News broadcasts, things took a bizarre turn. It was as if the producers suddenly realized that their political movement was about to be cast into the wilderness, that their core viewers were all at home eating their own gizzards, and that changing the mood somehow, anyhow, was mandatory. That meant hearing Brit Hume utter the word "blogosphere" (it's still funny!) and it meant bringing in Michelle Malkin, looking as if she had showed up to fill out an application at the Hawaiian Tropic theme restaurant and sat down at the wrong desk.

It was she who chirpily informed us that NewsBusters and other right-wing sites were blaming CBS News for Santorum's defeat in Pennsylvania (and, no doubt, for global warming and the North Korean nuclear bomb). Moving along briskly to the so-called left of the spectrum, Malkin announced that Ned Lamont's defeat by Lieberman had "really opened up some fissures in the Democrat Party. There's a lot of cannibalism out there among liberals." Is that so, Michelle? I can't say I'm surprised; they are liberals after all. But tell me, who gets to eat Al Sharpton?

Right after that, just before 10 p.m. Eastern, Hume had to announce the defeats of Gov. Bob Ehrlich and Senate candidate Michael Steele, two well-liked Republicans, in Maryland. Whether it was Malkin's outburst or those losses that threw him off, Hume lost all pretense of objectivity, and spent several minutes dolefully dwelling on a lone Republican hold in a close seat, the 13th Congressional District of Florida. He seemed terribly eager for analyst Michael Barone to tell him this was a harbinger of better things ahead, and not just a Proustian remembrance of glorious elections past.

... Normal TV manners reasserted themselves, and before long Sen. John McCain came on the show, supposedly to talk about how the Republicans would land on their feet. Of course this is the new, improved McCain, a pod person hatched in some Karl Rove greenhouse who at some point in 2005 replaced the old tough-as-nails, indie-Republican model. I have long felt that I'd actually prefer McCain to Hillary Clinton in '08, but, jeez Louise, have you seen this guy lately? He sits there in a chair with all the lifelike vividness of Lenin's corpse, smiling in this ghastly, dead way and reading from a script, with no evident conviction or even awareness. I'm not positive his lips move. Sca-a-ry.

... At 11:23 EST, Fox put up a graphic showing a cherry-picked selection of the incoming House leadership. Predictably, they'd found a photo of Nancy Pelosi with a bad puffball hairdo and a weird gape-grin. Below the speaker-presumptive were a few likely chairs of major committees: Charles Rangel, Alcee Hastings, John Conyers and Henry Waxman. These people were variously described as highly liberal (Rangel and Conyers), ethically challenged (Hastings) and overly aggressive (Waxman). No one on the show observed that the folks in the picture were a woman, three black guys and a Jew. (At least not out loud.)

Shortly before Hume's signoff at midnight, Kondracke asked him, "How do you keep track of all these blogs? There's a lot of them. It seems like anybody in their pajamas ..." He trailed off.

"It's a real marketplace of ideas, isn't it?" said Hume.

All night long, it had looked like George Allen was going to squeak it out in Virginia, and the Foxies were clinging to that apparent result. Bill Kristol kept wanting to call the race and then talking himself out of it, but he did repeatedly exclaim with boyish wonder over the fact that it might be Allen who saved the Republicans' bacon in the end. Hume got to tell his viewers, right before departing, that Allen's lead had finally evaporated, and that a recount, and possibly agonizing defeat, would come with the dawn.

By the next hour under Shep Smith, Fox had totally dropped the mode of lamentation and moved on to a new message: Let's end this partisan bickering and get stuff done! It's time for new ideas! Change! Competence! Like I said earlier, it's the message of those who just got a can of whup-ass opened all over them. (It looks like condensed cream of mushroom soup, but tastes even worse.)

"This is sort of a standard election," Kondracke said crossly in summing up. "There's always something in the sixth year [of a president's tenure], whether it's Watergate or Vietnam or a recession." Yeah, Mort. There's always something. Here's the something this year: That big plan for a permanent Republican majority? It crawled out into the Iraqi desert, rolled onto its bristly back and died.