Backwards & Forwards
If you want any sort of in-depth retrospective on 2005, you can click here or comb through our archives. What is a blog, after all, but an on-going, real-time retrospective anyway?
When I think of retrospectives I think in a big-picture sense. And in that regard I think that the overall theme of the past year was a repetition by Republicans, from the President on down, of the same mistake the GOP always makes after winning a national election: they stopped campaigning and tried to return to "governing." They thought that partisanism and heated rhetoric and the like could be put aside, hands extended across the aisle, and both sides joined together to work for the common good. And, most inexcusable of all, Pachyderms thought that the Democrats would accept the election results and the back seat to which they had been relegated, just as Republicans always used to.
People ask what happened to the Republican agenda this year. The answer, with a few fair-to-middlin' exceptions, was that it never got out of the starting gate. Permanent tax cuts? Never pushed. Permanent Patriot Act? Left 'till the last minute and almost killed outright. ANWR drilling? Passed, rejected, passed, and finally filibustered with RINO help. And, of course, there was the great "there/not there" of Social Security reform, which George Bush himself left to be kicked to death by the other side while he tried with noble-but-desperate foolishness to convince them to come to the table with a plan of their own from which a grand compromise could be fashioned that would make everybody happy. Is it any wonder that the effort became the most ignominious failure since Millard Filmore's Compromise of 1850?
While Republicans were trying to play "Mr. Nice Guys," the Democrats kept the 2004 campaign (which was really the 2000 campaign with a roughtly six-month interruption after 9/11) going right through 2005. They attacked Bush on tsunami relief, repeatedly defamed U.S. troops, undermined the GWOT both in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else, including the homefront via an avalanche of national security leaks. They insisted that Iraq is Vietnam and Bush is Nixon and Cheney is Agnew and that we bring all the troops home and let al Qaeda run right over the top of us and that the federal government enact a prayer rug subsidy and throw all Jews and Christians into internment camps. And, of course, they demanded that Dubya be impeached. And Cheney. And Hastert, and Stevens, and Rice, and Rumsfeld, and right on down until they finally get a Democrat back in the Oval Office. All hail the Mineta administration! The leader of which would then take a dive in a celebrity boxing match to Senator Thunder Thighs, after which the 2008 election would be canceled.
Oh, sure, some of that is satire. Or Howard Dean's recurring wet dream. But it's an indication of how extreme the minority party became last year that you can't really say definitively where reality leaves off in the above recitation and parody begins.
Regardless of that line of demarcation, the Left's war of sedition took place completely unopposed by the White House for more than a year. And, much like a similar ten-month period from May 2003 through March 2004, it had, inevitably, its intended effect: Bush's poll numbers cratered and public support for the GWOT eroded right along with them. And that dynamic bled over into virtually every other policy area, which gave us the Administration's public relations floundering after Hurricane Katrina and the too-clever-by-a-bunch Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination. It also emboldened the RINO winglet of the GOP and intermittently spread the collaborationist contagion to other 'Pubbies, which gave us the McCain Mutiny on Bush's appellate court nominees, Bill Frist's embrace of embryonic stem cell research, runaway government spending, and the aforementioned RINO mischief on ANWR that helped kill any move toward greater energy independence for another year.
It was only after Veteran's Day that the President finally came to grips with the reality that in a divisive political landscape, if you're not "pushing back," you're getting your ass kicked and your groin stomped. Nowhere in that formula is there room for "reaching out in the spirit of bipartisanship" - not if you want to keep your hand.
That's a refreshingly pugilistic segue into my look at head at 2006, which will be worthy at least as much as what you paid to read it.
Problem is, I do better at prognosticating when I have a mathemetical formula to guide me. You know, saves all the time otherwise wasted on thinking and pondering and all that sort of rubbish. And hey, I picked 72% of NFL regular season winners this year, so we're not talking numerology.
In that spirit....
*The Seattle Seahawks will finally get to their first Super Bowl, where they will fall a field goal short of....the Denver Broncos.
*The San Antonio Spurs will once again defeat the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals because their offense is better and because ABC and ESPN, who would naturally much rather see a Heat-Lakers (i.e. Shaq-Kobe) soap opera series, must be denied as a matter of principle.
*The inexplicable stretch of the New York Yankees being unable to buy World Series championships will come to an end.
*Patriotic, family-oriented movies will be more popular than ever. Accordingly, Hollywood will churn out more seditious, salacious garbage than ever, and continue to blame "Jesusland" for their box office woes.
*Samuel Alito will be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court without (much) incident. Another SCOTUS opening will not occur.
*The White House will remain engaged in the domestic political wars throughout the year. However, election year politics will prevent much, if anything, from getting done legislatively, other than things that should not be done at all.
*The big foreign policy issue will shift by one consonant, from a "q" to an "n". Iraq will continue to stabilize and progress and take over more of its own self-defense responsibilities and, accordingly, fade from the political radar as it becomes less and less exploitable by the Left. Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, OTOH, will quickly take its place as the Bush Administration, with time running out and diplomatic options exhausted and futile to begin with, launches multiple air strikes against Tehran's nuclear development facilities that cause enough damage to set the mullahs' progress back sufficiently to buy the West at least some additional breathing space for more pointed diplomatic efforts (i.e. ultimatums) be to pursued.
*Let's toss in one of Jonah Goldberg's predictions, to wit, that there'll be another terrorist attack on the American homeland. But let's include the wrinkle that it comes after the attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, giving the American Left a fresh bogus PR truncheon with which to batter away at the President.
*Despite all this fussbudgeting, when the dust finally settles (for the time being) after the mid-term congressional elections, there will be no net change in either the House or Senate. But there will be new majority leaders in both chambers, as John Kyl shocks the world on the Senate side, and House Republicans welcome back an acquitted, refreshed, recharged, tanned, rested & ready Tom "the Hammer" DeLay to his rightful place of power.
*Meanwhile, the Democrats will do what they always do after yet another crushing defeat, rallying around Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, blaming their latest failure to regain power on Bush's NSA "domestic spying" program (which prevented them from "getting their message out"), and vowing to fight EVEN HARDER, and scream EVEN LOUDER, until the American people finally "see the light," "come to their senses," and return the Democrat party to its rightful (or is that "leftful") place at the pinnacle of American governance.
What will happen after that is fairly easy to forecast, but that's for next year's picks....
When I think of retrospectives I think in a big-picture sense. And in that regard I think that the overall theme of the past year was a repetition by Republicans, from the President on down, of the same mistake the GOP always makes after winning a national election: they stopped campaigning and tried to return to "governing." They thought that partisanism and heated rhetoric and the like could be put aside, hands extended across the aisle, and both sides joined together to work for the common good. And, most inexcusable of all, Pachyderms thought that the Democrats would accept the election results and the back seat to which they had been relegated, just as Republicans always used to.
People ask what happened to the Republican agenda this year. The answer, with a few fair-to-middlin' exceptions, was that it never got out of the starting gate. Permanent tax cuts? Never pushed. Permanent Patriot Act? Left 'till the last minute and almost killed outright. ANWR drilling? Passed, rejected, passed, and finally filibustered with RINO help. And, of course, there was the great "there/not there" of Social Security reform, which George Bush himself left to be kicked to death by the other side while he tried with noble-but-desperate foolishness to convince them to come to the table with a plan of their own from which a grand compromise could be fashioned that would make everybody happy. Is it any wonder that the effort became the most ignominious failure since Millard Filmore's Compromise of 1850?
While Republicans were trying to play "Mr. Nice Guys," the Democrats kept the 2004 campaign (which was really the 2000 campaign with a roughtly six-month interruption after 9/11) going right through 2005. They attacked Bush on tsunami relief, repeatedly defamed U.S. troops, undermined the GWOT both in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else, including the homefront via an avalanche of national security leaks. They insisted that Iraq is Vietnam and Bush is Nixon and Cheney is Agnew and that we bring all the troops home and let al Qaeda run right over the top of us and that the federal government enact a prayer rug subsidy and throw all Jews and Christians into internment camps. And, of course, they demanded that Dubya be impeached. And Cheney. And Hastert, and Stevens, and Rice, and Rumsfeld, and right on down until they finally get a Democrat back in the Oval Office. All hail the Mineta administration! The leader of which would then take a dive in a celebrity boxing match to Senator Thunder Thighs, after which the 2008 election would be canceled.
Oh, sure, some of that is satire. Or Howard Dean's recurring wet dream. But it's an indication of how extreme the minority party became last year that you can't really say definitively where reality leaves off in the above recitation and parody begins.
Regardless of that line of demarcation, the Left's war of sedition took place completely unopposed by the White House for more than a year. And, much like a similar ten-month period from May 2003 through March 2004, it had, inevitably, its intended effect: Bush's poll numbers cratered and public support for the GWOT eroded right along with them. And that dynamic bled over into virtually every other policy area, which gave us the Administration's public relations floundering after Hurricane Katrina and the too-clever-by-a-bunch Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination. It also emboldened the RINO winglet of the GOP and intermittently spread the collaborationist contagion to other 'Pubbies, which gave us the McCain Mutiny on Bush's appellate court nominees, Bill Frist's embrace of embryonic stem cell research, runaway government spending, and the aforementioned RINO mischief on ANWR that helped kill any move toward greater energy independence for another year.
It was only after Veteran's Day that the President finally came to grips with the reality that in a divisive political landscape, if you're not "pushing back," you're getting your ass kicked and your groin stomped. Nowhere in that formula is there room for "reaching out in the spirit of bipartisanship" - not if you want to keep your hand.
That's a refreshingly pugilistic segue into my look at head at 2006, which will be worthy at least as much as what you paid to read it.
Problem is, I do better at prognosticating when I have a mathemetical formula to guide me. You know, saves all the time otherwise wasted on thinking and pondering and all that sort of rubbish. And hey, I picked 72% of NFL regular season winners this year, so we're not talking numerology.
In that spirit....
*The Seattle Seahawks will finally get to their first Super Bowl, where they will fall a field goal short of....the Denver Broncos.
*The San Antonio Spurs will once again defeat the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals because their offense is better and because ABC and ESPN, who would naturally much rather see a Heat-Lakers (i.e. Shaq-Kobe) soap opera series, must be denied as a matter of principle.
*The inexplicable stretch of the New York Yankees being unable to buy World Series championships will come to an end.
*Patriotic, family-oriented movies will be more popular than ever. Accordingly, Hollywood will churn out more seditious, salacious garbage than ever, and continue to blame "Jesusland" for their box office woes.
*Samuel Alito will be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court without (much) incident. Another SCOTUS opening will not occur.
*The White House will remain engaged in the domestic political wars throughout the year. However, election year politics will prevent much, if anything, from getting done legislatively, other than things that should not be done at all.
*The big foreign policy issue will shift by one consonant, from a "q" to an "n". Iraq will continue to stabilize and progress and take over more of its own self-defense responsibilities and, accordingly, fade from the political radar as it becomes less and less exploitable by the Left. Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, OTOH, will quickly take its place as the Bush Administration, with time running out and diplomatic options exhausted and futile to begin with, launches multiple air strikes against Tehran's nuclear development facilities that cause enough damage to set the mullahs' progress back sufficiently to buy the West at least some additional breathing space for more pointed diplomatic efforts (i.e. ultimatums) be to pursued.
*Let's toss in one of Jonah Goldberg's predictions, to wit, that there'll be another terrorist attack on the American homeland. But let's include the wrinkle that it comes after the attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, giving the American Left a fresh bogus PR truncheon with which to batter away at the President.
*Despite all this fussbudgeting, when the dust finally settles (for the time being) after the mid-term congressional elections, there will be no net change in either the House or Senate. But there will be new majority leaders in both chambers, as John Kyl shocks the world on the Senate side, and House Republicans welcome back an acquitted, refreshed, recharged, tanned, rested & ready Tom "the Hammer" DeLay to his rightful place of power.
*Meanwhile, the Democrats will do what they always do after yet another crushing defeat, rallying around Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, blaming their latest failure to regain power on Bush's NSA "domestic spying" program (which prevented them from "getting their message out"), and vowing to fight EVEN HARDER, and scream EVEN LOUDER, until the American people finally "see the light," "come to their senses," and return the Democrat party to its rightful (or is that "leftful") place at the pinnacle of American governance.
What will happen after that is fairly easy to forecast, but that's for next year's picks....
posted by JASmius at 2:43 PM
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