November 8th

A lot of ink is being generated to talk about the thrills and chills the Dems are experiencing right now as they plan to take over the House, but what will happen next? Robert Caldwell discusses that in this piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

What, pray tell, would Congress' new Democratic majorities offer on the morning after Nov. 7?

A solution to the Iraq war? The Democrats don't have one.

Fiscal conservatism as an antidote to Republican overspending in the Bush era? Surely you jest.

A better economy? Thanks in part to the Bush tax cuts that many Democrats favor repealing, it's already humming along quite nicely. The Bush economy boasts record-low unemployment, six million new jobs, steady growth, the Dow at a historic high of 12,000 and a booming revenue stream that cut the deficit by 22 percent in just the last 12 months.

Reform the entitlement programs that threaten a fiscal train wreck sometime after 2020? Democrats wouldn't even agree last year to discuss Bush's pilot program for a very limited partial privatization of Social Security.

Clean up the corruption in Congress? The Democrats did nothing this year on lobbying reform and ending the wholesale abuse of pork-barrel spending earmarks.

Fix immigration? Divided Republicans at least agreed on a lot more border enforcement. Democrats were just divided.

Well, then, you say, maybe we can expect a more effective prosecution of the war on terrorism. Fat chance.

Two-thirds of House Democrats voted against renewing the counterterrorism Patriot Act. Many Democrats then opposed the Bush-McCain compromise on standards for terrorist interrogations. Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi represents the Democrats' left-leaning, MoveOn.org wing that would hobble U.S. intelligence monitoring and give captured terrorists unfettered access to American courts.

The fact is that, unlike the Republicans in 1994, congressional Democrats in 2006 have no coherent governing agenda.

Is this really what the voters want? A divided government (which I must admit has its advantages in stopping bad bills), hearings, subpoena's and attacks on Bush and his team?

If the voters choose that route, then I hope the Dems deliver every stupid thing they're planning. I'll never run out of material for this blog, and by '08 the country will be so sick of them that they won't dare elect another one president.