This is completely unrelated to anything in the political world, but I've noticed that any comment about football tends to bring at least four or five e-mails, so somebody must enjoy reading it. I predict tomorrow's NFL draft will begin as follows:

1. The Houston Texans will take RB Reggie Bush.

2. The New Orleans Saints will seek a trade but fail to find a willing partner and will select DE Mario Williams.

3. The Tennessee Titans will take QB Matt Leinart. All of the talk about Vince Young will be revealed to be a feint. Also, if you're the Titans, and your offensive coordinator Norm Chow worked with this guy in 2004 and he says he's the right choice, you almost have to pick him - otherwise you're saying you don't trust your offensive coordinator's eye for talent.

4. The New York Jets will waste little time in taking OT D'Brickashaw Ferguson. I will applaud. The Jets fans watching the draft live in the room will boo. They will boo because they always boo the Jets' picks; and others will boo because they are idiots, and they always want the biggest name, whether or not we have a glaring need for an offensive tackle with nimble feet and great skills to protect our quarterback's blind side for the next ten years.

5. The Green Bay Packers will take linebacker A.J. Hawk.

I will make two more predictions. You know that rumored deal that the Jets would trade their #29 and #35 picks to the Ravens if QB Jay Cutler is available and the Ravens couldn't get their top priority, NT Haloti Ngata, at the #13 spot? It won't happen; one or both players will be gone by then.

Also, with the #29 pick, the Jets will select C Nick Mangold. I will be very happy with two young, talented first-rounders to anchor our offensive line; many other Jet fans will boo. Again.

There are many, many columnists lambasting both parties for their transparent and empty demagoguery on high gas prices: NRO editors, Charles Krauthammer, Eugene Robinson, Thomas Sowell, The Los Angeles Times.

We’ve seen some terrible commentary regarding gas prices; perhaps most spectacularly, Nancy Pelosi’s comment that, “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3 a gallon gasoline. There is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.” We’ve seen poll questions that assume, erroneously, that gas prices are something the President “handles” in his daily duties.

(We’ve also seen Schumer and Boxer take their cars ONE BLOCK to attend a press conference at a gas station on Capitol Hill.)

The preferred solutions of many politicians are to a) pledge investigations of oil companies and b) to take oil companies profits’ away from them in the form of a “windfall tax.”

Let me throw out a “here’s the stakes” thought here:

This idiotic rhetoric works because a big chunk of the American people is economically illiterate. They do not grasp the laws of supply and demand. They do not know or understand about enormously surging demand from China and India. They do not realize how many places with oil reserves in the United States are off-limits to drilling.

They believe that the Constitution includes a guarantee of $1.50 per gallon gas, and that when it is not available, someone has stolen it from them.

Americans may have some vague sense that a lot of places in the world that have large reserves of oil are hostile, dangerous, manipulative or unstable – Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Russia. They do not realize, as Thomas Friedman tried to lay out in Foreign Policy magazine and elsewhere, that the more oil-rich a country is, the more likely its rulers will be autocratic, corrupt, brutal and irreformable. They do not realize that a big chunk of the recent price surge in recent years stems from the fact that doing business with these regimes is risky, and oil companies increase their prices to cover the bets they’ve made by dealing with these countries. On any given day, al-Qaeda might blow up a tanker, pipeline or refinery or Hugo Chavez might “nationalize” – read, “steal” – company assets in Venezuela.

The vast majority of voters do not realize that we haven’t built a new oil refinery in this country since the late 1970s. They do not see any connection between high energy prices and the country’s refusal to build any new nuclear power plants. They do not realize that not building wind farms in pretty places like off Martha’s Vineyard means that there are fewer options for electricity generation.

They only know that they’re paying more, and “somebody’s getting rich.” Must be the oil companies.

If this demagogic wave does not get beat back, then we are doomed to a future of increasingly incoherent and ineffective economic policies. For any major public policy problem, there will often be an easy private sector target. Pharmaceutical companies. Health care plan administrators. Mining companies. Fast-food companies. Tobacco companies. Banks. Financial services companies. Media conglomerates. Wal-Mart.

(Marshall, I’m mailing you an invoice for that reference.)

This is what policy decisions will be in the future if politicians learn that there is no consequence for taking the easy, demagogic path. When a problem comes up, politicians will fall all over themselves to blame the scapegoated industry or company and use the stirred up public outrage as an excuse to seize financial assets through “windfall taxes” or “fairness taxes” or whatever they’ll want to call it. Political debates will be settled by who can shout the loudest and pound the table the hardest.

Not long ago, Jonah said, only half-jokingly, that his preferred immigration policy is to have one. That’s my attitude on energy policy. If Americans don’t want to drill in pretty places like off the coast of Florida, or even not-so-pretty places like ANWR, fine. If they don’t want to build any more oil refineries because they’re ugly, fine. But you can’t make those decisions and then throw a tantrum when gas gets expensive.

Someone – besides incredulous and infuriated columnists – has to go to the American people and give them the unpleasant truth. Life requires you to make choices. If you want cheaper gas, you can either produce more or reduce demand.

UPDATE: A good sign? A big refinery expansion on the horizon.

Kathryn pointed out this comment by the Bull Moose blog - in his new book, "The Good Fight", Peter Beinart, the former top editor of the New Republic has completely changed his opinion on the Iraq War. Where Beinart was once one of its most eloquent and persuasive supporters on the left, he now believes, as the Moose puts it, that there is "no moral nor strategic value in removing Saddam. He believes that the porous sanction regime could have been sustained."

A TKS reader responded to my post of a few days back by observing, "The New Republic supported the current Iraq War wholeheartedly. It lost them quite a few suscribers. A lot of the criticism you'll hear from them now is about the errors Bush and Rumsfeld made in executing it."

I don't begrudge someone changing their mind. Individuals can suddenly screech to a halt and change direction, exclaiming, "Whoops, nevermind, I didn't mean to do what I just did." But nations can't. A country cannot topple a dictator, disband an army, put more than a hundred thousand troops on its soil and become the de facto protectors of the citizenry living within that territory and then suddenly turn around and give an Emily Litella "Nevermind" and hightail it out of there.

Or it can, but it is guaranteed that terrible results will follow — anarchy, thuggish kleptocracy, or worse for those in the vacated land; a loss of national honor and trust for vacating nation in question. When the last helicopter left Saigon, evil men commiting evil deeds filled the vaccuum created by our departure. When we departed Lebanon, the message was clear, that the streets were owned by the most vicious and amoral. When we departed Somalia, jihadists and thugs around the world rejoiced and took heart, and that battered nation was left to sink ever lower. Our enemies learned that we can eventually tire of far-off missions; our friends learned that perhaps we shouldn't always be counted on; sometimes even Americans give up and go home.

There's nothing brave or insightful about saying "I support the war when it's going well, but I oppose it when it's going badly." That public stance says you only move forward when the wind is at your back, when things are going your way; setbacks paralyze you. The only stance that gets you anywhere is to say, "We've got a goal: A stable, unified, free Iraq that respects the rights of its citizens. When this goes well, great. When this goes badly, we'll learn from our mistakes, adjust our tactics, and fight our way through the hard times. But we're not quitting until the job is done."

More from the Moose:

What does it mean to be a contemporary version of a Truman Democrat, anyway? According to Beinart it just requires that one recognize that there is a war against Jihadism, and presto, you are a credible hawk. Who in the party would disagree?

The book offers little about what course America should take other than essentially embrace public diplomacy, offer more development aid and express more humility. Jimmy Carter could embrace that agenda.

If Beinart is singing this tune, then it's over; Lieberman is the last of the Mohicans, or the last of the Scoop Jackson Democrats. There are no hawks over there anymore. Every once in a while I have hopes for... for... well, you know, her. I figure it means something that she hasn't embraced the whole Dean-Murtha-Pelosi-Cindy Sheehan-Kerry line. But if Beinart — in a book audaciously entitled "The Good Fight"! — can't keep the New Republic as the voice of pugnacious hawkishness in the Democratic party, there's no way that she will pick a fight that enormous with her base.

I'm reading Joe Klein's "Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid."

I probably had heard this before, but seeing this fact again surprises me - in 2000, Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum recommended to Al Gore that he select John Edwards as his running mate, even though he had exactly two years of political experience as a senator from North Carolina.

I take back anything I might have ever said about Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney not having enough experience to be the GOP nominee in 2008.

UPDATE: Another fascinating revelation:

The John Edwards campaign, for example, was deluded into thinking that domestic issues were all that mattered. When I asked a key Edwards adviser why the candidate never talked about foreign policy, I was told, "Because the people don't care about that."

Congratulations to Tony Snow. It’s hard to think of a guy better suited to the position of White House Press Secretary.

But he has his work cut out for him. I chatted with a well-connected guy in Washington yesterday and he asked, “Why is the Bush administration not making more out of the documents found by the Iraq Survey Team that Stephen Hayes and the bloggers have been talking about?”

The documents suggest Saddam sponsored terror groups in the Philippines, that the Russian ambassador was passing U.S. war plans to the Iraqis, that Saddam approved meetings of Iraqi government officials and al-Qaeda, and Afghani sources claimed Iraqi intelligence was cooperating with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. None of these are a smoking gun that Iraqi was working arm-in-arm with al-Qaeda, but they do refute the most blanket assertions of the antiwar crowd that there was “no connection” between Saddam and al-Qaeda and its affiliated terror groups.

I had no good answer for this well connected guy. It’s been a big question for months. Then he asked another.

“Why isn’t the White House spotlighting all of the Democrats who spent most of the 1990s lamenting that the first President Bush didn’t finish the job and go on to Baghdad in 1991?

A quick Lexis search reveals that in October 26, 1998, Charles Lane wrote in the New Republic that it was “one of contemporary history’s most maddening puzzles. Why, with Kuwait already liberated and Saddam Hussein's forces on the run, did George Bush balk at sending American troops on to Baghdad? … Yes, Bush’s decision spared American sons and daughters at that particular moment in February 1991, but it also left Saddam in power — which meant that, only weeks later, he could slaughter thousands of Kurds and Shiites within his own borders. It also meant that the United States was obliged to maintain an indefinite military presence in the Persian Gulf to keep Saddam bottled up. Dozens of soldiers have since died in Saudi Arabia at the hands of terrorists. Yet, to David Frost, Bush insisted that “instead of doing the Lord’s work, we would have been doing something very, very bad” if we had gone to Baghdad to oust Saddam.”

And in February of that year, the New Republic editors wrote, “The bombing of Baghdad, in short, is not the solution to the problem of Saddam and his chemical agents. There is only one solution to that problem, and that is to depose or to destroy Saddam himself. Bill Clinton seems no more willing to acknowledge this truth than Colin Powell was in 1991, when that great American paragon left the Iraqi villain to fight another day.”

Or back in 1997, recall the Newsweek story entitled “Saddam’s Dark Threat” that declared, “This time the real Iraqi menace is not a campaign of conquest but the growing anxiety that Saddam is building deadly chemical and biological weapons. With America's allies in disarray, President Clinton is weighing whether to strike Saddam and signal merchants of death that the United States will stand up to the new face of war — before toxic terror can make its way home.”

And let me remind you of a September 2002 speech by Al Gore:

Back in 1991, I was one of a handful of Democrats in the United States Senate to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf War. And I felt betrayed by the first Bush administration's hasty departure from the battlefield, even as Saddam began to renew his persecution of the Kurds in the North and the Shiites in the south - groups that we had after all encouraged to rise up against Saddam.

I don’t bring this up to pick on the editors of Newsweek or the New Republic. (Okay, maybe I do want to pick on Gore.) It’s worth noting that deposing Saddam was a bipartisan aim of U.S. foreign policy for at least a decade, and that some of those complaining the most about our presence in Iraq are those who were calling for it for a long time.

Deposing Saddam was, like cleaning out the gutters, a chore we kept saying we would do but never seemed to get around to it. It was, however, very easy and convenient to lament that President George H.W. Bush should have done it years back.

Had the first President Bush sent the troops in to Baghdad and toppled Saddam, we probably would be in the exact same situation – a messy occupation, violence between the Shia and Sunnis, a cacophony of discordant voices hindering political consensus, etc. - in 1994 that we are in 2006.

I suspect one of the big reasons the President is in trouble is that his defenders are tired. We see these examples, we remember these examples, we blog about these arguments – but the White House press operation itself too often seems quiet, muted, defensive and milquetoast.

Tony, bring your A game and eat your Wheaties!

Crazy Mahmoudi, a.k.a. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, may be attending the World Cup in Germany this summer. (Iran's team qualified last year.) A friend passes on this petition to bar his entry to Germany. A German parliamentarian is on board.

I wonder if his trip to Germany would be a good chance to nab – er, rendition him – and put him on trial for his role in the illegal kidnapping and detaining of 52 American citizens in 1979. Just thinking out loud here.

Dear Republican lawmakers,

Please take this idea (eliminating the federal tax on gas and diesel for sixty days) and run with it. Take the support of Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and argue that this is bipartisan and make the Democrats vote for or against temporary tax relief for American drivers. If everyone votes for it, then great. Let the Democrats argue that they thought of it first. All the voters will remember in November is that gas prices dropped 18 cents a gallon (unleaded) and 24 cents a gallon (leaded) and that a GOP Congress and a GOP president got it done.

Just some free advice.

I'm back in the United States for a few weeks, so blogging will be sporadic and light. Kind of like rain, this time of year.

Well, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid may not have realized he was calling for the U.S. to recognize Iran’s mullahs as their legitimate leaders and for the U.S. to formally reestablish a diplomatic relationship. But it’s hard to see how the administration could follow his advice without doing just that:

The Bush administration is relying too heavily on other countries in the international effort to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, according to Sen. Harry Reid.

Reid, D-Nev., said the administration should be taking the lead, but instead is relying on Germany, France and Great Britain to convince Iran to end its uranium enrichment program.

"It is hard to comprehend," Reid said Tuesday in Reno. "We should be involved at trying to arrive at a diplomatic solution. ... Not just these three countries."

Reid said the Middle East is a "powder keg" because of U.S. failures in Iraq, the rise of fundamentalism and the recent election of Hamas in Palestine.

"Our not being involved diplomatically in trying to solve the situation in Iran shows the Bush failure in foreign policy there and elsewhere."

And he said the U.S. has no military option in Iran.

"We don't have the resources to do it" because of the ongoing war in Iraq," he said.

But as you will recall, there currently are no diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran. We haven't had one since they (including, reportedly, the current President) took over our embassy - invading sovereign American soil - and took 52 of our citizens hostage for 444 days. If we need to send them a message, we do it through the Swiss embassy in Tehran and they talk to us through the Pakistan Embassy in Washington.

I realize that Reid is not alone; there are several in the political and diplomatic community, including a former hostage, who wish to reestablish relations with Iran.

But it has long been held that U.S. policy is to refuse to negotiate with terrorists. And aside from the terrorist action of taking our embassy personnel hostage, the Iranian leadership is not merely the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorists; they’ve struck at U.S. targets before.

As the 9/11 Commission report stated:

In June 1996, an enormous truck bomb detonated in the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that housed U.S. Air Force personnel. Nineteen Americans were killed, and 372 were wounded. The operation was carried out principally, perhaps exclusively, by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization that had received support from the government of Iran. While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown.

But yes, Mr. Minority Leader, let’s sit down and have a nice long chat with them. Any volunteers to go meet the Mullahs? Careful, U.S. diplomats who go into Tehran sometimes have difficulty leaving.

Abdul Rahman's dead.

No, not the good one who had to be smugged out of Afghanistan. The bad one, who was a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure, also known as Abu Mohsin Musa, a.k.a. Muhsin Musa Matwalli Atwah. He had a $5 million bounty on his head, and was one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists. A little background:

Muhsin Musa Matwalli Atwah was indicted in the Southern District of New York, for his alleged involvement in the bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, on August 7, 1998.

Pakistani military reportedly nailed him.

Why is the Bush administration losing the message game? Well, for starters, almost nobody has blogged about this, and almost nobody has covered this. (I realize that there are several spellings of his name and several aliases, but even searching for variations, there just hasn't been much talk about this guy.)

Does the President have to put this guy's head on a stick on the White House lawn to get people to notice our victories in the war on terror?

Or would Rummy have to unveil the corpse at his next press conference to get anybody to notice this?

"See this? This is a dead al-Qaeda. This is our job in this building, and we're doing a pretty darn good job at it."

"Mr. Secretary, isn't killing this al-Qaeda just a way of distracting the American people from the shocking and unexpected news that Wes Clark thinks you should resign?"

UPDATE: Oh, by the way, senior Taliban commander killed in a raid by Afghan police in Zabul province, five militants killed by U.S. and Afghan military forces in Kunar province, eight militants captured in southern Khandahar.

The headline in the New York Times today? "Afghan Battles See Higher Toll for Civilians."

I'm not saying ignore the bad news in Afghanistan and Iraq. But don't ignore the good news, either.

I realize that trying to reason with the Rumsfeld-must-go crowd is probably a waste of time, but here goes…

Brain Shavings has a wonderful graphic depiction of how many retired generals have called for Rumsfeld's departure, and how many haven’t.

(Maybe I'm a bit more irritable than usual, but I just feel like when a figure like Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, writes, "Is there a retired general left in the States who hasn't called on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to fall on his sword?" and the answer to her question is, "Yes, there are roughly 4,700," that the person who writes the spectacularly wrongheaded statement should be subjected to two or three days of being pelted with tomatoes everywhere they go. Not enough to cause bodily harm, just some public humiliation to rebuke their a) ignorance or b) extreme exaggeration to the point of a falsehood.

I think much of life comes down to incentives and deterrents, and right now there are no deterrents to just blurting out statements like that, or my other recent irritants, "The 9/11 Commission Report said there was no passenger revolt on Flight 93" and "Kofi Annan was Time's Man of the Year in 2001." Clearly, being fact-checked by the blogosphere isn't enough.

It's wrong to drive without a license, and I submit it's wrong to opine without a clue. I wonder if, in the interest of factually accurate public discourse, maybe we need some sort of stiffer penalty to those who blather first and get the facts later.)

So - looking at the question of whether there would be any advantage to Rumsfeld's departure, I’m reminded of my attitude towards changing a sports team’s head coach. (When you’re a New York Jets fan, you contemplate this issue a lot.) There’s no point in firing the current guy unless you’ve got a better guy to replace him with. If your current guy is Rich Kotite (4-28 over two years) and you have a chance to get Bill Parcells (two Super Bowl rings), you make that move. If your current guy is Pete Carroll (9-7) and your option for replacing him is Kotite, change will not necessarily be synonymous with progress.

I’d like to see Rummy’s critics give some sense of who they think would be an improvement. You know that if Bush appointed anyone currently at the Pentagon, the new nominee would be greeted with the same whining, wailing, and moaning that Josh Bolten heard when he stepped in as the new chief of staff. (I’m a fan of former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman, currently Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, but I have no idea if he would want the job.)

There was the Joe Lieberman rumor of a couple months back, but that didn’t seem serious. Lieberman’s got a reelection campaign to run.

And let’s not exaggerate the benefits of “fresh faces.” How much goodwill and good press did Bush get by replacing Andy Card with Bolton? Next to none. The press will treat any personnel change, even the departure of a cabinet member hated by the media and administration critics like Rumsfeld, as a sign that the administration is in disarray, not as a reenergizing burst of new momentum.

David Ignatius deserves a half a point for actually suggesting some replacements; unfortunately, he throws out a couple of perennial media favorites, Sens. Chuck Hagel and John McCain.

Not. Gonna. Happen. Why should these guys leave the comforts of the Senate (and botch possible presidential runs) by going across the river and getting grief and aggravation for not immediately fixing Iraq?

(And what’s with all the dreamy wish-fulfillment column themes lately? The New Republic’s Peter Beinart wants John McCain to run for president as an independent. *sigh* Whatever. Jeez, if these guys can write about their wildest dreams, I can write a column saying I want Abu Zarqawi to resign in disgrace and turn himself in, that I want to sell a million books, for the Jets to win the Super Bowl, and for pizza to suddenly become a health food. And I want a pony!)

So – with no immediate, obvious choice to step in and do the job for the next two and a half years, the benefits to replacing Rumsfeld to placate individuals like Anthony Zinni (a smart man with a book to sell) and Wes Clark (a man who wanted Bush’s job a few years back) seem pretty thin.

If a figure appears who would be the ideal Secretary of Defense for the next two years, then great. Thank Rummy for his service, give the new guy a shot and watch him go. (Maybe then the President could name Rummy to replace Scott McClellan and let him mock, browbeat and berate the White House Press Corps for hours every day. If that wouldn’t fire up the GOP base, nothing would.

“Mr. Secretary, isn’t your new position just another sign of disarray and panic within the administration?”
(the trademark Rummy irritated squint)
“Gregory, have you been drinking again? You smell a bit of curry, you have a flashback to New Delhi, and you go on a bender, is that it?”)

But most of the Dump-Rummy crowd isn’t falling for his ouster because they think it will really change anything or improve anything on the ground in Iraq; they’re saying it because they want more fodder for “the Bush administration is in disarray” columns.

And let’s remember, much of the criticism of Rumsfeld comes from generals who want to fight the last war – and by that I mean the 2004 election.

UPDATE: TKS reader Josh asks, "How many tomatoes can we throw at you for getting Caroll's record with the Jets wrong?" He's right, it was 6-10.

I blame post-traumatic stress disorder. You know what I remember about that season? That the Jets were actually doing pretty well, had a shot at the playoffs, and were in a three, maybe four way tie for first place when Miami came into the Meadowlands. I want to say the Jets' record was 5-5, maybe 6-5. Not a great record, but a shot at a winning season and maybe they sneak into the playoffs. New England had lost, and beating Miami would have given the Jets sole possession of first place.

Miserable, rainy day. Was there with Dad. The Jets were leading by a touchdown late in the game, and Marino is driving 'em down the field, but they've got no time outs left. They get the ball close to the Jets' end zone, I want to say like the seven yard line, and the Dolphins line up real quick. The crowd is thinking, they're gonna spike the ball. I think they're gonna spike the ball. But worst of all, the Jets' defense thinks they're gonna spike the ball.

Nope. Marino fakes the spike and throws a perfect quick strike to... (okay, this I had to just look up), it was Ingram, because the entire Jets defense is standing, dead in its tracks. Touchdown. The entire stadium just gasps, like they've been stabbed in the heart.

That pass was probably one of the most devastating in the history of football, because Miami goes on to win and take first place. The Jets' psyche is just crushed, and they don't win another game that season; the papers say the players quit on Carroll; some say Carroll quit on the players. Carroll gets dumped, and the Jets replace a guy who lost his last 5 games of the season with a guy who lost his last 7 games of the season, Rich Kotite. The NY Post headline was "Dumb and Dumber" over pictures of Carroll and Kotite.

If the Jets' cornerback (it wasn't James Hasty; it was the other one) had just covered that stupid reciever instead of falling for the fake spike, maybe they win the game, don't go into a slide, keep Carroll, never hire Kotite, never go 3-13 and 1-15...

I don’t doubt that the GOP base is cranky and dissatisfied, and that most Democratic voters are as angry as the lovely lady the Washington Post profiled on Saturday.

I look at the Post this morning, and I read:

“Anger at Bush May Hurt GOP At Polls; Turnout Could Favor Democrats”

“Santorum Facing Multiple Obstacles In Reelection Bid; Ties to Bush May Hurt GOP Leader”

“Pink Is The New Red; As President Bush's Popularity Falls, the Nation's Color Divide Adds a Few Hues”

Okay. I’m sure that’s the honest take of skilled observers of the electorate. But let me observe something.

Mickey Kaus loves to recall the New York Times story from the final Sunday before Election Day 2002, when the Times and CBS News released their final poll. They found that after months of Democrats and Republicans running neck-and-neck on the ‘generic ballot’ question, the GOP had jumped to a 47 percent to 40 percent advantage.

Six paragraphs in, Times reporter Adam Nagourney addressed the Republicans’ seven point bounce:

“That question, known as a generic ballot question, is a measure of national sentiment, and does not necessarily reflect how Americans will vote in the governor's races around the country and in the handful of close Senate and House races that will ultimately determine the control of Congress. The concern among Democrats about the nation's direction and the economy suggests that Democratic voters might be more motivated to cast their ballots on Tuesday and respond to the ambitious get-out-the-vote drives that have been organized by the Democratic Party, aimed in particular at voters who are distressed about the economy.”

Similarly, the Election Day 2002 assessment of the political staff of ABC News, in their daily roundup of news and gossip called ‘The Note,’ was “Democrats start this day with ... a bit more mojo in the tight contests.”

So, in 2002, the storyline was, “Democrats were very motivated, their base was mobilized, and they’re set for some big wins.”

In 2003, the biggest race of the year was the California recall; as Mickey Kaus observed, two days before the vote, the Los Angeles Times declared, “Davis did get a boost this weekend: less than a week after two polls showed the recall and Schwarzenegger succeeding by a healthy margin, a Knight Ridder and NBC poll has detected a change in the tides.” A month before the election, the Times reported, “many voters are deciding the recall is unfair to Davis.” Two weeks before the election, the Times told readers, “aides to Gov. Gray Davis said they increasingly feel that they are within striking distance of saving the unpopular governor's job.”

The recall passed, 55 percent to 44 percent; Arnold won 48.6 percent to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante’s 31.5 percent. So, in 2003, the storyline was, “Democrats were very motivated, their base was mobilized, and they’re set to pull out an unexpected victory against Arnold.”

In 2004, John Zogby declared, “the race is Kerry’s to lose,” on May 9. Chuck Todd of the Hotline wrote in the Washington Monthly that the election wouldn’t be close and that, “If you look at key indicators beyond the neck-and-neck support for the two candidates in the polls — such as high turnout in the early Democratic primaries and the likelihood of a high turnout in November — it seems improbable that Bush will win big. More likely, it’s going to be Kerry in a rout.”

ABC’s The Note declared on August 11 that it was “Kerry’s contest to lose.” The last day of the campaign, Jacob Weisberg wrote in Slate: “The Kerry campaign staff is confident, and it appears to be genuine, rather than bluster… By Monday evening, reporters from news organizations that have colleagues traveling with Bush started saying that the Bush folks have clammed up, or that they seem unusually tight. Kerry’s final events had a giddy air.”

So, in 2004, the storyline was, “Democrats were very motivated, their base was mobilized, and they’re set for some big wins.”

Are we starting to detect a pattern here?

Or you can go back further. You’ll recall that in 1996, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t.

And in 1998, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t. (Credit where it’s due, they closed the margin a bit.)

And in 2000, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t, until Jeffords switched parties.

And in 2002, Dick Gephardt said, “We’re going to win back the House!” And Daschle said, “We’re going to expand our majority in the Senate!” But they didn’t.

In 2004, Pelosi and Daschle said, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t.

So I’m not really all that surprised to hear Pelosi and Reid and Schumer saying this year, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!”

Yes, sooner or later, they’re going to be right; it’s unlikely that the GOP will hold both houses of Congress for all eternity. And maybe this is the year. But can we have a little more skepticism? Some acknowledgement that we’ve been hearing these same confident boasts for a decade, and they’ve turned out, cycle after cycle, to be mostly empty bluster?

I’m not quite sure what it means, but there seems to be some very unusual expectations management going on from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga:

The Democratic leadership thinks that the GOP implosion will ipso facto translate to Democratic victories in November. But the electorate is universally disenchanted with politics.

The GOP has proven, time and time again, that it is incapable of governing. But Democrats have not shown they are any different. They do not paint any bright lines between them and us. And they do nothing to motivate the Democratic base to turn out and vote.

My sense of pessimism for November's elections only gets deeper the more elections show lower and lower turnout. Our supporters have stopped giving a [bad word]. They were burned three elections in a row, and seeing nothing different come from the leadership, it has become easier for them to tune out.

There has got to be change in strategy from DC. Because right now, the Democratic leadership is just as reality-addled as the GOP's.

The conventional wisdom for three straight cycles has been, “the Democrats’ base is motivated and set to sweep the party to victory.” The GOP’s get-out-the-vote efforts never seem to get the same hype, although they do seem to work effectively.

Wake me the day the story is, “the Republicans are expected to have huge turnout.”

A few quick comments on some more evidence of the Tipping Point in Americans' perceptions of Islam. First, a CBS News poll:

Although Americans believe they are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

Forty-five percent of respondents queried April 6 - 9 said they have an unfavorable view of Islam, a rise from 36 percent in February. And the public’s impression of Islam has diminished even more compared with four years ago. In February 2002 – less than six months after the terrorist attacks of September 11 – the country was evenly divided in its impression of Islam.

(Hat tip, Ed Driscoll.) Some folks, including the LittleGreenFootballs guys, think the lead is wrong, and that it ought to say, "Americans are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, and a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable."

I agree that the first lede is editorializing a bit - "Americans claim they know more about Islam, but we doubt it, because they have such a negative attitude about the faith" - but would we ever really expect to see the inverted meaning of that lead? "Americans are turning against the teachings of Islam more than ever before, because they know more about the faith and what it instructs its followers"?

Also, the Wall Street Journal reacts to the partial transcript yesterday of the final 31 minutes of United Airlines Flight 93 and observes that "especially in this holy season of Easter and Passover, it was disturbing to read the hijackers swear fanatic allegiance to another great religion as they squeezed the life out of pleading flight attendants and pointed the jet down to smash in a Pennsylvania field."

The further we move away from 9/11 without another domestic attack, the more tempting it is to believe that awful day was an aberration, to think that we can return to normalcy if we merely leave Iraq and the other Middle Eastern regimes to their own purposes. But the forces of radical Islam aren't going to leave us alone merely because we decide that resisting them is too hard. The men and women on that plane weren't soldiers overseas; they were traveling to work, or on vacation, or to their homes within the United States.

The main political difference in the U.S. today is between those who appreciate that Islamic terrorists represent an existential threat to American life and liberty and are prepared to do what it takes to defeat them, and those who think the threat is overstated and can be ameliorated or appeased. Only yesterday, al Qaeda kingpin Ayman al-Zawahiri exulted in a videotape posted on the Internet that "the enemy has begun to falter." He's wrong, but the transcript of Flight 93 is a reminder of our fate if we do.

Also, Glenn's getting a little more belicose as time goes by:

"We have an obligation to be the superpower. You have to be subdued," [Zacarias] Moussaoui said. "America is a superpower and you want to eradicate Islam."

Well, not before, but he may put the idea in a few folks' heads. At any rate, this war isn't about cultural insensitivity or intolerance, or imperialism. At least, not on our part.

By the way, what have we learned in recent months?

That when it comes to material that may be offensive, there are two standards. There is one standard for material that offends Muslims (it is forbidden, or at least not worth the potential risk and/or headaches) and another standard for offending everyone else (anything goes!). Oh, and I completely disagree with Hugh Hewitt, which is somewhat interesting, because we began the cartoon controversy on the same page (denouncing the violent protests, but not terribly enthusiastic about a work that we saw as a deliberate poke in the eye to Muslims).

We've learned that when the issue is the First Amendment right to publish something offensive to Muslims, the first to fold and capitulate are newspapers, television networks, and bookstores! The ones who are supposed to be the most staunch defenders of our First Amendment freedoms! And who rallied to insist that no, the Islamic rules for blasphemy do not apply to non-Muslims?

A couple of newspapers, bloggers, and the South Park guys!

Bravo, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. And as for Comedy Central, well, we now know everything about them we need to know.

For a long, long time, a major goal of groups like the AARP and fans of expanding the welfare state was to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare. It didn’t take long for Republicans to figure out opposing this idea was a political loser; it lent itself easily to attack ads of granny being pushed in front of an oncoming bus by cackling pharmaceutical company CEOs.

Well, the new program is debuting, and the response from many seniors is, “it’s too complicated.”

Perhaps it is; but as we do our taxes at this time of year, it’s good to keep in mind that few processes involving government (or health care, for that matter) are not complicated. And perhaps this shows a bit of the futility of trying to court this constituency: the message from America’s seniors on this issue is generally, “We want Medicare to cover the cost of every prescription drug we could need or want, and we want it paid for by somebody else.” We want a program that isn’t susceptible to fraud, but doesn’t make verification of claims too complicated or bothersome. We want it simple, but we want it to be responsive to the different needs of different seniors.

I can’t get too mad at seniors. As a whole, Americans want their taxes low, spending on their favorite programs to increase, and for the deficit to be reduced. In fact, on just about every major political issue, the public at large, when speaking through polls and man-on-the-street interviews, wants it both ways.

We get angry over high gas prices, but we don’t want to drill in Alaska. Or off the east coast. We don’t mind 50 states having fifty different fuel blend requirements, or local, state and federal taxes that can add up to anywhere from 33 cents (N.J.) to 62 cents (N.Y.) per gallon. We don’t want ugly oil refineries anyplace near communities, even though that’s where the demand for gasoline is.

On energy in general, we don’t like building power plants. Even clean coal pollutes too much for most of the environmental crowd. We can’t build nuclear power plants, because Jane Fonda was in a scary movie about them in the 1970s. Wind farms kill birds who fly into the blades. We can’t build a wind farm off Cape Cod because it would ruin the view of a certain environmentalist senator.

We hate sprawl and like efforts to preserve undeveloped areas and that beautiful countryside, but we find housing prices to be exorbitant, and lament the lack of nice neighborhoods with housing affordable for young families.

I applaud Porkbusters for a good effort, but by and large Americans’ views of pork barrel spending echoes their local lawmakers’ – spending on projects in the other guy’s district is pork; spending on projects in my district is a vital national priority.

We’re very happy with no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11. However, a significant number of us are very upset that some communications with one party in the U.S. may have been monitored. Some even want to impeach the president over this. We don’t want our guys who interrogate captured terrorists to cross that line of decency. We want Jose Padilla to get a trial instead of being detained indefinitely, we want Moussoui to get a fair trial with all of the traditional rights of the accused. We worry that using a predator drone to whack an al-Qaeda leader on Pakistani soil without checking with Musharraf is violating Pakistan’s sovereignty. But again – if there’s another attack, all of those who are enacting the policies we want will be just the folks we will blame.

We think racial profiling is wrong. But we hate the illogic of random searches of granny and confiscating nail clippers while Abdul just walks through the medal detector.

We’re very angry at the Iraqis for not forming a government quickly enough. Some of us are angry enough to pull out all of our troops by May 15 if they don’t. Of course, the question remains whether we’re really willing to accept the consequences of a decision like that, most likely chaos and carnage that would ensue from May 16 until God knows when. We hate the strife and violence that’s occurring with coalition troops in the country; but we would probably hate even more the strife and violence that would occur without troops in the country.

If we were to enact this policy, would those who called for it stand up in the aftermath and say, “Yup – the all-out civil war, the collapse of the new Iraqi government, Turkey’s invasion of the Kurdish regions, Iran’s de facto control of the Shia areas – all of that is the fruits of my plan; I take responsibility”?

Mystery Pollster takes a long, detailed look at what appear to be contradictory results when polling the public’s views on immigration. Here we have a strong desire to beef up border security. We want a wall, except when we say it would be too much like the Berlin Wall. We want to welcome immigrants, except when we say they’re taking our jobs. We want to see them take the legal path to immigration, except when we say there are too many of them. We want them to assimilate, except when we want to send them back.

We like low-cost imported goods, but we don’t like it when “foreigners take our jobs” by working for less, and companies conclude that foreign labor can do the same work cheaper than American workers can.

Of course, it’s not just American voters. Looking over at France, we see young people protesting a law that would allow them to be fired until they were 26. It’s not too different in the rest of Europe – “we hate that our economies are barely growing, that our unemployment is in double digits and up to a quarter of young people, our taxes are too high, but we refuse to cut social spending. We want to be competitive in the global economy, but we refuse to give up our eight to ten weeks of vacation and our three hour lunches.”

So I can’t help but get a little cynical when I see low approval ratings across the board (Bush 37 approval/56 disapproval; GOP Congress 38 approval/51 disapproval; Congressional Democrats 38 approval/47 disapproval). The majority of voters want it both ways, they want their cake and to eat it too. They reject Plan A and Plan B, and keep demanding a logically impossible “Plan C” with all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks. This is the “magic wand” school of public policy.

I’m generally big on “trusting the people.” But when you get to the thornier issues in public policy – immigration, entitlement reform, energy, Iraq, immigration - there’s a disturbing trend of the public not willing to make tradeoffs. The result is a formula for the status quo; we reject any solution because it involves something we don’t want.

I see that George Conway, another NRO blogger, appears to have come to the end of his rope regarding the current Republican Party leadership:

I'm disgruntled, too, and I'm going to get it all of my chest this morning: I've never voted for a Democrat in a general election in my life, and I don't expect to anytime soon, but it's been impossible for me over the past couple of years to get enthused about the Republican party. I voted for President Bush twice, and contributed to his campaign twice, but held my nose when I did it the second time. I don't consider myself a Republican any longer. Thanks to this Administration and the Republicans in Congress, the Republican Party today is the party of pork-barrel spending, Congressional corruption — and, I know folks on this web site don't want to hear it, but deep down they know it's true — foreign and military policy incompetence. Frankly, speaking of incompetence, I think this Administration is the most politically and substantively inept that the nation has had in over a quarter of a century. The good news about it, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's almost over.

First, get that man a good sandwich or other comfort food and a Guinness. Save some room for dessert. Let's get the blood sugar up.

Second, there are two things that conservatives can do right now. They can push for the ideas that they believe strongly in, and take their message to the people. (Rich offers a good agenda; I would just add that the administration ought to point to Europe. The continent is demonstrating every day why larger, more intrusive government with more regulations and higher taxes eventually reaches a point where it just can't work. In France and Italy, problems just don't get solved anymore and voter cynicism is off the charts. In Germany, Merkel's fighting the good fight, but has an uphill climb.)

Or conservatives can throw up their hands and say, "I'm through with this, I'm leaving the party, all of this is pointless."

With option one, conservatives may win, or they may lose. On option two, they will definitely lose.

Third, let's not recall previous administrations through rose colored glasses.

Thinking back to the Clinton administration, do we look back fondly at their "foreign and military policy competence" in the way they handled the growing al-Qaeda threat? The cruise missiles fired, once, at the training camps and empty tents? Those decisive, responses to the first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, the embassy bombings, the U.S.S. Cole?

Do we look back fondly at their "foreign and military policy competence" in the way they handled Iraq? The collapse of the U.N. inspections, periodic cruise missile attacks that had little impact, the leaky sanctions that hurt the Iraqis more than the regime and that the world was ready to repeal?

Do we look back fondly at their "foreign and military policy competence" with, say, their approach to China? Loral? Madeline Albright's champagne toast in North Korea to "friendship between our peoples" with Kim Jong Il?

If you're upset with the current Bush administration's stance on illegal immigration, how did you like the Clinton administration's "Citizenship USA" program, unveiled in August 1995, designed to deal with an INS backload that ended up naturalizing 1.1 million immigrants in time for Election Day 1996?

We are righteously outraged with Abramoff and Duke Cunningham, and ought to be. But let's not forget Henry Cisnero's guilty plea about lying to the FBI, Hazel O'Leary's apology to Congress for her travel expenses, John Huang, James Riady, and Maria Hsia, the Marc Rich pardon, the grant of clemency to FALN bombers in 1999... I'm not even getting into that scandal, or Jocelyn Elders' "hands-on" proposal for sex education.

In Congress, the opposition party had Jim Wright, Dan Rostenkowski, the post office scandal, the Keating Five (with McCain), Tony Coehlo's resignation. By the way, it's not like the post-1994 Republicans had avoided any perception of scandal until recent years. We've had Gingrich's book deal, Bob Livingston's resignation, Rep. Nick Smith's claim that someone offered a bribe on the Medicare bill, the guilty plea of a New Hampshire GOP official and a consultant to using the phones to "jam" the lines of the New Hampshire State Democratic Party's phone bank on Election Day 2002.

Let's go beyond Clinton, and think back to the first Bush administration. Perhaps we were happy at the time with the decision to leave Saddam in power in Iraq, but it certainly left a festering problem. The military deployment to Somalia represented a major commitment of U.S. armed forces to a part of the world where we had no compelling national interest; the subsequent withdrawal (on Clinton's watch) is cited by jihadis as a major victory. Do we look back fondly on Bush's economic policies, the retraction of "read my lips, no new taxes," the "Chicken Kiev" speech, the well-oiled communications machine that was the 1992 campaign? How about Justice David Souter?

Regarding the Reagan administration, many of us have fond memories because the Gipper, God bless him, got so many big things right. But do we think back on Iran-Contra, or the quiet-at-best reactions to the bombing of the embassy in Lebanon and the Marine barracks months later? The handling of Robert Bork's nomination, the 35 percent approval rating in January 1983, the revelation of the astrologer? And if you don't like our current immigration policy, what do you think of Reagan's 1986 mass amnesty for illegal aliens?

Any administration is going to have its mistakes, and sometimes, they're going to be big ones. Let's be honest about where the current president and cabinet have botched things, but let's not fool ourselves into nostalgia for some golden age of political and substantive skill.

I like the attitude described by Tony Robbins (can’t find his quote online, so I’m paraphrasing). If you’re a gardener, and you’re worried about weeds, the answer is not to panic because you know the weeds will crop up and grow and take over your garden. The answer is also not to be excessively positive, and declare, “there are no weeds, there are no weeds.” The answer is to say, “I know there are going to be weeds, and I’m not going to panic when I see them, because if I see them, I can do something about it.”

Yes, the Republicans have problems right now. But it’s better that they see them and can do something about it.