Reductionism is sometimes the only way to make sense out of a nonsensical world:

12 million illegal aliens: the amoral, nationless corporate right wants cheap labor any way possible, the government to pay for the ensuing entitlement costs, cares little about the stability of its own country, and figures its own elites have enough privilege to shield themselves from the social consequences; while the race industry feels that a new Latino majority is, with just a few million unassimilated more, almost here in American Southwest, and it will require an entire cadre of special interest, bloc politicians, academics, and journalists, as well as providing some sort of psychological tweaking for an array of past perceived ethnic grievances.

Democrats on Iraq: They were worried about seeming soft on national security, so-after the unforeseen success in Afghanistan-by October 2002 tried to outdo the administration in rattling the sabers on Iraq–and then sometime around mid-2004 thought the whole democratization thing over there wasn’t worth the unexpected costs: our three-week war, your four-year occupation.

The administration on Iran and Syria: We got sidetracked in Iraq, and so now figure that a stable realpolitik from the past will be less painful than the current uphill battle to implement democratic idealism. That principle wins no adherents from the supposedly liberal left, and only disdain from the realist right. But we must make no such honest admission of an about-face, when an incremental, insidious and unspoken retreat could slip under the radar and stop the wasting away in the polls.

More national debt, out of control federal spending, huge trade imbalances, oil extortion by the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela, etc.: this can’t all go on forever, but for now the necessary medicine scares us more than the wasting disease.

Somewhere out there, someone must believe that we can stop illegal immigration,and that to do so is the only legal and ethical course; that the Democratic amnesia about their past support for the war is pathetic; that we were making real progress in marshaling world opinion against these murderous regimes in Damascus and Teheran; that stabilizing Iraq is critical, very much possible, and the only moral course; and that we need some short-term tough love to avoid real dislocations down the road.