From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On the New Congress—

MORT KONDRACKE: I think they have to get stuff passed into law. I think the Republicans passed lots of stuff out of the House of Representatives that never made it through the Senate and it was deemed a failed Congress as a result of it. I think there has got to be, and the public expects, and all the polls indicated and the exit polls indicate that the public wants its problems solved. It doesn’t want this political posturing all the time, it wants things accomplished.
FRED BARNES: We learned from Newt Gingrich . . . you can’t govern from Capitol Hill. They can’t do it. I think people ultimately will understand that you can’t do it.
HUME: We’re about to witness . . . some ceremonious goings on here, worthy of, not coronation, I don’t mean to belittle it in anyway, but this is a big deal and the Democrats are making it a big deal. And they are certainly not lowering expectations from what they’re going to achieve.
BARNES: I know they’re not and it’s a huge mistake. Republicans made the same mistake.

—On Iraq After Saddam—

BARNES: [The Sunnis, through] their terror attacks and their violence, have reduced Baghdad to the state of near anarchy. And when an execution that did produce justice, as Mort said, is carried out in a messy way in this messy city, by this messy government, which they have helped create, now they’re complaining and whining about it.
We shouldn’t listen to these Sunnis. They don’t have a leg to stand on morally, legally, ethically, or any other grounds. If they want to step forward and say, look, we now reject Saddam Hussein and all he did, we’re sorry for that. We want to join you in a government, that’s one thing. They haven’t done that at all. They’ve let the insurgents swim in the sea of their neighborhoods. They protected them and they participated in these attacks. So, let’s forget about the Sunni complaints and offer them nothing.
KONDRACKE: What I really don’t understand is what the Sunnis think they’re going to get out of this if the insurgency succeeds in driving us out. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be at the mercy of the Shiites. . . . [T]hey’re really going to whack the Sunnis, and there’s going to be more ethnic cleansing or atrocity than there is even now if we get out. It’s up to the Sunnis to make the deal.