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I’ve been waiting for quite some time to hear confirmation of what I’ve been expecting for nearly as long, that the Democrats would choose Howard Dean as the chairman of their national committee. I see that news has now arrived:

Dean Accepts DNC Helm With Low-Key Speech

Capping an improbable political comeback, Howard Dean was unanimously elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday, accepting the job with a low-key speech that depicted the struggling party as the nation’s voice of fiscal responsibility and social progress.

Good for them. It’s about time the Democrats did something right.

There seems to be some concern that Dean might not be the right man for the job, but I think that notion is misguided. Rather than asking if Dean is fit to lead the Dems, I can’t help but wonder if the Democratic party is fit to follow Dean. If he can prod the Democrats into finding their collective backbone again, the entire nation will be in his debt. 

Today’s issue of The Japan Times carried a Reuters article titled “History says it’s all downhill for new Bush term,” in which the second paragraph informs us that:

In the last half-century, every U.S. president who won a second term had a reputation-tarnishing scandal to go with it.

I hear this kind of thing a lot, but I’m beginning to think that the people who write this kind of material need to wake up to an unfortunate reality: For whatever reason, history doesn’t apply to Bush.

Let’s look at a few examples. If history is any guide:

• Presidents usually have more experience than Bush. “With the specialized exception of Eisenhower, every single other president [since FDR] has had at least 14 years between first winning political office and becoming president. George Bush had six.” (Kevin Drum)
• Presidents who win office with less votes than their opponent usually serve only one term. (Kevin Drum, again)
• The president’s party usually loses seats in Congress during mid-term elections. (Not so in 2002!)
• The Presidential Debates usually shape public opinion about the candidates. (Not so in 2004, where Bush lost all three debates yet still went on to win the election.)

I’m sure there are plenty more examples, if you care to look for them, but my point is merely that people should stop fantasizing about “what history tells us.” If the last four years are any guide, history doesn’t matter—at least as far as Bush’s prospects for winning elections are concerned.

Seriously, who in the world did not see this coming?

Bush: Voters Ratified Iraq Policy

President Bush says his re-election proves Americans agree with his decision to invade Iraq, and that as a result, there’s no need to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes made in planning for the war, or its aftermath.

“We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” Mr. Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post for Sunday’s editions. “The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me.”

Not that it wasn’t before, but all sense of accountablity has now been banished from the White House. Thanks, voters!

By way of the DAJ mailing list comes this article from the Washington Post.

Ugly Truths About Guantanamo

The term “Orwellian” is much abused, and back in the actual year 1984 I thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called “the lunatic logic of the bureaucracy.”

Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years. With immense satisfaction, he would have noted the constant abuse of language by the Bush administration—calling suicidal terrorists “cowards,” naming a constriction of civil liberties the Patriot Act and, of course, wringing all meaning from the word “torture.” Until just recently when the interpretation of torture was amended, it applied only to the pain like that of “organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death.” Anything less, such as, say, shackling detainees to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is—or was until recently—considered perfectly legal.

The administration’s original interpretation of torture was promulgated by the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, and the White House, under its counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales. The result has deeply embarrassed the United States.

…

In the audience, unseen but nonetheless present, Orwell and Kafka look on.

It reminds me of something I was trying to explain to a Bush supporter before last year’s election:

There are two kinds of people involved in politics today: those who read Orwell’s 1984 as a warning and those who read it as a playbook. I don’t think I need to explain which of those groups the Bush administration belongs to.

Perhaps the term “Orwellian” is much abused, but then again perhaps it wouldn’t be if the folks in the Bush camp didn’t seem to draw inspiration from Orwell’s dystopian vision. 

Okay, I’m definitely not as distraught as this guy:

Vote-related suicide suspected at 9/11 site

A man who shot himself at the World Trade Center site was apparently distraught over the re-election of President George W. Bush.

Or as pissed off as this one:

Fuck the South

Fuck the South. Fuck ‘em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they’d stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

(This one is pretty funny in spite of the profanity. It’s something I would have been very pleased to have written when I was in high school.)

I’m also not as revved up as many Democrats seem to be about races that are too far off to think about. If I read one more message from the Draft Hillary or Let’s Run Obama camps, I will really have to write the Democrats off as a bunch of hopeless losers. The next round of important elections comes in 2006. Mark it on your calendar. The 2008 presidential race doesn’t come around until two years after that. It’ll be a while, so save your energy for goals nearer at hand.