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While the Larry Craig scandal post-mortems move over all sorts of Via arcane, almost pointless speculations, I'm left wondering whether this is at all a political win for progressives.

Yes, the GOP is imploding over its holier-than-thou right to hate ______________ (fill in the blank), but is giving the "crime" of Craig's sexual orientation such political validity through all the chest-thumping really a "win"?

Yes, Craig seems to be a cheat. But cheats led the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. What's so different now? Because Craig is gay?

This is part of the sad spectacle of American politics that goes back in my memory at least to the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, when a clearly unqualified not-quite-a-judge was challenged not over his lack of qualifications but rather over sexual misconduct. Anita Hill may have suffered, and I'm inclined to believe her, but was her suffering really to the point? Clarence Thomas sits on the bench, writing inane opinion and dissent, one after the other, like some grumbling old curmudgeon clinging to the dogmas of his angry view of the world, all because the Democrats would not challenge him on the issue at hand: competence.

And now we see the crowing over the fall of Senator Craig, who is all too typical of the fragile conservative male who needs to pass law after law to prevent him from being himself. And we crow over his fall.

But isn't it a bit tragic? War, bloodshed, corruption in the billions of dollars, domestic and abroad, and the only casualties we see are over sexual "deviance" as defined by a bunch of fearful men afraid of their own shadows.

Some victory. Like standing on the top of the hill that's falling into a deeper and deeper hole.

The bedwetting set can sure do the hysterics thing. They're hysterical over gays. They're hysterical over women's rights. And they're famously hysterical over barefoot gangbangers in rural Islamic countries.

Now they've been just beside themselves over two bloggers who were attacked by a hatemongering bigot, then fired by John Edwards campaign, then rehired by the John Edwards campaign.

They're also wonderful offering threats.

John Edwards ought to pray (softly, because you don't want your
staffers muttering about you being a "godbag" behind your back, right?)
that he doesn't get hit.Hear me now, believe me later, Johnny E.: If you lay down with nutroots, it will be hard to get back up.

At MyDD, Chris Bowers writes:

William Donahue is scared to death of you. He just promised a
nationwide campaign to fight the success you have made possible. Ha!
Bring it on. It is about time this wingnut is exposed, and the media
shamed for treating him like a mainstream Catholic figure in the first
place.

Of course, this goes right to the heart of the radical right's claims that the rest of us must be tolerant of their hate.

Unfortunately, Edwards' public statement on his campaign's blog is rather middlin' and, to some extent, cowardly:

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So How Terrible Is It? Max Rodenbeck asks in the New York Review of Books, November 30, 2006 issue. Louise Richardson, a Harvard professor who has been teaching about terrorism for a decade, counts the ways:

1. Terrorism is not new.
2. Terrorism is nowhere near as threatening as, say, drunk drivers (who kill six times more Americans than 9/11 every year).
3. Terrorism using weapons of mass destruction is extremely difficult and rare.
4. Terrorists are rational.
5. Terrorism usually arises out of defensive desperation.
6. Suicide attacks are rational: cheap, effective against difficult targets and, well, terrorizing.
7. Terrorism and Islam are not linked. Terror has been perpetrated in the name of most religions, as well as for secular causes.
8. Democracy does not prevent terrorism.
9. Democratic civil rights do not impede prosecuting terrorists.
10. Military action is usually not effective against terrorist groups.
11. Armies usually cause more terrorism in response.
12. Addressing causes of terrorism is not surrender or appeasement to the terrorists themselves.

You can almost see Rush, O'Reilly and the other armchair hawks having apoplectic fits over these conclusions.

One particularly important point of Richardson's is that few terrorist groups have ever succeeded in achieving their stated primary aim, whether to foment a revolution or to "liberate" a territory. In fact, most of them do not really expect to do so, and are extremely vague about what they would do if they actually succeeded. Osama bin Laden has said next to nothing about what sort of society he would actually like to create, just as Marx never described in any detail what his communist utopia would look like. This may explain why the terrorist groups that have taken power have sometimes produced such incompetent rule —as was the case with Yasser Arafat.

Because terrorists tend to be aspirational rather than practical, their practices typically amount to what Ms. Richardson calls a search for the three R's of terrorism: revenge, renown, and reaction. As she puts it, "the point of terrorism is not to defeat the enemy but to send a message." This simple insight is important, because it suggests ways of dealing with terrorism: you must blunt the impulse for revenge, try to limit the terrorists' renown, and refrain from reacting in ways that either broaden the terrorists' appeal or encourage further terrorism by showing how effective their tactics are.

Richardson's three R's go a long way toward explaining why American policy has become so disastrously askew. As she notes, an act such as September 11 itself achieves the first of her three R's, revenge. So spectacularly destructive an attack also gains much of the second objective, renown. But the Bush administration's massive and misdirected overreaction has handed al-Qaeda a far greater reward than it ever dreamed of winning.

"The declaration of a global war on terrorism," says Richardson bluntly, "has been a terrible mistake and is doomed to failure." In declaring such a war, she says, the Bush administration chose to mirror its adversary:

Americans opted to accept al-Qaeda's language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities.

In essence, America's actions radically upgraded Osama bin Laden's organization from a ragtag network of plotters to a great enemy worthy of a superpower's undivided attention. Even as it successfully shattered the group's core through the invasion of Afghanistan, America empowered al-Qaeda politically by its loud triumphalism, whose very excess encouraged others to try the same terror tactics.

That's right. Bush has decided us into military and political blunders that have resulted in placing al-Qaeda right up to superpower level in foreign affairs -- something akin to making some urban gangbanger into Public Enemy No. 1.

The article is a fascinating read ... if depressing.

Some very interesting, if distressing, articles in the New York Review of Books over the past three weeks offer some context for the mess we find ourselves in.

In the December 21, 2006 issue, Mark Danner's review, "The War of the Imagination," looks at just how we got into Iraq in the first place. What were they thinking, anyway?

Inherent in the War of Imagination were certain rather obvious contradictions: Donald Rumsfeld's dream of a "demonstration model" war of quick, overwhelming victory did not foresee an extended occupation—on the contrary, the defense secretary abjured, publicly and vociferously, any notion that his troops would be used for "nation-building." Rumsfeld's war envisioned rapid victory and rapid departure. Wolfowitz and the other Pentagon neoconservatives, on the other hand, imagined a "democratic transformation," a thoroughgoing social revolution that would take a Baathist Party–run autocracy, complete with a Baathist-led army and vast domestic spying and security services, and transform it into a functioning democratic polity—without the participation of former Baathist officials.

How to resolve this contradiction? The answer, for the Pentagon, seems to have amounted to one word: Chalabi.

Apparently, Chalabi was the plan. Put him into power, and he would do the nation building. There was one flaw in that plan: President Bush refused to put him into power. That caused a problem, because the brilliant minds behind this war did not have a plan B.

So there would be no President Chalabi. Unfortunately, the President, who thought of himself, Woodward says, "as the calcium in the backbone" of the US government, having banned Chalabi's ascension, neither offered an alternative plan nor forced the government he led to agree on one. Nor did Secretary Rumsfeld, who knew only that he wanted a quick victory and a quick departure.

So what now?

Nearly four years into the Iraq war, as we enter the Time of Proposed Solutions, the consequences of those early decisions define the bloody landscape. By dismissing and humiliating the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi army our leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the insurgency. By bringing far too few troops to secure Saddam's enormous arms depots they armed it. By bringing too few to keep order they presided over the looting and overwhelming violence and social disintegration that provided the insurgency such fertile soil. By blithely purging tens of thousands of the country's Baathist elite, whatever their deeds, and by establishing a muscle-bound and inept American occupation without an "Iraqi face," they created an increasing resentment among Iraqis that fostered the insurgency and encouraged people to shelter it. And by providing too few troops to secure Iraq's borders they helped supply its forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic extremists from neighboring states. It was the foreign Islamists' strategy above all to promote their jihadist cause by provoking a sectarian civil war in Iraq; by failing to prevent their attacks and to protect the Shia who became their targets, the US leaders have allowed them to succeed.

Danner's review, which addresses State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward (Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., $30.00), The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind (Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $27.00) and State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, by James Risen (Free Press, 240 pp., $26.00), is well worth the read.

The AP raises the question on many minds:

It's the question Democrats would rather not ask in their moment of revelry: Are their new majorities in the House and Senate sustainable?

What if the war in Iraq is over by 2008? Or what if it is still being waged despite Democratic pledges to change the course? What if voter antipathy toward President Bush is irrelevant in two years? After all, he will be on his way out....

...As some Democrats begin looking to 2008 and beyond, the challenge is how to turn antipathy toward Republicans into affection for Democrats.

In other words, what will these "new" Democrats stand for? After all, a number of them believe the state should regulate women's bodies. More than a few believe homosexual Americans should be afforded fewer rights on the basis of their sexual orientation. These are issues the Republicans are almost certain to push on over the next couple of years.

What do the Democrats stand for, now that they've dropped the ERA from their platform? Senator Chuck Schumer's answer is (wait for it) a three-point plan. (It's not a real plan unless you can count off the main points on your fingers.)

It would begin with modest plans to increase the minimum wage, provide more tax breaks on college tuition, encourage greater energy independence and require drug companies to negotiate for lower Medicare drug prices.

Democrats then must work in bipartisan fashion to confront the war in Iraq and government deficits, Schumer said.

"Thirdly, we have to try our best to come up with a full vision and platform that points toward '08," he said.

It's that third point that is the biggest challenge. What will this new platform look like? Will the voters who put the Democrats into office see the Democratic Party as representing them and their interests? Or will the Democrats try to look even more Republican so they can win Republican votes?

Of course, all this begs the questions: What will the Republicans do, now that they've received such a drubbing? Some are calling for even more conservatism, more wingnuttery, to appeal to even more hard-core right-wingers. If that's the case, when it comes to hate-mongering by the right, we ain't seen nothing yet.

I would hope they would rediscover the roots they claim to have, and look more to Goldwater conservatism rather than Pinochet conservatism, and give up their dreams of establishing a religious police state. Maybe that's too much to hope for.