The War Party

If this were ten years ago, when America was safely suckling on the Internet bubble and restricting its overseas dabbling to military exhibition games like Kosovo, this back-to-the-good-old-days bullshit would be mere vileness. But thanks to the GOP's excellent leader, Mr. Bush, America is no longer in any position to hide from reality. We are now fully and catastrophically engaged in reality. And reality is kicking our ass, in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else in this world that hates us more and more with each and every passing day. The party's response is to blow that off, pretend it's not happening. Six years after 9/11, Bush's would-be replacements are still reading My Pet Goat. Their solution to the Iraq dilemma is to keep talking tough, as if our kids were not getting arms shot off from Basra to Tal Afar, as if bin Laden weren't still scoring record recruiting numbers in between bong hits on Al Jazeera.

Tancredo's idea for repairing America's relations with the Islamic Middle East is to threaten to nuke the innocent holy cities of Mecca and Medina. "That's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do," he said recently. At the tail end of his Newark appearance, as a means of trying to get him to say something, anything, about the Middle East, I ask Tancredo about that comment.

"That's for a different press conference," he grumbles, and slithers away.

***

Polls may be the devil's currency, near the top of the list of campaign evils, but in this case they tell the whole story. A recent CBS News poll indicates that thirty-one percent of Americans want to begin pulling at least some troops out of Iraq right away. Another thirty percent want to completely withdraw from Iraq, right now. That's nearly two-thirds of the country that wants to start bringing troops home.

Among young people, the numbers are even more striking. According to another poll, voters ages eighteen to twenty-nine now trust the Democrats more than the Republicans on every single issue surveyed, including the War on Terror. A mind-boggling sixty-six percent of young people are against giving the president's Iraq War plan a chance. Even among young Republicans, nearly four in ten favor an immediate withdrawal.

Anyone with an IQ above ten can see what these polls mean; what they should tell the Republican Party is that it simply cannot win a general election unless it changes its tune on Iraq. Instead, after two decades of Reagan-esque macho campaigning, decades in which Republican electoral success so spooked both the national media and the Democratic Party that it became axiomatic that only the toughest-talking and most warmongering politicians had even the slightest chance at the presidency, the Republicans find themselves cornered by their own conventional wisdom. Indeed, they are experiencing a sort of mirror image of the electoral/ideological malaise that has stricken their opponents in recent years. Democratic candidates have generally refused to sell out on social issues like abortion and minority rights but have quickly surrendered on military spending, worker rights and deregulation in a desperate attempt to win swing voters and corporate contributions. Now, with doomed figures like Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain headlining this season's primary choices, the Republican Party offers the opposite: candidates willing to betray traditional party orthodoxies on abortion and gay rights but unwilling to budge on the toughness thing. After so many years of watching Democrats crucify themselves on the altar of missile envy -- saddling national tickets with pint-size fist-shakers like Joe Lieberman and turning the Kerry convention into a fatigue-clad orgy of Band of Brothers-style grunt-humping -- witnessing this sad procession of stay-the-course Republicans engaged in the political version of the Bataan Death March is a delicious comedy.

To wit: I checked in with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney outside Orlando, where he gave a speech to local Republicans before opening up the floor for his goofy-ass "Ask Mitt Anything" town-hall routine. Romney is an utter tool; he represents nothing so much as the very banality of our system of campaigning, a poll-chasing stuffed suit with a Max Headroom hairdo who will say (or won't say, for that matter) whatever the fuck it takes to get elected. The winner of the less-than-meaningless Iowa straw poll, he might end up the front-runner solely by virtue of the fact that he lacks the obvious hideous deformities of most of the rest of the field, in particular the human car wreck John McCain and the electoral incarnation of Tommy Lee Jones' acid-bath-surviving Two-Face character, Rudy Giuliani.