How to Make a War Disappear

Iraq is fading from the minds of the American public, and politicians, pollsters and pundits are trying to figure out how it happened.

Although 2007 casualties have been the highest in five years of war, a combination of Congressional Democrats' ineffectual efforts to stop or slow it down along with Republican unwillingness to buck Bush in numbers large enough to override vetoes has created an Iraq fatigue in both the media and public.

Now, Politico reports, "Democrats plan to spend the December recess reviewing their strategy and determining if they missed opportunities to put limitations, even if they were smaller than war activists were demanding, on Bush’s war policies.

"Some Democratic strategists are warning that congressional leaders are 'muddling through' with a strategy that carries both political and military risks for the party."

"News about the Iraq war," the Pew Research Center reports, "does not dominate the public's consciousness nearly as much as it did last winter" and cites figures to support that contention.

There is enough blame for this to go around--divided Democrats, absence of Republican spine, Petraeus' flacking for the Surge, too little MSM courage coupled with too much posturing and puffing on the blogosphere--all adding up to impotence in resisting a pathologically stubborn Administration.

Now facing a new year, with the Presidential contest upstaging all else, where do the vast majority of Americans who want to end the most disastrous war in our history go from here?

Republicans, under the cover of electorate ennui, will try to ride it out behind their White House candidates' bluster. Democrats will keep promising to get us out but not just yet.

Like it or not, those who hate this war are faced with no better hope than the kind of incremental easing out that seemed unthinkable a year ago.

We can only hope they don't botch that, too.

Democrats Eating Their Old

The party that prides itself on being a big tent for diversity is showing signs of cannibalism since it took over Congress a year ago and, in a reversal of eating its young, is threatening to devour some of its long-standing stalwarts.

After all the furor about anti-war legislators not being anti-war enough, now we have Rep. Barney Frank, of all people, defending himself from charges of not being pro-gay enough by backing a bill to protect homosexual men and women in the workplace that might leave transsexuals vulnerable.

“There is a tendency in American politics,” he said yesterday, “for the people who feel most passionately about... a single issue to be unrealistic in what a democratic political system can deliver, and that can be self-defeating.”

In an era when George Bush is still blocking almost everything with his veto power and remnants of a monolithic Republican minority, Democratic activists only play into his hands by forgetting that politics is the art of the possible and that the perfect can be the worst enemy of the good enough.

Push for perfection by all means, but don’t trample those who are out front navigating the minefields.

Incremental improvement in energy standards and cutbacks of farm subsidies are not very exciting for generations that want it all now. But politics has never been the best place for instant gratification, except for those who exercise their mouths rather than real power.

From half a century of observation and activism emerges the lesson that inertia, while it slows progress, can also be the best protection against violent, destructive change.

Those who find that old fogeyism can eat me, too.