Republicans take a wide stance

Now that Sen. Craig has flushed his political career down the toilet at the Minneapolis airport, the Republican Party is looking increasingly likely to follow suit next year. It's remarkable, considering that only five years ago conservative pundits were thumping their chests and discussing the prospects for a permanent Republican majority with a straight face.

Being an outspoken opponent of the Iraq occupation, I didn't know whether to laugh or laugh really hard when George Bush announced that Iraq was Vietnam after all, after literally years of his supporters in the media swearing up, down, left, right, backwards, forwards and sideways that there was absolutely no truth to the analogy. I suppose it's like tigers and man-flesh, once you get accustomed to stabbing your supporters in the back, you start to develop a taste for it. Of course, if I had supporters as blithely and stubbornly stupid as George Bush does, I'd probably be tempted to kick them around contemptuously too.

TRENDING: Poll: Stunning number say Biden suffers 'cognitive ailment'

The president is an interesting political figure in that he clearly has no regard whatsoever for the health of his party. Republicans would be much better off if George Bush had spent his entire two terms doing nothing but molesting interns and issuing meaningless threats while lobbing the occasional cruise missile or two; as incredible as it sounds, Bill Clinton was not only a less destructive president for the nation but was less damaging to his party's future prospects.

However, no amount of sordid bathroom scandals and suicide bombers may hammer Republican prospects deeper into the core of the earth than the increasing whispers of a large-scale attack on Iran. A normal president, gauging the public distaste for his previous actions, would refrain from any such offensive action unless there was literally no other alternative, but this one shows no signs of understanding that public support is a basic necessity for any military effort likely to last more than a few weeks.

The president and his advisers are relatively old men. Baby Boomers, that most gullible of generations, do not understand the deep cynicism of the generations that have followed them. No Pearl Harbor is going to galvanize them into blindly supporting U.S. action, because a statistically significant minority of them already believe 9/11 was at best an accidental own goal, at worst an intentional false flag event in the long and ignoble tradition of the Maine. A Rasmussen Reports poll showed that 22 percent of Americans believe that Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened, so at this point, a so-called Iranian attack on U.S. interests is more likely to be interpreted as evidence that the conniving Busheviks are habitual Reichstag-burners than as a genuine casus belli by most observant Americans.

One hopes that the administration has more sense than to spend the last remaining pennies of its political capital this way. Defending Israel from aggression is not an ignoble goal in itself, but then, what is the point of providing billions of dollars worth of arms to Israel if the Israeli Defense Forces are still not capable of defending themselves? Considering that the Israelis have demonstrated copious military competence in defeating pan-Arabic alliances in the past, it seems obvious that the IDF will have little trouble defending Israel against any prospective Iranian misadventures.

If the rumors are true and the president is contemplating a wider stance in the Middle East, Republican politicians would do well to seriously think about whether supporting this crippled duck of an administration in such an action can be defended in any way. Supporting an attack on Iran would not be good for the nation, for the Republican Party or for their future careers.

Hillary Clinton's historic landslide is already in the making. The winds are blowing powerfully against the Republican Party, that must defend not only a terrible record of negative achievement and an increasingly unpopular military occupation, but 22 Senate seats as well, two of them open. Compounding these challenges with an ill-founded and unprovoked attack on Iran would bear the very real possibility of marking the beginning of the end of the Republican Party.

Special offers:

"Conservatives Betrayed"