You just have to wonder how much more fouled up the Bush administration’s Iraq policies can possibly get. The Prez was supposed to meet with Iraqi prime minister Maliki and King Abdullah in Jordan today, on the wings of a leaked National Security Council memo basically saying Maliki doesn’t know his butt from page eight. Then came the news that five Iraqi Cabinet members and 30 parliamentarians aligned with Moqtada al-Sadr–whose support is necessary to Maliki’s continuation in office–were “suspending” participation in the government indefinitely, to protest the summit. And now we learn today’s Bush-Maliki-Abdullah meeting was canceled, as a “social event” that wasn’t important (Bush and Maliki will still meet tomorrow). Add in the massive anti-Bush demonstrations on tap for Amman, and you’ve got a public relations disaster of serious magnitude, instead of the confidence-building event the whole show was supposed to represent.A long, long time ago, a Georgia colleague of mine, at the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, said: “Well, Jimmy’s just become the first president to show he could screw up a one-car funeral.” That probably wasn’t fair to Carter, but it’s increasingly becoming an apt characterization of George W. Bush when it comes to Iraq. I don’t know if the Baker-Hamilton commission will indeed give Bush a way to back out of virtually everything he’s said and done since the invasion of Iraq, but something’s got to give, and very soon.

Today Salon is featuring a piece I wrote (at their invitation) responding to Tom Schaller’s post-election restatement of his hypothesis that Democrats should not only write off the South, but even campaign against the region in order to solidify a non-Southern majority. I’m not arguing for any particular focus on the South, but do think it’s a mistake to write off whole regions, and a potentially disastrous mistake to attack a Southern culture that pervades so much of our latter-day national culture. Check it out.

Since this blog first went up in August of 2004, it has been sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council, where I have been Vice President for Policy and/or Policy Director for a good while.I’ve now gone part-time with the DLC and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute and am no longer acting as a spokesman for the DLC. And in an act of real generosity, the DLC is letting me take NewDonkey.com completely independent.I want to emphasize that my new status does not represent some sort of rift with the DLC. After nearly twelve years there, it was just time to do some other stuff as well, while enabling myself to work at home for the most part. Moreover, regular readers of NewDonkey probably won’t notice much of a change in content. Nobody at the DLC tried to censor NewDonkey, though I did occasionally censor myself (e.g., on Iraq) so as to avoid “disarray at the DLC” blog entries among the organization’s many detractors. Now that I’m no longer officially or unofficially speaking for anyone but myself, I’ll say exactly what I think. And that may well continue to include occasional ripostes to those who have lurid and completely inaccurate views of what the DLC is all about.This change in NewDonkey, I guess I should add, has absolutely nothing to do with the recent decision by my former colleague The Bull Moose, to shut down his own, DLC-sponsored blog. He decided to do that because he’s going to be a full-time spokesman for Joe Lieberman. I don’t have that handicap at present, but will shut down NewDonkey if any conflicts of interest develop in my non-DLC work (I am, for example, doing some contractual speechwriting work for a potential Democratic ’08er, and will strictly avoid blogging about the Democratic presidential nominating contest so long as that arrangement exists). In any event, I hope old readers stick with the New NewDonkey. I’ll try to keep it interesting.

I won’t do any more posts about college football for a while, but I do have to report I was able to attend the Georgia-Georgia Tech game in Athens yesterday. As you may have heard, Georgia won a thriller, 15-12, over the nationally ranked Jackets (out of respect, I won’t call them Dirt Daubers today), their sixth straight win in the intrastate series. Tech goes on to play in the ACC championship game against (surprise) Wake Forest, while Georgia has salvaged a disappointing season with back-to-back wins over Auburn and Tech, and will probably go to the best of the non-BCS bowls, the Chick-Fil-A (formerly the Peach Bowl).Georgia true Freshman Matthew Stafford showed why he will probably, if he stays healthy, be an all-American QB before he leaves Athens. But perhaps the two biggest stars were on defense: the routinely brilliant LB Tony Taylor, who alertly plucked a Reggie Ball fumble from a pile-up and ran it in for Georgia’s first TD, and defensive back Paul Oliver, who held superstar Tech receiver Calvin Johnson to two receptions for 13 yards, and made an interception to ice the game.It was truly a fun late afternoon and evening in the Classic City, and left me looking forward to next season like a child counting the days until Xmas.NOTE: In my next post, I’ll explain some significant changes in this blog and my own professional life. It’s not as dramatic as The Moose’s sudden blog shutdown and his departure for Liebermanland, and certainly won’t get any attention beyond regular readers, so I’ll make it snappy and return to previously scheduled blogging.

Boy, talk about a strange but appropriate development: it’s increasingly clear that voting machine errors probably robbed Democratic candidate Christine Jennings of a victory in Katherine Harris’ old Florida House seat. You can read about it in the link, but the basic facts are that the electoral results showed a very large (18,000 vote) “undercount” (i.e., disparity in total votes cast) of House votes in a single county. Moreover, the ballots where voters seem to have skipped the House race in unaccountable numbers were those where every statewide Democratic candidate won by a margin that exceeded the district-wide margin for Jennings’ opponent, Vern Buchanan.This didn’t keep the Florida Secretary of State’s office from certifying the Buchanan win, replicating Harris’ famous quick certification in the 2000 presidential elections. There are a number of ways this result can be overturned: a state audit of voting machine performance; two separate lawsuits, and a direct challenge to the U.S. House. But the problem is that absent any way to exactly recover the uncounted ballots, the only remedy is a new election, which would likely produce a much smaller turnout than occurred on November 7. There’s no evidence of fraud at this point, but this electoral miscarriage of justice reinforces the already powerful case for requiring some sort of paper trail for electronic votes. I guess the good news is that Katherine Harris herself lost by so huge a margin in her fiasco of a Senate race that no manner of errors or quick certifications could have possibly saved her.

Well, it’s now out in the open, after an announcement by Joe Liebeman’s office: my colleague The Moose, a.k.a. Marshall Wittmann, is shutting down his blog and leaving the DLC to become Communications Director for the Independent-Democrat from CT.I was travelling last week when The Moose suddenly did a post saying he was going into “hibernation.” I guessed pretty quickly where he was headed next, but couldn’t say anything until Lieberman made it public.It’s obviously the perfect gig for Marshall, and he’s the perfect spokesman for Lieberman. When he first came to the DLC in 2004, he had just changed his registration from R to Independent, endorsed John Kerry for president, and burned a lot of bridges to the Right–bridges he had already undermined in his work for John McCain in 2000. And although he wrote some of the most withering critiques of Bush, Rove, DeLay, the K Street Strategy, and the whole culture of the GOP appearing in the English language, he could not bring himself to join Our Team in the polarized politics of 2005-06, and was increasingly uncomfortable working in an unambiguous Democratic environment, even at the very tolerant DLC.The Moose became a passionate advocate for Lieberman’s primary and general-election campaigns in no small part because he sincerely believes both parties are in danger of abandoning the political center, and quite frankly because he is happiest free of either party’s yoke. This is obviously where Joe Lieberman is today. After voting for Harry Reid as Majority Leader, Joe will likely view himself as a completely free agent, much like The Moose.For regular readers of this blog, it’s been no secret that I disagree with Marshall on many issues, including Iraq, how Democrats should deal with polarization, the nature and significance of the progressive blogosphere, and the general political landscape.. I cannot count the number of times we’ve disagreed in internal DLC discussions, or around the office water cooler.But as I indicated a while back in a post defending The Moose against his blogospheric detractors, he has been a boon companion and good friend through thick and thin, not to mention one of the smartest and funniest people I’ve ever met, which counts a lot with me. And I still think his exceptionally well-informed attacks on the whole rotten culture of the latter-day GOP contributed far more to the Democratic Cause than he took away in his occasional ripostes against what he called the “nutroots,” especially among the media types who came to him so often to diagnose the conservative meltdown. It’s about as much as any Democrat could expect from a guy who, after all, was a self-proclaimed independent.I sincerely wish The Moose well in his new gig, and hope that his transition from a Democratic organization to an Independent-Democratic Senator will not slake his thirst for attacking the continuing ideological extremism of a GOP that’s half-convinced it lost on November 7 by being insufficiently right-wing.So let me say Hasta La Vista to the Moose. I don’t know if we will meet down the road as allies or friendly adversaries–hell, we both may be in assisted living before long–but I do know the blogosphere will suffer from the absence of his antlered presence.

One of the most frequent and controversial lines of argument about the Iraq mess has been the idea that it represents a repetition of the U.S. experience in Vietnam. The parallels are obvious: an overwhelmingly powerful U.S. military gets itself bogged down in a theater related to, but ultimately distinct from, a broader war. An administration (or two) unwilling to admit mistakes or tell the truth gets ensnared in its own lies and spin, which then become the justification for continuing the mistakes in the name of preserving U.S. credibility. And the American people, who are divided on what they think should actually be done, eventually reject the status quo and demand a new course of action.Lots of younger political analysts and bloggers view the whole Vietnam analogy as just another example of Baby Boomer narcissism. Far as I’m concerned, if you could make the case that the U.S. effort in Iraq reflected mistakes made by FDR and Truman in WW2, Wilson in WW1, or for that matter, Napoleon in Russia or Cromwell in Ireland, I’d be interested to hear about it.Now that Iraq is semi-officially an ongoing disaster, it’s actually Republicans, including George W. Bush, who seem to be into the Vietnam analogy, but not in a way that indicates any understanding of the lessons of Vietnam. Here’s Josh Marshall’s take on the subject, based on Bush’s quick trip to Vietnam:

Isn’t this trip a really odd venue for the president to be arguing that staying the course basically forever is the only acceptable solution? Though it took a tragically long time, the US, for all the moonwalking, eventually decided to pull up stakes in Vietnam. And what was the result? One might make arguments that the Soviets and Soviet proxies were temporarily emboldened in Africa or Latin America, though I think that’s debatable. But what of the real effects? The Soviet Union was dismantling itself within little more than a decade of our pull-out. And now we have a Vietnam that is politically repressive at home but proto-capitalist in its economy and, by any measure, incredibly eager for good relations with the United States.If geo-political standing and international repercussions are really the issue we’re discussing, it seems very hard to argue that our decision to pull out of Vietnam had any lasting or meaningful ill-effects. And there’s at least a decent argument to the contrary.And yet here we have President Bush, stepping on to Vietnamese soil to further our rapprochement with Vietnam, and arguing, in so many words, that the lesson of Vietnam is that we should still be there blowing the place up thirty years later.We’re really deep into the primitive brainstem phase of our long national nightmare of presidential denial and mendacity on Iraq.

Yeah, it’s odd, though not that suprising to anyone who followed this year’s House debate on the Murtha proposal for Iraq, in which most of the Republican debaters explicitly and reduntantly suggested that we could have won the War in Vietnam if we had really tried. For every Democrat who attacks Bush on Iraq without a clear plan for what to do next, there is at least one, or probably two, GOPers who think America has not sufficiently thrown its military weight around in Iraq or elsewhere. These are the ideological heirs of those who argued that we could have prevailed in Vietnam if we had basically killed everything in sight, and escalated the military presence to the gates of hell, and victory. As Josh noted, sometimes even the most hawkish observers have to be able to figure out that Iraq has been and continues to be a huge propaganda defeat for the United States. There are probably no real victories available at this point, but you’d like to think American policymakers can figure out how to pivot from Iraq to the broader war on jihadist terror. It’s out there, all the time.

There’s a fun article in today’s Washington Post by DeNeen Brown that captures a bit of the slow-motion riot associated with a change of partisan control of Congress. Sure, the important thing is that Democrats will control the flow of legislation in the House and Senate, and the agenda of committees. But underneath the surface is the human drama of Very Important Members becoming nonentities, and all sorts of havoc at the staff level. For one thing, the majority party controls a significant number of committee and subcommittee staff positions. The turnover of congressional staff jobs doesn’t create the kind of employment tempest associated with a change in the Executive Branch, but it still produces a ripple effect throughout the political world; suddenly unemployed high-level Republican staffers will displace all sorts of people in think tanks, law firms, lobbying shops, and so forth. Conversely, it’s a good time for Democrats to move in or move up in Washington. Moreover, the majority party gets the really good offices on Capitol Hill. Given the rabbit warrens most congressional staff occupy, a few extra square feet make a big difference. All these small, subtle but significant changes on the Hill won’t be fully implemented until the next Congress is sworn in next January. But the political culture of Washington is already adapting to the New Regime. Since 1994, Capitol Hill has been a strange right-wing cigar-and-martini-bar enclave in a very Democratic city. To paraphrase David Bowie, that’s about to ch-ch-change.

So, House Democrats voted today, and elected Steny Hoyer Majority Leader over John Murtha by a big 149-86 margin. I´m happy with that result, and not terribly surprised, given the dues Hoyer has paid, the broad support he had across the usual factional lines, and various issues raised by Murtha´s non-Iraq voting record over the years.Nor am I surprised that the Washington Post reported the vote as a big setback for Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi. I still don´t understand Pelosi´s reasoning in publicly endorsing Murtha, attributing the entire election victory to Murtha, as she did, was weird, as was her suggestion that his election as Leader would magically end the war in Iraq.Whatever the impact of this result on the internal dynamics of the caucus, I don´t think this should be interpreted as some sort of ideological Gotterdamerung among Democrats. Sure, a lot of progressive blogospheric types basically endorsed Murtha or said negative things about Hoyer. But they sure didn´t go to the mats on this (beyond the predictably shrill David Sirota), and have quickly moved on to other topics. I don´t know if this was just a matter of counting votes more accurately than Pelosi, or a sign that many threatened post-election intraparty fights just ain´t happening.

Sorry for the hiaitus, but I´ve been on the road and offline. I was not terribly surprised, however, to learn how quickly George W. Bush got tired of the bipartisanship rap he dusted off and rehearsed several times last week. In case you missed it, Bush´s first official action after the November 7 debacle is apparently going to be to send up a big batch o´previously rejected conservative judicial nominees. Here´s how the Wall Street Journal summarized it:

After calling for bipartisanship, President Bush surprised Senate Democrats with plans to renominate a controversial list of judges – some of whom may be unacceptable even to a few Republican senators. “It’s an unfortunate signal,” said one senior Democratic Senate aide.The Senate Judiciary Committee has not received the nominations yet. As word spread about the nominations, however, the committee’s Republican Chairman Arlen Specter told reporters: “It is obvious they cannot move during the lame-duck session.” After January, he added, questions about the fate of the nominees should be “directed to someone else.”The White House action is viewed largely as an effort to appease the party’s conservative base. An administration official says there will be a formal White House announcement on the renominations later today. The president is in Moscow, having left Washington last night.

Appease the party´s conservative base? Lord a´mighty, Bush is right where he was in the runup to the elections. This has to be the longest political learning curve in history.