Saturday Reading

Sleeping with the enemy
Yesterday I discussed James Carville's outrageous suggestion the Howard Dean be replaced as DNC chair. While I'm not in favor of purges I don't see anything wrong with purging spies and as Chris Bowers reports James Carville seems to qualify.

Now that James Carville is leading the charge to undermine the 2006 Democratic victory, I would like to take this moment to remind everyone how he undermined John Kerry's potential challenge to the result in Ohio in 2004:

[......]

Considering that his wife is being floated for RNC Chair, a decision which I am sure Carville supports, maybe everything the Democratic Party is doing will be immediately leaked to the RNC. And hey, since Carville thinks DNC chair is all about getting large donors to him from rich DLC-types, which Carville admired so much about Ken Mehlman, maybe he would even approve of Ken Mehlman becoming DNC chair. I hear he is available.

Goodbye James!!!

Won't make that mistake
Former Republican Congressman Bob Barr says House Democrats won't repeat GOP mistakes. After listing the many mistakes the Republicans have made since 1994 Barr says this:

Unfortunately for the Republicans, the Democrats are unlikely to repeat any of these mistakes made by the Republicans a dozen years ago. I suspect the Democrats know, for example, this election was more a vote against Bush than for the Democratic platform.

Perhaps most important, every senior Democrat in line for a House leadership post or a committee chairmanship has served in the majority; they have wielded power before, and they know how to use it (something many Republicans in the House have failed to grasp even to this day).

The Democrats will do everything in their power to avoid a return to second-class citizenship. They will be more likely than were the Republicans a dozen years ago to take modest steps, and to be careful lest rhetoric overtake feasible action. The goal for Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her battle-hardened team will be to spend two years laying the groundwork for further gains in 2008, and to push an agenda that will provide a solid and likely centrist platform for their party's standard-bearer.

Read it and weep Rethuglicans. Nancy Pelosi may be one of those dreaded "liberals" but Barr gets it right; she is also a shrewd and practical politician unlike the cultists who have been in charge of the Republican Party.