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though how much of a crime it really was- a bunch of bunglers caught trying to plant a completely unimportant bug on a phone line, some people 'conspiring' about it- is somewhat less important than the political part, which was a violation of trust in general and a breach of the inofficial rules of the political game then in particular.
FDR's undeclared war...U.S. military ships escorted British convoys and committed acts of war against German U-boats during 1941, despite there being no military alliance or German act of war against innocent or military American ships. Roosevelt claimed it was done because the materiele transported on the British ships was 'still American property'. Actually it was done because the British didn't have enough convoy escorts. A German U-boat torpedoed and sank the U.S.S. Reuben James, with a loss of over a hundred American lives, when it pursued and depth charged her in the fall of 1941. Neither government said anything about the matter- the German sub officers probably didn't know it was an American destroyer in the first place and the U.S. Navy wasn't in a hurry to explain any of it all either. Look at Lend-Lease for the extent of the 'tacit' cooperation with Britain. As for FDR's steel and oil embargo of Japan, there is some thought that it was done with the British colonies in Asia in mind as well as American interests in the Pacific, and no one quite knows where to classify the embargo in its intended degree of hostility shown Japan. The Japanese saw it as a provocation to war, FDR's people probably knew they were coming very close to war with Japan by it.
Clinton's Presidency saw three 'backlashes'. 1993/94/95 was the Gingrich Revolution- 1995 was pretty much a McCarthy Era in miniature, where the people who are sorta wild and disgusting lashed out at the more cosmopolitan. 1998/99 was the Lewinsky Scandal, which was really an argument about Betty Friedan feminism- Republicans were arguing it all to be adultery, then sexual harassment/coercion, then it was all about what a disgusting person Monica Lewinsky was (anti-Semitic stereotypes and all), then it was finally about 'why doesn't Hillary divorce him'- male chauvinism (oops, 'traditional morality') from one end to the other. The final 'backlash' was George Dubya's peaking in popularity against Al Gore in the summer of 2000, which was all about 'morality' and low taxes with an undertone of racism (i.e. black Christians and the black poor tolerating less than orthodox sexual behavior in the slums, Latino people having 'too many' children to 'take care of and educate them' in places such as Texas, Affirmative Action 'going too far')- it was a going back to the original political race arguments of the Civil Rights Era, which took place mostly during the late Fifties.
Republican moderates- no, I wouldn't hold my breath about the politicians per se. It's the 5-8% of the swing voters that lean Republican, that are persuaded to vote Republican on flimsy but not absurd grounds, that matter. The basic argument that swayed them this November was some vague idea about Republicans being better at rough-stuff foreign policy, somehow being a known quantity. Kerry's problem ultimately was that the Pentagon went about propping up all the Republican cant about Iraq being somehow, by some very low standard, a winnable situation- and he couldn't break through the amount of denial involved with this set of voters, it reestablished itself after the debates via massive propaganda. (Kerry blames the bin Laden tape of that weekend for a lot of the margin.)
Basically, disintegration of Iraq and the 'Coalition' can be used to persuade these 5-8% to let go of this, their last internal bias favoring Republicans. (We know from polling that they agree well enough with Democratic positions on domestic issues for that not to be the obstacle.)
Truth is, if you've followed the Social Security business, that Republican politicians are actually afraid of the consequences of what they're tasked to do and don't inherently believe much or any of any domestic policy positions of their party- they were cynical in years past, but at this point they're appeased personally and honestly don't consider any of the stuff pretended to now real. (What do they care about gay marriage? Nothing!) Their role is to hand off money and power to their contributors, appease their voters, and give their superiors- Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld- what they demand. There's no there there, they're the dog that caught the car now.
When that 5-8% of voters is solidly gone, gone over to Democrats because the D's have gotten their act together and R's have no irrational button to push with them, that's when the game changes. Of course the moderate Republicans in the U.S. Senate think the Bush Administration is an out-of-control disaster: every sensible person does. Of course none of this can continue, depending of course on whether some irrational reactionary resentment remains to be dug up and exploited among Christian Rightists or some other demographic. But once all the irrational bias for Republicans is used up and they have to compete with Democrats on rational footing, the Democrats own the swing voters on domestic policy. The Republican game is essentially up when the foreign policy game in the Middle East collapses- after that, Democrats just have so much Republican corruption to run against and so much post-Republican disillusionment to exploit. (Okay, Democrats also need a visible set of credible leaders, but that's not a substantial obstacle at this point.) That is all the incentive a lot of the moderate R politicos need to distance themselves from the hard core and the Bushies- their swing voters going AWOL on them, the Bushies becoming politically fatal to be linked with, selfpreservation and deflecting voter anger onto others is Rule 1.
I dunno, I see the moderate Republican Senators here in New England a fair amount, and everything they say and most of what they do suggests that they think the game played since the late Eighties is pretty much in its final stretch. Of course they don't know what to do, concretely- but they do know that their electorate is moving to views unthinkable in 1990, that they're going to have to compete on a level playing field in the near future, and that the present extreme incarnation of the Republican Party has only so much political life left in its people, electorate, and ideas. Both New Hampshire Senators did pretty remarkable left turns during 2003/4 after running as far Right as New Englanders can bear before that- they're suddenly centrists now, with one or both (I don't remember which) voting against the FMA, both talking about federal deficits being a problem and not cutting social spending drastically, all this 'religious' politicking in Washington being wrong...I never thought they had it in them, they both seemed such perfect Republican blockheads in the '00 and '02 elections. It turns out that they're actually politicians with a pretty sharp sense of their constituents, of course, and perfectly aware that their nonreligious paleoconservative base is starting to go into its demographic dieout. I think I'm seeing a bit of the like in Arlen Spector's behavior, in fact in more and more of the Republican politicians mostly in the swing states of '04. They're starting to percieve real risk to themselves and Democratic strength building
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