As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. ~George W. Bush

By “repeatedly,” Bush means once in 1939, but it is the one and only time that counts.  Had there been a few more “appeasers” (i.e., cooler heads) during the July crisis, the world might not have been plunged into the inferno for half a century and more.  Most who think about it will acknowledge that the two world wars were to some extent two parts of a long, interrupted conflict.  Interventionists constantly talk about how this conflict resumed in the 1930s, but they rarely talk about how it began, because every instinct that they champion in international relations was shown to lead to unnecessary, unprecedented slaughter in 1914.    

Does Krauthammer know that Bush is stealing his favourite appeasement anecdote?  Sen. Borah must be the most-cited representative from the state of Idaho in the history of the state.  The quoted line is a silly one, since quite a few people “talked to Hitler” and could not dissuade him.  If security guarantees from two of the most powerful states in the world could not dissuade him (because the guarantees did not seem credible), talking wouldn’t, either.  But this episode does not teach the lesson that Mr. Bush thinks it does.  It does not show that negotiating with despotic regimes is always and everywhere unwise or undesirable.  It is sometimes unwise and undesirable, and the difference between the prudent statesman and the blundering jingoist is the ability to discern which is which.  Kennedy going to Vienna was a blunder, not because having summits with the Soviet premier was inherently stupid or dangerous, but because Kennedy seemed to demonstrate in Krushchev’s eyes a certain weakness that could be exploited, which he tried to exploit with the Missile Crisis.  How one engages with hostile states matters far more than whether one engages with them.  Making a fetish out of non-engagement, Mr. Bush has typically mistaken refusing to talk with a sign of strength, and so necessarily takes any indication of engagement as proof of weakness and “appeasement,” which shows how shallow and absurd this entire ideology of resolve vs. appeasement is.   

While I find it strange that someone who ordered the illegal invasion of another country would so frequently invoke the example of the late 1930s, the lesson to learn from 1939 is that once you have made a security pact with a state that you have no real intention of keeping, and then effectively break that pact, all your other allies are sitting ducks.  No one will believe that you are going to fulfill your security guarantees in the future if you fail to do so once, so the guarantee will not deter an invasion, which means that you will feel compelled to embark on a war in which you can do nothing for the state whose security you have guaranteed, while compromising your security in the process.  The proper lessons from the late 1930s are these: don’t make security guarantees that you don’t need to make and that don’t serve your national interest, because you have to be willing to back up these guarantees when they are challenged.  The mistake that London and Paris made in these years was to act as if they were in a position to do something against Germany, and to make guarantees that many of them did not want and in any case could not keep had they wanted to do so.  Those, including Messrs. Bush, McCain and Obama, who wish to expand our military alliances to far-off places about which they know nothing are preparing the way for some future international crisis over a border dispute, whether real or staged, and certainly a President McCain will have the “no appeasement” mantra ringing in his ears as he insists that the peace of the world is worth defending a state in which the United States has no interest whatever.

That’s apparently the question that 25% of Democrats, 26% of liberals and 19% of black voters want to ask, since these are the people who think Obama should drop out of the race.  29% of Democrats think Clinton should run as an independent, which may be a good measure of how many ABO Democrats there are. 

One of the things that I often hear when I cite Obama’s weakness with Democratic voters is that there are simply so many more Democratic voters now that 75% of them will be enough in conjunction with support from independents, while McCain is retaining a higher percentage of a smaller pool of voters among Republicans.  Fair enough as far as it goes, but, if these percentages are representative, it also means that the actual numbers of voters who are alienated from Obama are consequently much higher than in previous cycles when there were fewer Democrats.  Losing a quarter of Democrats to the GOP nominee in the past was not desirable, but it is actually much more of a weakness now that a quarter of all Democrats translates into many more votes.

Nationalizing the elections, though, and associating Cazayoux and Childers with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and likely Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama can still work, he [Cole] said. ~Reid Wilson

Cole calls tying these candidates to national Democrats a “useful tool,” but how useful can it be if it doesn’t work?  Cole acknowledges that it is no substitute for an agenda, but then why on earth don’t they actually start pushing, well, an agenda?

Part of me really wants to pity Tom Cole, who took a thankless, hopeless job and will be rewarded for it by presiding over one of the worst blowouts of my lifetime.  Then I think better of it, and instead I find the grisly spectacle of an imploding GOP fairly entertaining.

The GOP just got some more bad news–Scott Kleeb will be the Democratic nominee for Nebraska Senate to compete for the open seat left by Hagel’s retirement.  Not many rookie politicians would have a chance of flipping Nebraska to the Democratic side, but I would wager that Kleeb can do it.  He ran a genuinely competitive race in a NE-03 district where Democrats have no business running respectably, and he should be able to translate that appeal to the entire state.  Even if he doesn’t win, he gives the Democrats the best chance of making the race competitive of anyone since Kerrey ruled out running.

Yglesias pokes fun at the importance of West Virginia:

What’s even more interesting is that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.

Very droll.  To put this in a slightly different light, even Michael Dukakis won West Virginia, or, to put it more starkly, even Jimmy Carter in 1980 won West Virginia.  Someone might object that Kerry came very close to winning without carrying the state, which is true, and someone could argue that Gore still won the popular vote and didn’t carry it, which is also true, but it remains the case that had Bush not carried West Virginia in 2000 he would not have become President after Bush v. Gore, because there would have been no great recount drama, the results in Florida would have been irrelevant to the final decision, and Florida could not have swung the outcome to Bush anyway.  In 2004, it mattered considerably less, because West Virginia tends to back incumbent Presidents regardless of party.  So the inability of the Democratic nominee to carry West Virginia when no incumbent President was running gave us eight years of George Bush–think on that for a moment and then tell us that it doesn’t matter whether the Democrat can win there.  

In any case, the larger point in talking about competing in West Virginia (and Kentucky) is that weakness there seems to reflect significant weakness that carries over in other states that the Democratic candidate does need to win, such as Ohio or Missouri or Pennsylvania.

Subtlety is not the strong suit of the folks in the Michigan GOP (via Ambinder).  The irony here is that Obama started wearing the Sacred Flag Pin when he was in West Virginia, so he has already “shown” everyone.  I don’t know what I find more depressing–that the GOP is so absolutely, unspeakably intellectually bankrupt that this is all it has to offer, or that this sort of tactic might very well win them the presidential election.

I find it amazing that they are hanging so much on this Hamas “endorsement” business.  If I were the leader of a foreign terrorist group, and I saw how people were responding like Pavlov’s dogs to the idea of “Hamas’ preferred candidate,” I would make sure that I endorsed the candidate I wanted to see lose and have the morons who fall for this ploy vote my real preferred candidate into power.  Of course, I think the Hamas “endorsement” is actually a by-product of the campaign to paint Obama as unfriendly to Israel.  Having heard that Obama is not as “pro-Israel” as his opponents, the Hamas leadership simplistically concludes that he must be good for them.  All of this requires studiously ignoring what Obama has actually said and done on these matters.

In a major blow to national Republicans, a Mississippi congressional seat that once voted for President Bush by a twenty-five point margin elected a Democrat on Tuesday. Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers beat out Republican candidate Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, by a 54%-46% margin, a spread that several Republican strategists on Capitol Hill characterized as a startling wake-up call for a party in dire straits. ~Reid Wilson

This seems to be a very clear indication that the NRCC’s efforts to make the House races into a national contest, invoking the dread spectre Pelosi to scare the voters into obedience, are completely useless and probably counterproductive.  The public mood is so bad and so hostile to the national GOP that drawing direct connections between their candidate and the national party, as they did constantly, seems to have done more to doom Davis’ chances than help them.  The ham-fisted attempt to link Childers to Obama (“Childers said nothing!”) gave off the scent of desperation, and rural Mississippians in the district who were already inclined to vote for one of their own against a ridiculous-looking suburban mayor weren’t buying it.  Childers did make a point of focusing his campaign on local concerns, and rejected any connection with Obama.  The party is in dire straits, and it is going to suffer many losses, but I would still insist that LA-06 and MS-01 are special cases with respect to the South.  Whether or not the ballot listed partisan affiliations, by the time of the run-off it seems likely most voters knew that Childers was a Democrat.  This suggests that the GOP can no longer expect the regular support of rural and small town voters on the basis of the party brand and the old one-trick pony of warning about godless Californian liberals coming to get you. 

House incumbents in safe districts do not typically lose their seats, and most other Southern Republicans in the House are in safe districts.  The GOP’s problem is that it is defending over two dozen open seats and has shown no ability to defend them.  We could very easily see a repeat of the 30-seat losses of 2006, and this number could go higher depending on how badly the economy is doing in the summer.  I suspect we’re going to start seeing a lot of split-ticket voting this fall.

West Virginia has gone to Clinton by 40+ points (90% reporting).  The voters of Mingo County, one of the most Democratic parts of the state in the southwest, gave Clinton her most lopsided advantage, an 80-point margin, 88-8%.  Between Clinton’s voters and die-hard Edwards supporters, almost three-quarters of the primary electorate voted for someone other than the presumptive nominee.  Clinton has gained approximately 140,000 in the popular vote tally.  The Clintonite slogan beginning tonight: “key swing states.”  The Democratic race has already ended, and yet it will never end.

Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical [sic] teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. ~David Brooks

As opposed to what such believers have been doing for at least the last two thousand years?  It seems to me that some large part of Christian intellectual history has been the story of how theologians, monks and bishops have defended “particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings.”  The first eight centuries of Christianity are filled with episode after episode of this, as are the twelve centuries after that.  Against philosophers who posited an “unmoved Mover” or some similarly abstract deity, they have defended the idea of a personal God, and against one another they have made arguments for why “specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.”  It’s called moral theology, and people have been engaged in it for centuries.  C.S. Lewis combated some of the same materialist claptrap Brooks is talking about over half a century ago, and noted the absurdity of human beings claiming to know that the beliefs of other human beings were determined by material conditions (and that they were therefore irrelevant or invalid), when the logic of their own view would necessarily mean that the materialists’ views were likewise determined and no more true than anyone else’s.  Revealed religion has survived Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Marx and Dawkins; I don’t think neuroscience is going to shake Biblical teachings or Christian (or any other kind of) orthodoxy significantly more than any of these.