What can be said about Mr. Paul is that he’s not only ahead of Mr. Bernanke but also of his fellow Republicans, and he will eat into their standing until they address the question of the soundness of our currency. ~The New York Sun

That’s pretty high praise for someone who has such allegedly “kooky” ideas on economic policy.  It’s good to see Ron Paul finally getting a little more respect.

Still, if I had to choose between Ron Paul and, say, Rudy Giuliani for president, would I vote for Paul? You bet. There are worse things than being a crank. ~Kevin Drum

For it was not merely predictable that Georgia would somehow go wrong, it was a certainty: Just about all revolutions, even peaceful ones, somehow go wrong. In the decade following 1989, for example, communists were elected to power in pretty much every Central European country. ~Anne Applebaum

Ms. Applebaum notes that it is a “disgrace” that the President has said nothing about Georgia all week.  Well, until she published her column, the Post hadn’t said anything either, and even then it wasn’t much.  Most Western papers have kept shtum on the colossal embarrassment that is their social engineering project gone haywire.  Consider the quote above.  Yes, it’s true that communists, or “ex-communists” and “reformed” communists as they have been called by journalists, took power in many eastern and central European countries after the initial enthusiasm for full-on democratic capitalism, but in most former Warsaw Pact and ex-Soviet countries they didn’t send policemen on baton charges against civilian protesters. 

This sort of excuse-making for Saakashvili is particularly embarrassing, since it reduces what he has done to some inevitable outcome of the revolutionary process, which ignores the fact that many other former communist states have adjusted without anything like Saakashvili’s heavy-handed rule.  Saakashvili’s failure was not determined by geography or geopolitics, but by the nature of his “revolution” from the beginning. 

P.S.  There was no “counter-revolution,” because the “revolution” was a scam all along.  A “revolution” doesn’t become a “counter-revolution” just because it turns ugly.  The ugly government of Saakashvili was there from the start.

Glenn Greenwald has another excellent post on Ron Paul:

And — as the above-cited efforts to compel Congress to actually adhere to the Constitution demonstrate — few people have been as vigorous in defense of Constitutional principles as those principles have been mangled and trampled upon by this administration while most of our establishment stood by meekly. That’s just true.

Paul’s efforts in that regard may be “odd” in the sense that virtually nobody else seemed to care all that much about systematic unconstitutional actions, but that hardly makes him a “weirdo.” Sometimes — as the debate over the Iraq War should have demonstrated once and for all — the actual “fruitcake” positions are the ones that are held by the people who are welcome in our most respectable institutions and magazines, both conservative and liberal [bold mine-DL].

* * * * * *

This whole concept of singling out and labelling as “weirdos” and “fruitcakes” political figures because they espouse views that are held only by a small number of people is nothing more than an attempt to discredit someone without having to do the work to engage their arguments. It’s actually a tactic right out of the seventh grade cafeteria. It’s just a slothful mechanism for enforcing norms.

Alex Massie answers another tactic employed by some liberal critics of Rep. Paul here.

Dave Weigel has a great report on the Philadelphia Ron Paul rally from this weekend.  Here was one section that caught my attention:

After that: Beatlemania. Paul only needed to walk about 10 yards to get from his set-up to his van, but a crush of supporters swarmed off, holding out replicas at the Constitution (available at a gift shop next door) for him to sign, asking him whatever quick questions they could muster (“Doctor Paul, what’s your stance on, uh, intellectual property rights?”) and begging his handlers for hugs. A redheaded undergrad gently asked park police to let her into Paul’s circle: “I really just want to shake his hand, I’ve been waiting for so long to meet him!” When she got to the congressman she wailed, hugged, basked for a photo, hurtled away screaming “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”

It’s still a little hard to believe that these things are actually happening.  I have known about Ron Paul since I was a kid, my mother voted for him in 1988 and every December we receive one of the Christmas cards that he sends to his supporters around the country.  Even though he wasn’t our Congressman, he spoke for us and what we believed when our own representatives did not.  When the campaign started earlier this year I was pleased, but I never expected to see the day when he would draw this kind of exuberant, positive reaction from thousands and tens of thousands of people.  Whatever happens in January and afterwards, it has already been an amazing campaign.

The next online fundraising drive for Ron Paul is set for December 16 to commemorate the Boston Tea Party.

NRO blogger Tim Graham has a stunning piece of news: FoxNews isn’t the jingoistic party-line conduit for pro-administration spin that you think it is, because Judge Napolitano gave a positive blurb to a non-interventionist book.  (The book actually looks pretty good.) 

Yes, that sure throws me for a loop.  After all, what are years of shameless warmongering and administration loyalism compared with a book blurb?  The premise of Graham’s “observation” is silly.  Judge Napolitano, author of The Constitution in Exile(not exactly Cheney’s bedtime reading), is probably one of the last people still associated with FNC who speaks publicly about civil liberties in defense of them (rather than seeing them as obstacles on the path to Victory), so he is not exactly representative of the network’s news and commentary.  FoxNews also still employs Alan Colmes, which must similarly prove that there is no pro-war, pro-administration bias at the network generally. 

P.S. By Graham’s standard of political analysis-by-book-blurb, Sean Hannity’s blurb for Napolitano’s book would represent some actual sympathy with the argument that the federal government has overreached in the PATRIOT Act and detaining citizens without charge, when we all know that this is absurd.  Hannity’s blurb, meanwhile, is just two blurbs away from Alan Colmes’ blurb.  A product of media consolidation or an elaborate ideological web that unites both Hannity and Colmes?  You decide.

Turkey’s strategic interests are much more dependent on good relations with the United States than vice versa. If we tolerate Turkey’s blackmail, we actually weaken our position in the strategic relationship and embolden others in the region to blackmail us. ~Roxanne Makasdjian

This is pretty much my view of the matter as well.

Like many failed regimes dependent on foreign aid and playing one power off against another, Georgian politicians learned to pre-echo what Uncle Sam and the Eurocrats think. Some of it they meant. Our knee-jerk Cold War suspicion of the Kremlin made their Russophobia seem natural. But playing up nationalism even when it has a real emotional basis is not the way to stabilize a society, not [sic] to stabilize its regional relations. 

Anti-Armenian and anti-Azeri rhetoric worried the near neighbors. Saakashvili demolished both the neo-classical building that had housed the Imperial Russian gendarmerie and a district of Armenian houses to make way for his new palace.

Georgians noted the contrast with his claims in 2003 that he only needed a “three room apartment,” but the neighboring nations heard his apologists say that the new government’s massive re-ordering of old Tbilisi only “affect Armenians, Azeris, Kurds and foreigners.”

Whereas the authoritarian Aliev clan running neighboring Azerbaijan has enough oil revenue to fund a stable state system and many Azeris have jobs, Georgia’s much-praised reforms have boosted unemployment and mass migration. The only surviving industry from Soviet days seems to be massaging the statistics.

The oil pipeline across Georgia to Turkey from the Azeri oil fields in the Caspian has been a nice cash cow for the Georgian government and its appointees, but it hasn’t provided any boost to the rest of the economy. In fact, now that the Baku-Ceyhan project is finished, lay-offs – not new jobs – are the result. Part of the political infighting in Tbilisi is to control the transit fees. ~Mark Almond

Almond’s basic message is that we should stop meddling in Georgia’s affairs.  I couldn’t agree more.

The remaining thirteen seats are Republican opportunities ‘that will not fall easily.’ Add in the non-Freshman Democrats that the GOP may target (which now appears to include just a handful of seats), and the potential is there again to flip control of the House. That’s provided that Republicans hold most or all of the vulnerable open seats they have.

It would be foolish to predict a great Republican year based on the political climate today, but Rothenberg provides a helpful reality check for those inclined to the opposite extreme. If the cards fall the right way, it’s entirely possible a Republican will be sworn in as Speaker in January, 2009. ~Brian Faughnan

So if a dozen improbable things happen, something even more improbable might very well happen.   

There are some districts, particularly TX-22 (DeLay’s district) and FL-16 (Foley’s district), that will be difficult for Democrats to hold, assuming that Republicans turn out for their candidates.  That’s one area where the GOP is going to run into a lot of problems.  Democratic turnout in a presidential year is typically higher than it is at midterm and off-year elections anyway, and we are already seeing gaps opening up in party ID, fundraising and candidate recruitment.  If Republican voters are as demoralised as they seem to be, turnout may also be unusually low for Republicans, which could combine with an energised Democratic base to create more gains for the Dems on top of holding what they already have.  (For instance, NM-01 is a realistic pick-up for the Dems.)  Depending on the GOP ticket, the base’s morale may get worse rather than better.  A major third party challenge from the right could actually help the GOP in Congressional races by bringing conservatives to the polls who might otherwise have stayed home, but such a challenge is unlikely to materialise. 

Some Democrats have the fear, and I think it is probably an over-hyped fear, that a Clinton nomination would imperil closely-split districts and jeopardise the majority in the House.  There is a bizarre idea out there that a winning presidential candidate can have a kind of reverse coattail effect in every “purple” and “red” state.  This assumes that there will be a lot of split-ballot voters in “purple” states who elect Clinton but vote out the Democrats in the House, while there are few or no split-ballot voters in the “red” states who vote for the GOP candidate and select Democrats for Congress.  This is probably not how it will happen. 

The logic of this seems to be: Democratic presidential victory is very likely, in part because of the deep dissatisfaction with the GOP in many formerly red, now purple, states, but a particular Democratic nominee will actually help the GOP in these same states where they are becoming less popular (e.g., Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.).  I suppose if enough people believed Clinton to be the left-wing gorgon conservatives see when they look at her, that might inspire them to vote for divided government and switch control of House again.  However, I know of no instance when a party won the presidential election and lost control of the House on Election Day.  In fact, I don’t know of any instance when a party won the White House and even suffered a net loss of seats in the House.  (Actually, as shown in the comments, there were six seven elections in the twentieth century where the presidential winner’s party lost seats, so I was wrong in assuming that it hadn’t happened.)   The “coattails” phenomenon may have become much weaker in recent cycles, but it seems implausible that the GOP can gain much ground in the House next year unless it wins or at least runs extremely competitively in the presidential election.  All signs indicate that this will not happen, which makes predictions of a GOP comeback in the House even more far-fetched. 

Update: So my claims about there being no cases of the winner’s party losing seats were quite wrong.  What about the exceptional cases?  Does 2008 seem likely to be another exception?  1908 and 1988 appear to be examples of voter fatigue with the ruling party that had been in the White House for eight years or more, while 1960 and 2000 stand out for being fairly close presidential elections and in one case the declared winner received less of the popular vote.  1992 was complicated by Perot’s run, but the combination of Bush and many Perot voters would help explain the GOP gains in that year.  What the Republicans have to hope happens is that next year will be like 1960, in which they may narrowly lose the White House but come storming back in the House after a midterm debacle.  However, this scenario seems unlikely because of the nature of next year’s election.  Wartime or  post-war elections (1920, 1952 and 1968 are the examples I have in mind) coming at the end of multiple terms of the same party in power tend to result in big gains for the other party in the House, even if the other party has already made gains in the previous midterm elections (as happened in 1918, 1950 and 1966).  So I was badly wrong about that initial claim, but I think the argument I am advancing here still makes sense.