The many candidates for nomination for President represent a breakdown in what had been an American consensus about what problems America faces and what the best solutions were for those problems. Each of the Parties and each candidate represent definitions of what the problems are, and each candidate is offering himself, with his or her view of what those problems are and his or her solutions, to the public in an effort to convince enough voters that they should be given the power of government to try to solve those problems.

This started out as an effort to answer dday's question at  Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let's look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.

Listening to Gen. David Petreaus testify before Congress is fascinating. The man is an excellent soldier, by all accounts a leader who is far above average, extremely bright and well-educated, and is clearly well-prepared and smooth in his presentation. He is probably the best single General we could have commanding in Iraq.

He is also very clearly a Republican. No surprise, that. Since Vietnam the officer corps of the Army has felt culturally more closely akin to the Republican Party. Then when Donald Rumsfeld took office as Secretary of Defense in 2001 he personally approved every promotion to flag rank in the military, assuring that only dedicated Republicans got the jobs.

It is also obvious that the War in Iraq and its' resulting disastrous occupation was desired entirely by the American Republican Party. The Republicans wanted the invasion of Iraq, they lied their way into it, and they got it. The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq is entirely a Republican war. It is an American war only because the Republican Party had to use the military that belongs to all of us.

Why do we need hate crime laws? Because American was founded on religion and Slavery. The escapees from religious intolerance led the way to the Republic and the Constitution. We still suffer from the slave-holders.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the elimination of legal segregation have started the process of dragging America out of the illness of slavery. Now we have to deal with the basic social issues that have been behind the laws and that still remains. Now we have to do the hard part. Here is how the problem reveals itself today.

On June 5, 2007 columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. published a column entitled Racist cries of media bias don't fit this crime. Here is the beginning of Pitt's column

The Bush administration and its fellow-travelers keep saying that the Press is not telling the full story, the good parts, of the war in Iraq. They tell us to forget the lies the Bush, Cheney and their followers told us to get us into the war in Iraq in the first place, and they complain that everyone is against winning there.

OK. I claim that Bush and the Republicans are the ones who don't want to win in Iraq.

They blew it when they believed (and I think they really did believe) that we could "invade Iraq on the cheap" and expect that our superb military forces were so powerful that the entire Middle East would bow to our superior forces. These are conservatives. No ideas that have developed since WW I are true. No subnational forces can defeat the American national forces. Insurgency is not a significant modern problem.

The most recent hoax from Cheney and the Bush administration is the effort to blame the Iranians for the Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs) weapons that are being used against the American troops in Iraq.

From the LA Times we get this report:

PRESIDENT BUSH HAS now definitively stated that bombs known as explosively formed penetrators — EFPs, which have proved especially deadly for U.S. troops in Iraq — are made in Iran and exported to Iraq.

Since these are such "high tech" weapons, the Bush/Cheney administration expects us to make the leap to the conclusion that this is planned and directed by the leaders in Iran.

And if we don't jump to that conclusion ourselves, Cheney is feeding that conclusion to the media.

[More below the fold]

Digby very kindly channels us to the wisdom of Pat Buchanan. I hope you find this juxtopostion of individuals as jarring as I do.

Our local (Fort Worth - Dallas) CBS news just announced the death of the columnist Molly Ivins. She was recently hospitalized with a recurrance of breast cancer. She was age 62.

The world in general and Texas specifically has just become a much less colorful, lively and interesting place.

Damn! I'll miss her writing. And I never got to meet her.

"Well, I think there are a lot of people who don't want to be reminded that they were warned. I think it's relevant, when you talk about how you build national strategy, and how you use the military -- to talk about how these decisions should be made. There should be some sort of accountability."[bold mine - RB]

Larry Johnson points out that we have never had enough troops in Iraq to conduct Counterinsurgency actions, so that all we can do is conduct Counterterrorism attacks. Along with that our training of Iraq troops has had the effect of creating an Iraqi Shia army that the Shia's are using and will continue to use in their internal civil war with the Sunnis. There is no Iraqi army, and will be none.

"Counterterrorism" according to Larry Johnson is that set of offensive actions involving using military forces to "identify, locate, and kill or capture terrorist operatives. It is an offensive rather than defensive tactic."

Counterinsurgency below the fold.

<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/18/163220/03">Here</a> is the difference between Murtha's proposal and the one the Republicans demanded a vote on.

Dave Johnson <a href="http://www.seeingtheforest.com/archives/2005/11/the_next_longte.htm">explains.
</a> Note how he describes the building of a narrative.

Pure defensive bullshit. There is nothing that has happened on the Gulf Coast or to New Orleans that was not foreseen!

Everyone knew there would be a big hurricane. Everyone knew that if it hit New Orleans the city was likely to flood and that evacuation would be difficult at best. The only thing no one knew was when.

Let me list the criteria. There are nine criteria, and if a person meets five items, they are suffering from NPD.

It is my best guess that the White House is a triumvirate, with Rove as domestic czar and leader of the Republican party mechanism, Cheney as the foreign policy/military/Intelligence czar, and Bush as the nice-guy front man who gives the speeches written for him. You may notice a big gap in that. There is no policy expert who knows how things are really done within government (as opposed to merely giving orders, delegating, and firing those who don't toe the line), and there is no economics expert.

The New York Times published an AP story on the new proposals from the House GOP.

Howard Dean is right when he says that Democrats have to be SEEN to be fighting back against the Republicans, but we need to do that in a manner that does not leave Rural voters and Southerners feel like we are putting down their life-style and values. Dean, I think, understands that. That's what his comment last year about reaching out to the Southern guys with gun racks in their pickups was all about. Whether he can get his knowledge clearly expressed and pushed through a media that has its own idea what the stories should be is another issue.

"... once these independents are assigned the party they are closer to, Democrats enjoy a 13 percent advantage over Republicans."

Kevin Drum invited Rick Perlstein (author of "Before the Storm," a history of the growth of the American conservative movement) to write about what the Democrats have been doing wrong. Perlstein points out that Clinton practiced "triangulation." That means that he was ignoring his own base and moving to attract the swing voters to support his initiatives, on the assumption that his base had no place else to go. It frequently worked, but the cost was very high. He hasn't gone far enough back in history.  

The President has the Right to get the appointees he wants, and every appointee has the Right to get an up-or-down vote by the full Senate. This is what the Constitution says. Right?

No. It says exactly the opposite. The Constitution gives the President only the power to nominate, not appoint, officers requiring the Advice and Consent of the Senate. The Senate, acting as a separate body of government, has the responsibility under the Constitution to deliberate on those the President appoints and either approve or reject them.