This election had one bright spot

“One must change one’s tactics every 10 years if one wishes to maintain one’s superiority.
—Napoleon Bonaparte

I’ve figured out that there is an upside to the Democratic Party reclaiming Congress this year. Specifically, for the first time in six years, we don’t have to listen to another round of their insipid whining about disenfranchised voters, voter fraud, hacked voting machines or stolen elections. You see, when Democrats lose elections, it’s always the fault of some Republican trickery and never simply the fact that people didn’t like their message. In 2000, Al “Count Every Vote Until I Win” Gore ran around jacking his jaws over the fact that we couldn’t determine voter intent from the butterfly ballots in Florida rather than admit that people too stupid to make their intentions clear on said ballots probably shouldn’t be voting.

So, OK. Republicans got handed their lunch this year. They take it like adults, unlike your average Democrat who runs around like a spoiled child carping about how unfairly he or she was treated. This in and of itself shows the major difference between the two parties.

“Nowhere was the call for a new direction more clear from the American people than in the war in Iraq,” sayeth Rep. Nancy “I’ll be Speaker of the House” Pelosi about said election results.

Just a week before the election, we were looking at the lowest inflation rates and lowest unemployment rates (3.2 percent) in a decade. Oh yes, and the Dow had just blown through the 12,000-foot ceiling. And yet Iraq was the defining issue to give Democrats their newfound mandate?

That perhaps explains why, in Connecticut, former Democrat and pro-war Sen. Joe Lieberman got himself thrown under the proverbial bus by the anti-war lefties in the party all in favor of Ned “Better Red” Lamont during the primaries. Lieberman got the last laugh, though, winning the general election by 10 points.

And yet here was Speaker-in-waiting Pelosi about what the new majority party had in mind for the country: “Jobs, healthcare, education, energy independence, a safer America, a dignified retirement—that’s what the Democrats are all about, and we’re going to do that in the first 100 hours [in session].”

Uh, excuse me. I have a couple of questions here: What about that mandate over Iraq? What about that cut-and-run strategy to bring home the troops? What about maintaining that over-the-hill presence? What about de-funding the military to end the war early? What about making nice with terrorists and granting them constitutional and Geneva Convention protections?

We all know the answer to those questions. The Democrats don’t have any more answers than they had when they were criticizing the president before the election. So at best, the election proves nothing except that it was a vote against Republicans, not necessarily a vote for Democrats.

Indeed most of the conservative Republicans who got the boot were closely allied with the president—and if he’s a conservative, I’m Al Franken.

Republicans who stuck to conservative principles of less taxes, limited government, etc.—like the Silver State’s John Ensign—survived the Democrats’ new mandate relatively intact.

At least one thing is abundantly clear: Democrats have two years to get their act together and use their new mandate over Iraq before the 2008 bloodbath—I mean election.

Otherwise, I’m guessing they’re going to have a lot of time to contemplate Napolean’s wisdom.