With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Q Thank you, Mr. President. On immigration, many Democrats had more positive things to say about your comprehensive proposal than many Republicans did. Do you think a Democratic Congress gives you a better shot at comprehensive immigration reform?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I should have brought this up. I do. I think we have a good chance. Thank you. It’s an important issue and I hope we can get something done on it. I meant to put that in my list of things that we need to get done.

Apparently the President also forgot to put leading his Party to continued electoral success on his priority list. But then again, who needs racist, vigilante Republicans when you can just welcome Democrats who want basically the same open borders you do?

I would hope Republicans have recognized that we’ve taken very strong security measures to address one aspect of comprehensive immigration reform. And I was talking to Secretary Chertoff today; he thinks that these measures we’re taking are beginning to have measurable effects, and that catch and release has virtually been ended over the past couple of months. And that’s positive.

Of course, Mr. President. We can all see that the border is virtually secure now and you got so much credit for it that your party did so very well in the elections. Right. Perhaps you should have hired that elephant and mariachi band to sell the achievement.

And that’s what some members were concerned about prior to advancing a comprehensive bill. In other words, they said, show me progress on the border, and then we’d be interested in talking about other aspects. Well, there’s progress being made on the border in terms of security, and I would hope we can get something done. It’s a vital issue. It’s an issue that — there’s an issue where I believe we can find some common ground with the Democrats.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

Q What are the odds for a guest worker provision?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s got to be an integral part of a comprehensive plan. When you’re talking comprehensive immigration reform, one part of it is a guest worker program, where people can come on a temporary basis to do jobs Americans are not doing.

Like voting for your party, sir?

I’ve always felt like that would be an important aspect of securing the border. In other words, if somebody is not trying to sneak in in the first place, it makes — decreases the work load on our Border Patrol, and lets the Border Patrol focused on drugs and guns and terrorists. But that’s a — I appreciate you bringing that up. I should have remembered it.

“Keeping your base happy so you win elections? Oh, uh, that’s a–I appreciate you bringing that up. I should have remembered it.”

The following behaviors have been legalized in the state of Missouri:

• Cloning human embryos,
• Killing cloned human embryos,
• Performing experiments on cloned human embryos or their parts, and
• Selling cloned human embryos

Had the citizens of Missouri known this, the deceptively titled “Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative” would never have passed.

Instead, a lazy actor and amoral politicians teamed up to dump Teflon all over an already slippery slope.

Go read, then discuss….

Hat Tip LawDog

Early, I mentioned Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn as a possible Senate leadership position in a revamped GOP.

Here’s part of a statement he released today:

“Some have said that Republicans and Democrats now need to govern from the middle. I disagree. We do not need to govern from the center as much as we need to govern from conscience. When politicians have the courage to argue their convictions and lose their political lives in an honest battle of ideas the best policies will prevail.

“The American people do want civility but they also want real debate. Civility does not mean an absence of conflict, but a return of honor and dignity in our politics. The great debates in American history like the Lincoln-Douglas debates or the debates about the Constitution were intensely confrontational, but no one feels soiled after reading them. That same quality of debate is possible today if politicians put their country first and party second. The problems facing our country are too great to not have these debates. Voters are bored and tired of partisan role playing in Washington. The answers to securing Iraq, winning the War on Terror, and preventing the impending bankruptcies of Medicare and Social Security will not be discovered by portraying the other party as the focus of evil and corruption. If we don’t debate these issues with honor and agree on solutions we will be the first generation of leaders that left the next generation worse off, and we will see our relative power in the world diminish.

“One of the great paradoxes in politics is that governing to maintain power is the surest way to lose it. Republicans have the ideas to solve our greatest challenges. If we focus on ideas, our majority status will take care of itself,” Dr. Coburn said.

[Hat-tip: Instapundit]

You can call Senator Coburn and encourage him to step forward to fight for a leadership position by calling his office directly at 202-224-5754.

AP reporting he won’t pursue post.

Good.

Quotes from Robert Gates, Bush’s new nominee for Secretary of Defense:

• “Speaking to you all again is a bit like being Larry King’s newest wife– I know what I’m supposed to do here, I’m just not sure how to make it interesting.”

• “Were we to become a top ten university and lose that spirit, those traditions, our culture, we would be nothing more than another giant education factory. A big brain with no heart. Hell, we might as well be in Austin.”

It was a boastful, passionate, whispering, masculine, RINO-raping kind of election.

House Republicans have not lost this many seats since 1974, and Senate Republicans have probably had their worst election since 1986. Republicans lost six governorships. It was a comprehensive rout. No Democratic incumbents lost. Liberal and conservative Republicans both went down.

Republicans lost roughly 29 seats in the House.

The editors at National Review have offered their breakdown of this beating at the ballot box. Essentially, Republicans went adrift and gave voters little reason to turn out for them.

It is congressional Republicans, more than the president, who are responsible for the loss of the party’s reformist credentials. Republicans were perceived not just as the party in government, but as the party of government. That perception, deadly for the relatively conservative party in our politics, was accurate.

Republicans in general got soft and it cost them. Iraq was also a factor. But what happens now? How will Bush respond to what will surely be a hostile Democrat-controlled Congress? Will the no-“no” President suddenly discover his veto pen?

We trust that there will now be no shortage of Bush vetoes. Democratic control of the House, and possibly the Senate, mean, however, that he will mostly be vetoing bills that the Democrats have designed to be politically costly to reject. Bush will have to find some areas in which he can cooperate with some Democrats. We hope that a pro-family tax reform is one such area.

But all is not ideological roses in Democrat-land either.

The Democrats face some tough choices themselves. One reason that they won was that they ran more conservative candidates, and especially cultural conservatives, than they have run in many years. If those Democrats are neatly folded into a Pelosi party, they won’t hold their seats.

And finally, a word of advice for the Republican Party.

We will not pretend to have any detailed plan for conservatives to move forward just now. But it may be worthwhile to state the obvious, since Republicans in Washington have been quite accomplished in ignoring it. President Bush will have to figure out a way to salvage a failing Iraq policy, and congressional Republicans will have to come up with a reason for holding office beyond the perks they will no longer enjoy.

My own advice? Bush should have imported a few more illegals to vote for his party of “compassionate conservatism,” since it is obviously work Americans just wouldn’t do.

Dubya has just announced– Rumsfeld out, A&M President (and former CIA Director) Bob Gates nominated for Secretary of Defense.

David Benzion commented that he felt the party needed to feel a little pain in order to help focus itself. I hope you have massive quantities of your favorite liquid pain reliever, because here comes the pain. I’m going to make some predictions, let us see just how close I get in a few years.

Amnesty will be granted, taxes will increase, socialized medicine will be back on the front burner, Iraq will revert to a bloody civil war ravaged cesspool of terrorism, Afghanistan will do the same, virtually every middle eastern state will go nuclear within 2 years. North Korea will terrorize the eastern pacific region. China will be well on the way to having an outpost on the moon and will have signs saying “Posted: Keep Off!” ready to plant when they get there. By the time we have a chance to try to recover, the US will be less than a paper tiger, a shell of it’s former self. We won’t have the ability to even influence the country of Togo, much less Iran. The economy which has been on the upside of the first hill on the roller coaster is about to be on it’s way back down. The economy is going to tank, unemployment will go through the roof, gasoline will be pushing $5 a gallon. The oil biz will tank and people will be saying the last person out of Houston, don’t forget to turn out the lights the way we in Houston did about the auto biz in Michigan a couple decades ago..

The Chronicle has a staff editorial out today (which I won’t deign to link to) that repeats a common refrain among Democrats and their not-so-clandestine supporters lately — that Republican woes are, in part, driven by the economy, despite robust economic numbers.

I’m not saying this characterization is wrong, mind you, but it’s really about perception of the economy, not the economy itself. During the Clinton years the media was screaming (in effect) “the economy is batsh** crazy good!” at every turn. Today, the media reports the numbers, and then turns around an runs op-eds and editorials such as the Chronicle’s saying that the numbers mean nothing because millions don’t have health insurance, there’s wage disparity, blah blah blah…

Of course, the same problems existing during the Clinton boom, and nonetheless Clinton reaped the political benefits of presiding over a good economy (that he had done little to foster, I might add). On the other hand, the media is trying its damndest to downplay this economy, and behave as if an election best viewed as a referendum on Iraq and Bush’s foreign policy has anything to do with the economy.

Bush isn’t the greatest president, and Iraq hasn’t turned out well, but give credit where credit is due — the left may not like Bush for many reasons, but they look silly when they attempt to claim that the economy isn’t doing great.

Question– What kind of night was Election Day 2006 for David Benzion?

Answer– The one Democrat in the entire country I wanted to win… lost.

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“Real life” work intrudes this morning, but I’ll be back throughout the day as I get a chance, to sprinkle this space with various nuggets of insight on a number of races and the election as a whole. In the meantime, feel free to start gloating and beating the hell out of me in comments. I prefer to have all my opprobrium served to me in a single, convenient place.

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US SENATE– Regardless of whether or not the GOP can cling to a majority in the Senate, Dick Morris is advancing the theory that what the party needs is to elevate Trent Lott back into a leadership position, since he “knows how to make the trains run on time.”

Yeah–because the best way to communicate to the American people that “we got the message” is by empowering an entrenched political hack infamous for prioritizing federal pork for his contributors above all else and telling back-slapping, good-old-boy jokes about racial segregation.

Here’s my suggestion– put Tom Coburn in charge. His “Revolution of 1994″ credentials with the conservative base are, literally, impeccable. He’s charismatic and articulate. He is a decent man. And his opposition to earmarks and commitment to not doing “business as usual” is legendary. That would get some attention, and prove the GOP was serious about doing things differently.

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TX GOV.– The people have spoken– and 61% of them don’t want Rick Perry to be their governor. More interesting is if you combine Grandma and Kinky’s votes into a combo-candidate–let’s call it the “I Want to Shake Things Up But Don’t Like Voting For Liberal Democrats” vote–you get 31%. Still losing to Perry’s 39%, but as big of a voting bloc as Bell got with the straight-party 30% Democrat base.

God help the Texas GOP if the Texas Democratic party can get its act together and start putting forward conservative/populist statewide candidates in the mold of Chet Edwards (or pre-shift to the GOP Phil Gramm).

The simple fact is that at 39%, Perry trailed Hutchison (62%), Dewhurst (58%) and Abbott (59%) by anywhere from 23 to 19 points. Rick Perry owes his reelecton to the fact that a majority of Texans couldn’t come to agreement on who should be the one to throw his butt out.

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It’s nice to see that the flood of election results hasn’t kept our beloved hometown rag from its vocation of terrible journalism:

Police estimated about 300 protesters were gathered along the sidewalks at the intersection of Post Oak Boulevard and Westheimer. Some held signs that read, “Don’t hold Houston back” and “Good jobs now!”. Others shook empty soda cans filled with pennies.

Empty…filled…head hurts…

About 8 p.m., protesters moved toward the Transco Tower, said organizer Maria Xiquin.

That is, of course, the Williams Tower.

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