WEEK-IN-REVIEW: STORMY WEATHER FOR THE GOP-- MORE CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON

Anything happen this week besides this and Obama's pastor?

In this morning's Washington Post Jonathan Weisman enumerates the storm clouds gathering over the heads Republicans. Last week was another dismal week for the party whose chief  has an 18% job approval rating among registered voters (slightly better among the general population: 19%). They lost a heartland Republican seat in a special election to replace the ex-Speaker of the House-- and they lost it to a Democrat campaigning against the continued occupation of Iraq and against retroactive immunity and against the whole Bush-McCain agenda. They failed to put up a challenger for first-term Democratic Senator Mark Pryor in a state they once thought would be a GOP bastion, Arkansas. And they failed to find credible opponents for two more Democratic incumbents they once claimed were vulnerable, Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ). Just as in dozens of House races, they will find themselves stuck with third and fourth rate, self-funding vanity candidates who will barely be taken seriously by anyone who doesn't watch Fox News as their only source of information. On top of that, the "gold standard" of Republican treasurers, Christopher Ward-- who ran 83 GOP fundraising operations-- has stolen at least a million dollars (and probably a great deal more) from the Republican Party over the last 8 years, undetected by everyone from the NRCC to a schnook like Peter King (R-NY). Wonderers are wondering how we can trust them with our money, if they can't even keep their own from being stolen-- by themselves!

Two of the more memorable quotes of the week came from Virginia Republican Congressman Tom Davis. "It's no mystery. You have a very unhappy electorate, which is no surprise, with oil at $108 a barrel, stocks down a few thousand points, a war in Iraq with no end in sight and a president who is still very, very unpopular. He's just killed the Republican brand." And that was the optimistic quote. The more candid one was more to the point: "The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they'd take it off the shelf." He's so sick of it, in fact, that he's decided to take himself off the shelf, ceding another red district to a progressive Democrat, Leslie Byrne.

Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan analyst of congressional politics, said: "The math is against them. The environment is against them. The money is against them. This is one of those cycles that if you're a Republican strategist, you just want to go into the bomb shelter."

And the daily drip, drip, drip of news is just killing them-- at the gas pump, in the housing market, the supermarket, the stock market... The Regime's pals in the corporate media have done all they could to tamp down the troubles in Iraq-- there's virtually no reporting on Iraq any longer, except the absurd claims that the surge is "working." When Bush's political general was interviewed in Baghdad last week and admitted that the surge has overwhelmingly failed to meet it's most important goals, the story was buried on page 10 of the Washington Post and scrolled underneath TV pictures of publicity-hungry call girls who were acquainted with the call girl Eliot Spitzer was bonking.

Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

The entire heart and "soul" of the McCain campaign is based on the illusory success of the surge. And while Arianna is wise to warn Democrats to start challenging the surge-as-success meme before it becomes ingrained conventional wisdom, it isn't really likely that anyone-- despite what they tell pollsters-- is going to start feeling they want another 4 years of George Bush, even if it's repackaged in the form of John W McCain.

And the barebones, straight-to-the-point picture of McCain that Robert Dreyfuss paints in the new Nation gets dangerously close to the Real McCain, the one his well-oiled PR Machine has been keeping well out of sight of the lazy easily hoodwinked media for years.

"No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."

If you thought an uncomprehending and lightweight Bush was a captive of the lunatic Neocons, McCain actually does comprehend and fully embraces their vision for a dark, miserable future. Dreyfuss warns his readers that what they may not have heard yet is that serious and well-informed McCain watchers have come up with "an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call 'the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism,' McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a 'League of Democracies' that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in 'rogue state rollback' against his version of the 'axis of evil.' In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the 'war on terror' deep into the twenty-first century." A vote for John McCain is a vote for more and endless wars and, certainly, for a military draft... and worse.

And if you don't wanna take my word or Jonathan Weisman's word, just listen to Lena Horne: