Brooks: Let's not split hairs here, they were threatening castration...

Lot of different threads today...the first is the vertiginous ascent of the young right wing within the GOP as of this weekend's bailout failure. This is interesting to me because I can see the next generation of GOP leadership (whatever that means for politics in this country, good/ill, we report, you decide) budding beneath the klieg lights, like the 1948 election that brought Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon to Congress all at once, and no wonder McCan, Famous Air Pirate had to jump ship and split to D.C. for a day, because these men, Hensarling, Cantor and Ryan (and how remiss I was to exclude out of ignorance Rep. Hensarling, when he was the main man calling George Bush's plan socialistic; a thousand apologies) are going to be running the show. Cantor reps suburban Richmond, is a huge fundraiser, which presumably is how these (insert a derogation if you must) got into the negotiating room and got John Boehner to put their "plan" forward in the first place. Power is on display.

But not just power; grace. They are demonstrating an ability to see the long march ahead. Realizing that George Bush has crippled their brand for a generation (or whatever period our accelerated media represents as a generation, one possible rule being the distance between Oliver North's testimony before Congress in 1987 to his 1994 campaign for the Senate, so call the media-refractory period seven years), the RSGers have to purge the President and his followers. It's not that Bushites got us into trouble with the war, it's that they've repeatedly sold out conservative principles. Run to the right, on an eternal return to the party's Goldwater core.

David Brooks' problem with this (Nihilists? Really?) is that the short-term destruction wrought by House Republicans (and the story at this point is that liberal Democrats jumped ship when it became apparent that Pelosi had no help across the aisle) is enough to doom McCain and the Party. Perhaps. But the Hensarling clique has to figure that Walnuts was doomed from the start (who's been raising 50 million a month since February?), that the short-term damage is not only inevitable (seriously, Indiana is in play, the financial crisis has scared enough natural conservatives out of voting that Virginia and North Carolina are Obama's by like 5 and 3 points, respectively; these are things that should not occur; for the times, they are a-etc.) but is, as any free-marketer worth his salt will tell you, a form of creative destruction, clearing out the dead wood of leadership for the benefit of new growth. After Republicans lose 30 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate, betcha John Boehner is out of work, Roy Blunt gets to be minority leader, maybe, if by that point he's still considered ideologically pure, and Cantor gets min. whip.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like these men, but it's at least possible to like them. The way one likes Nixon. They do have an ethos. Eric Cantor may be a wild-eyed, exurban crypto-fascist itching for the opportunity to zap Tehran with Rods from God, but on the whole I prefer knowing where people stand, as opposed to having to sift through PR-speak and intentionally foggy jargon and blatant, opaque bullshit to get the nuts. Compassionate conservatism, and all the other 1990s Luntz-Rove memes are now consigned to the ash heap of history.

Now, other thread: what all that means for our continued influence in the multipolar world is anybody's guess. It is, and will be for the next decade, politically expedient to keep American troops out of harm's way. Period. Witness Joe Biden talking about Iraqis rebuilding their own country. But it's clear that Russia can't step into the void; the adventure in Georgia shocked foreign investors and prompted Putin's own bailout. This may be a period more like 1992, where there was a recession, no clear geopolitical balance of power, a rookie president, and all this anxiety about foreign ownership of American assets.

At the very least, our anxiety about our place in the world ought to shut up the Chomskyite "American Hegemon" fringe, because obviously, and you can ask Ho Chi Minh about this, the US was never a hegemon, we just played one on T.V. And again, let's talk about Dagestan, Chechnya, Igushetia, North Ossetia, the Transdnestr: the Russian Federation can't get its pants on straight, much less project power over oceans, or start naming towns "St. Putinburg."

Seriously, would you rather own dollars or rubles?

And finally, on hegemony, the Yankees' and Mets' seasons are over, the Boston Megalith has squeaked into the playoffs by the back door, the glorious Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles, who Pythagorically speaking should have gone like 89-73 instead finish 100-62...the Phillies play the Brewers tomorrow...and there's a one-game play-off for the AL Central today. Holy Cow...
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