Last-Minute Election Prediction
By Joe Mariani (11/07/06)
A week ago, I would have predicted that the Republicans would lose 20 to 25 House seats and 5 or 6 Senate seats, giving the House to the Democrats and putting retention of the Senate at 50-50. Now, I think they will only lose a few Senate seats, retaining control by a slim margin, and even stand a 50-50 chance of retaining the House.
In recent days, as the election approached, more and more "regular people" -- those who don't pay much attention to elections and politics for the other 364 days of the year -- began thinking about how they would vote. And as they looked to the Left, they saw John Kerry insulting our troops in Iraq, Democrats grousing about the President (who, by the way, is not running) but unable to come up with any plans other than, "we're not Bush," and obviously manufactured outrage over a sex scandal in which no actual sex was had.
On the other side, they have seen the New York Times admitting that Saddam Hussein was "as little as a year away" from achieving nuclear capability when he was forcibly removed from power. They've seen the same Saddam Hussein condemned to death for crimes against humanity. And as the Democrats continue to rant about how "Bush lied" to get us into a war against Saddam (although how agreeing with everything the same Democrats said for a decade can be a "lie" escapes me) more and more Americans have been impelled to the conclusion that getting rid of the Butcher of Baghdad was, perhaps, a good thing. As the Left is campaigning to get Bush to send troops on a humanitarian mission to stop genocide in Darfur, those with a shred of intellectual honesty are bound to wonder, "why there and not Iraq?"
If the Left wants to make Iraq the driving issue of this year's election, so be it. America did the right thing in removing from power a brutal fascist who had well-established ties to terrorist groups, continued to work on banned weapons in secret labs and underground facilities despite 17 UN resolutions and a cease-fire with the US, corrupted the United Nations with his stolen oil money and who murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people to maintain power. No election can change that.
http://guardian.blogdrive.com/archive/cm-11_cy-2006_m-11_d-07_y-2006_o-0.html
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