A few easy pieces

• An Iraqi reporter threw shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Iraq. This is actually a sign that Iraq might be well on its way towards becoming a stable, democratic country. Think about it: here is a country that has suffered sectarian violence, street-level terror, and government-sponsored pogroms for decades. Now a reporter can throw a shoe at the leader of the free world and suffer, say, the leader of the free world laughing in his face about it. That seems like progress.
  
  Or put it this way. American Democrats have been waging a cold, civil guerilla war against President Bush from Election Day 2000 to the president. If the Democrats were to stop their relentless campaign to poison public opinion against Republicans and merely resort to throwing shoes at the President to register their disapproval, we'd be calling the Bush years another "Era of Good Feelings".



• It should be clear now that the Republican party has developed a serious case of Tyler-Fillmore disease with the rise of John McCain to de facto party leader since 2000. True conservatives knew that if Senator McCain lost the 2008 election to Senator Obama, McCain would take it upon himself, as a true Republican moderate, to enact President Obama's legislative agenda in 2009.
  
  Thus, in a sign that the Blagojevich scandal is politically damaging Obama and helping Republicans, Senator John McCain thinks that the Republicans should "lay off" of the Blagojevich scandal. That the Republicans should be doing the opposite of what John McCain advises would make a sound rule of thumb at this point.