Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I appear to be running the risk of turning into a political blog, but I just have a couple of notes and thoughts that I want to get out of my system.

:: So Dick Gephardt has stepped down as Majority Leader. This is hardly surprising, given the Democratic failure in this week's elections, but I don't think his departure is quite like Newt Gingrich's in 1998, in that when Gingrich departed he really departed: he resigned his seat entirely and left Congress. Gephardt's decision, to me, seems more like a bit of positioning for a 2004 Presidential run. (Not that he has a chance of winning the nomination, but that's what I think is going on here.)

:: As long as Democrats are sobbing in their beer this week, it might be helpful to consider the numbers. This was not a Reagan-vs-Mondale type of political blow-out; it was actually a very close election. The majority in the Senate that just changed hands was razor-thin to begin with, and now it's widened to paper-thin status. There seems to be a meme forming that the Republicans delivered a staggering knock-out type punch to the Democrats, but that's simply not the case. The races were sufficiently close that if 100,000 votes in the right races had changed hands (out of 40,000,000 cast), the Democrats would be doing all the chest-thumping about their mandate. I'm reminded of 1992, when the USA Today ran the headline "LANDSLIDE!" after Bill Clinton won the Presidency, despite the fact that Clinton failed to even win a majority of the votes.

:: I'm not running a warblog, but noting today's passage of a "This is your last chance" UN resolution, I'm thinking that it's time for the anti-war voices in the US to finally answer the question that keeps vexing me as I try to decide whether or not I'm for this war: What do we do if and when Saddam Hussein fails to comply? I really do not want to favor the war against Iraq, but I'm not seeing that there's much choice in the matter. It's sort of like that old chestnut: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains -- however improbable -- must be the truth." It's distasteful as hell, because I'm not convinced we have any plan for after the war that will make things appreciably safer, and because maybe we wouldn't be in this damnable mess if we hadn't created Saddam Hussein in the first place, and, well, because I don't like the company I'd be in if I decided that I favored the war. So, if the anti-war crowd is going to make the convincing argument for their position, now's the time. (By the way, one of the most convincing arguments for war that I've encountered can be found here.)