I'd love to see residency requirements back. Say five to ten years before you can vote in your district (during which time you still vote in your old one.) That way all those [expletive deleted] Californicans and New Englanders would have to live in their new communities a few days before trying to change it into a duplicate of what they left.

It boots little if we cannot carry the electoral college.

Morale in war is a resource, no less so than bullets, and we have frittered it away. It is not so bad as the MSM would make out, but it is bad.

Listen to the Sunday talk shows: "George Bush is a poo-poo head," the critic bleats. "What is YOUR plan?" the moderator asks, sometimes again and again. The answer, again and again, "George Bush is a poo-poo head."

There is no plan--no one has a plan. No one can say what "victory" means.

The plan should be the Untergang (and that doesn't mean "decline") of the spiritual jailhouse. No one can handle the truth, certainly not to speak it, almost not to think it.

Now the United States' course of action, namely containment and reformation, was a good plan, and it was working, but it had taken too long. The barbaric atavism against which we stand can be counted on to shake itself apart eventually, but in the short term we have committed a terible mistake. We have tried to fight a war without a vision of the Endsieg. You would have imagined that Vietnam had taught us something, but aparently not.

Lou:

You know darned well that the lessons of Vietnam are best remembered by the Left - how to wail, denigrate, undermine, and flee.

I'm sure the services learned lessons as well, but those aren't going to be reported. Remember how the press mocked Bush Sr. for saying (after Gulf 1) that we had kicked the 'Vietnam' syndrome? They didn't like it one bit.

But we haven't kicked it. Not being ready to lose and not being ready to win got us into a situation in which our enemies, foreign and domestic, have spun what shouod have been victory into protracted defeat.

The war had been a very good idea, and had been superbly executed. Quick was the word and sharp the action, and then it all fell to pieces. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of war, history and politics could have seen this coming.

We knew, for example, that the enemy habitually hides behind protected persons and places. There is absolutely no surprise here. We had to have know he would do so and we had to have known that our alternatives were total war, and defeat. If we were not ready to win we should not have started.

Apparently the left is not the only party to have forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. Vietnam was only won when our version of the Partei-tag geschwadern thundered over North Vietnam. It was only lost when the dagger in the back struck home. War in Vietnam lasted 16 days and ended in victory; war in Iraq has never been tried.

Of course that is correct. Just today, John Boehner was bleating on Hugh Hewitt's show about proposing a resolution of his own on the war. He would have done better to have marched at the anti-war rallies on Sunday and hugged Hanoi Jane.

To the political class, the war has become a blot to be washed out, a kidney stone to be passed. McCain must be in the midst of a titanic struggle now, torn between his record on the war (and terrorism in general), and the temptation to get in line and go mushy.