Salad Bar

by digby

Speaking of the desire among Republicans to draft Peter Pace and other Bush era generals to run for office, Matt Yglesias smartly observes:

Now of course there’s a long tradition of generals (but not, I think, admirals) entering politics in the United States, starting with George Washington. Contemporary conservatives, however, seem to be misunderstanding the tradition in crucial respects. The idea, normally, is to nominate flag officers who are associated with noteworthy victories — from Andrew Jackson to Wesley Clark — or else for a junior officer who showed noteworthy courage in battle (John Kerry, John Kennedy) to run for a lower office. Neither Franks, nor Petraeus, nor Pace is actually popular, probably because insofar as anyone knows who these guys are it’s from their association with a giant unpopular fiasco in Iraq.

This is correct. But Republicans are suckers for Republicans in uniform. I don’t think they’d care if he had been convicted of war crimes, they’d love him if he were GOP. (They’d actually love him more if he were convicted of war crimes.) The problem for Republicans is that there just aren’t as many of them as there used to be. And Independents and Democrats might have some objections to electing a Bush toady and Iraq war architect, no matter how much salad he has on his chest.

Nonetheless, it would be a very tempting campaign for the right as they could work themselves into a full-on frenzy and start speaking in tongues and whirling around like dervishes if any Democrat even whispered that one of these men had not been fully competent in their jobs. (A congressional censure would certainly be in order if the opponents ran a negative ad or spoke in anything but the most reverential tones.) You can understand why the Republicans would be hot to do it — phony hypocritical hissy fits are their specialty. They would tie the opposition up in knots.

Winning would be beside the point, really. This is their idea of recreation.

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