…in a post by Victor Davis Hanson over at PJM:

The kind of thoroughgoing liberal orgy of corruption and incompetence that has followed the Obama coronation has been seen only once before in American history: in the carpetbagger/scalawag/freedmen radical Republican governments in the South during the early years of Radical Reconstruction following the THE War.

The Obamites should take the lessons of Reconstruction seriously. Not the ones that modern historians who say it was not radical enough try to draw, but the lessons that (1) the only thing that supported those governments was the presence of lots of Federal bayonets, (2) the excesses of Reconstruction were real, and were major factors in shaping Southern responses ranging from the initial Ku Klux Klan to Jim Crow, (3) it ended badly with serious political violence in 1876, and (4) after 1876, it was three or four generations before any respectable Southerner could even think about voting for a Republican.

In this situation, we have a military that is mostly conservative and has generally stayed out of law enforcement in the US since the Compromise of 1877. Even though changes to the Posse Comitatus Act probably would now permit Obama to use the military in the US to enforce his measures, I doubt there would be much enthusiasm for that in the officer corps or the ranks.

Unlike the post-War situation where the North had not only active Army units in the South but a vast body of veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic who could have been called out had the South actually risen again, today the Left that supports the Obama agenda is almost devoid of veterans or even men and women trained to arms at all.

Not only is the majority of the entire country center-right, the overwhelming majority of men of military age and trained to arms are decidedly on the Right.

I think we are reaching a point where the current Congress and Administration behave like a combination of the Radical Republicans in 1866 and the contemporary Carpetbagger/Scalawag/Freedmen governments in the South at their peril.

The next year is going to be very interesting.

I agree with Glenn:

IS “TEABAGGER” THE NEW “N-WORD?” No, but when I hear someone use it, I know that nothing they say on the subject is worth taking seriously. Either they’re deliberately using it as a sexual slur, or they’re too ignorant to be worth listening to.

Or both.

I’m getting tired of hearing all these Senators from both parties talking about what a great guy, what a charmer Ted Kennedy was. I don’t think I’d be able to be that friendly with someone who, regardless of his politics, essentially murdered a young woman with whom he had probably been philandering, got away with it, and joked about it. You know, there was another Ted who everyone thought was charming, too. His last name was Bundy.

[Late Sunday afternoon update]

Mark Steyn has some related thoughts:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

Read all.

[Bumped]

At the WaPo.

I’m going to be blunt. People who attempt to claim that “torture” doesn’t work simply make themselves look like illogical fools. There may be arguments against it, but that’s an idiotic one. And the people who make it never explain what will work in its place against people like this.

[Sunday morning update]

Stephen Hayes has more.

A good point:

Underestimation explains the success of many politicians. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush come to mind. Overestimation is the mother of failure, and it may help explain President Obama’s sagging popularity right now.

Yes, though the sagging popularity will also lower future expectations.