Oops. Turns out the Department of Homeland Security has that letter from Duke Cunningham recommending Hookergate’s Shirlington Limousine after all. We’ll be posting it momentarily.

My favorite line from Duke’s testimonial: Shirlington CEO Chris Baker “has been of service to me and other Members of Congress over the years.”

And how …

Get the full story and letter here.

ChiTrib follows up on Speaker Hastert’s earmark bonanza.

“The complex structure of a real estate transaction in Kendall County last December left House Speaker Dennis Hastert with a seven-figure profit and in prime position to reap further benefits as the exurban region west of Chicago continues its prairie-fire growth boosted by a Hastert-backed federally funded proposed highway.”

The results seem to be in, from pretty much every quarter: Congressional Democrats’ new theme or campaign program or whatever it is it’s supposed to be exactly is just embarrassingly lame. Frank Rich says so. Jo-Ann Mort says so. If you haven’t heard, it’s A New Direction for America. So you can see what they mean.

In his Sunday Times column, Rich quotes Tony Fabrizio’s line from last April: “The good news is Democrats don’t have much of a plan. The bad news is they may not need one.”

I don’t want to pump this line up too much because it plays to this pattern of Democratic hand-wringing that Republicans play up, knowing that it feeds ingrained perceptions of Democratic haplessness, indecisiveness and thus unworthiness to hold office.

But I take some solace from the fact that I think it is largely true, especially in the second clause, though not in just the way Fabrizio thinks.

Political insiders consistently overstate the importance of slogans and programs. Political tides aren’t unleashed or weathered because of message discipline or thematic fine-tuning. They come about because of failures or victories abroad, big motions in the economy, or judgments coalescing in the public mind in ways that are as inscrutable in their origins as they can be transparent in their effects.

1994 is a classic example. The Contract with America is now judged a seminal political act whereas in fact, I would say, it had little if anything to do with the result of that watershed election. 1994 happened because Bill Clinton was very unpopular two years into his first term. A new wave of right-wing politics — bound up with but not limited to talk radio — had been building steam since the beginning of the Bush years. Clinton’s unpopularity both stemmed from that wave and helped crystallize it. Add to these factors the fact that redistricting, a wave of retirements and unified Democratic control in Washington for the first time in a generation all made the South ripe for finally flipping over into the hands of the Republican party at the Congressional level.

In saying this I’m not suggesting that anyone just sit back and let history happen. Politics matters. Organization matters. Message matters. But there’s a line from Seneca in which he says, “Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling.” And there’s a political corollary to this as well. Voters are making a decision about Bush’s presidency and the Republican ascendency in Washington. If voters aren’t happy with them, Nancy Pelosi’s unoriginality or tone deafness won’t be able to stop that judgment any more than President Bush’s handlers can goose his poll numbers.

So, yes, the new theme is dopey and flaccid. But the only thing worse than that would be getting too upset about it. On the Democratic side, the punch of this election is going to come from individual candidates willing to be fiercely candid with voters and fight Republicans tooth and nail.

Let’s be honest. What is this election about?

It’s not about the Democrats. 2008 may be about the Democrats. Maybe 2010. Not 2006. 2006 is about George W. Bush and the Republican party. And, specifically, how many people are fed up with what’s happened over the last six years and want to make a change? The constitution gives the people only one way to do that in 2006 — put a hard brake on the president’s power by turning one or both houses of Congress over to the opposition party.

That’s why Newt Gingrich was so on the mark, ironically, when he suggested the Democrats’ slogan should be “Had Enough?” (As a way of understanding Gingrich’s particular genius, consider that “Had Enough?” and “A New Direction for America” are actually two ways of saying the exact same thing — with the first forceful and infectious and the second limp and denatured.) Everything else the election is allegedly about is chatter. The details are so many fine points about making the sale, framing the question. And, yes, those are important. But that is the question. And nothing the geniuses on either side do will change that from being the question.

Here’s what Reed Hundt said last week …

The Republican game plan is emerging. Its three points appear to be: anti gay (save marriage for straights), anti aliens (save America for citizens), and anti troop withdrawal (except when they announce they’ve secured Iraq).

This plan calls out their base. All off-year elections, and many Presidential elections, are won by turn-out, and 2006 promises to be no different.

Democrats running for office in any state need to formulate a three-part challenge, which might be called an attack by the uncharitable, or could be called aggressive by those who know elections are more like boxing than chess.

This is exactly right. Go on the attack. Remind people why they have had enough. The prescription just isn’t going to come from the leadership offices on Capitol Hill. It’s up to you.

How much is that Democrat in the window? As the winds of change blow Democrats closer to a majority in the House, corporate interests have decided that Dem lawmakers are the “must-have” accessory for the fall season. Consequently, they’re bumping up donations to Democratic candidates, and former GOP-heavy lobby shops are suddenly courting Dems to help fight their battles. This and more of the day’s news in today’s Daily Muck.

Here’s an article in the Times describing Rep. John Murtha’s swipe back at Karl Rove’s speech in which the president’s chief political advisor tried to take the political offensive against Democrats on Iraq. The Times quotes Rove assailing “that party’s old pattern of cutting and running.” And Murtha comes back at Rove: “He’s making a political speech. He’s sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside saying, ‘Stay the course.’ That’s not a plan.”

Then there’s this passage …

Mr. Murtha spoke as the Bush administration pressed ahead with its campaign to seize the political offensive on Iraq — a push that included President Bush’s surprise visit to Baghdad early last week.

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, made the rounds on the Sunday morning political programs, saying that President Bush had every intention of sticking with the course he had set in Iraq, even as opinion polls suggested that most Americans were increasingly uneasy about the war.

“The president understands people’s impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation,” Mr. Snow said on the CNN program “Late Edition.” “He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.”

Here is a claim that needs to be blown apart. Get real: the administration isn’t trying to seize the offensive on Iraq. The war is dismally unpopular and on that basic judgment opinions are largely congealed and fast congealing. They know that. What the White House is doing is trying to knock the opposition off its stride and scare them out of their own offensive, which is to hold the administration accountable and press for a change of direction on Iraq.

Of course, the White House is going to try to call any change of direction “Cut and Run”. That’s their angle. That’s their card. If you can’t stand in the debate in the face of that, far better to leave all foreign policy entirely off the table and contest the election on minimum wage or college loans.

With more apologies in advance for suspect language, this is more of the White House trying to make the opposition into their chumps and bitches. The aim is to scare the opposition out of taking the Iraq debacle to the voters.

Kevin Drum was right a couple days ago when he said that the key problem for Democrats in coming up with a unified message on Iraq is that they’re not unified. That’s life. And it’s not terribly surprising that they’re not unified. We’ve gotten into an incredible fix in Iraq. And extricating a country from a predicament like this isn’t easy. We have Democrats who think the whole idea was a disaster from the start and that we should leave immdiately, others who think it was a plausible idea bungled through incompetence, others who speak of timelines for withdrawal.

But the White House is making and has made its stand quite clear — American troops in Iraq at least through 2009, and probably for the indefinite future; and no reevaluation of the basic concept of why we went in. So, a good idea to start with and we’ll stay there more or less forever. (Saying we’ll be there until 2009 and then having no plan to leave after that = forever.) That position is so out of sync with where the country is and so disastrous for the country’s security and future prosperity, that I don’t think anyone should be afraid to go to the country opposing it. The truth is that the president doesn’t have any policy beside denial about how we got into this jam.

Democrats need to keep learning from the president’s debacle last year on Social Security. They need to learn from how they confronted his gambit. You seldom can win a political debate unless and until you decide you are willing to lose it the right way. On Social Security the Democrats eventually made a decision and took it to the voters. If you want to keep Social Security, choose us. If not, choose the other side. And if we lose, we can live with that. Because we’re confident that that’s a question we’re willing to take to the people.

Hastert won’t ‘fess up to his earmark payday.

TPM Reader MA responds on our Iraq policy and our earlier post …

It is true that the Dems don’t agree on what to do but the Dems, all Dems — except maybe Joe Lieberman and he doesn’t count anyway — agree that the U.S. needs to change course starting with actually having a plan AND a healthy, open debate about what is best for our country.

I’m a rare breed of Dem who believes Iraq was a disaster from the start but since we are there we have an obligation to position it for future success and security before we leave. What is happening now is a continuation of the incompetence that has been running the show from the start. If we won the war, we are losing the peace.

Competence in foreign policy seems like a political winner for the Dems. Level with the American people about what is really going on there, put a plan in place to restore order and fix infrustructure, and then get out of there.

TPM Reader RC also shares his views …

Something in your post this morning really clicked for me, and I’d like you to put a sharper point on it from here on out. I’d like to see the main Democratic talking point become, “Bush will be in Iraq forever. Period. The Democrats will extricate us. Period.” And let the administration convince the public otherwise. I think if the Dems just keep saying, over and over, “Republicans want us there forever, that’s why we have no timetables, that’s why THEY ARE building permanent bases, etc.,” this would be a useful evolution of the basic description of the situation.

That is the policy.

Finally, there’s TPM Reader TM …

To further what you said, I think the notion that there has to be a unified Democratic plan on Iraq shows a complete misreading of the political situation. Bush is the President until 2009. The Dems won’t have any means of actually implementing any plan they come up with for 2.5 years, at the earliest. Additionally, any plan created now would be done without even knowing who the (hopefully) Democratic President in 2008 would be, or whether he or she would have any support for this hypothetical plan. All of this makes any plan created now worse than useless – not adding value and merely serving as a target for GOP attacks.

The 2006 Congressional election should not, and cannot be about the Democrats plan, or lack thereof, for Iraq. Instead, they should be about accountability for the actual actions of the current President and the current Congress. Any attempt to ask Democratic candidates what their plan is for Iraq should be met with a “I am not the President, and won’t have the power to implement any such plan if elected, so that is a ridiculous request. What I *can* do, however, is hold this administration accountable for their mistakes. Do you want more Iraqs and disastrous responses to natural disasters? Or do you want a Congress that thinks ‘checks and balances’ means ‘holding the President accountable’, not being the President’s rubber stamp. Never was the wisdom of our nation’s founders more apparant in the need for a Congress as a check on the President, and never has there been a Congress as woefully inadequate in*being* a check on the President”.

The question of the Democratic plan for Iraq is something that has to wait until 2008, when it is actually relevant.

Rep. Jerry Lewis’ ties to Duke Cunningham’s earmarks and Duke’s guy Brent Wilkes.

What a guy.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on the death of Zarqawi: “There probably are not 72 virgins in the hell he’s at. And if there are, they probably all look like [White House correspondent] Helen Thomas.”

It’s a minor point, all things considered. But like a number of readers I can’t help but flag White House spokesman Tony Snow’s witless comparison of ‘staying the course’ in Iraq to WWII’s Battle of the Bulge.

The president understands people’s impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the reference, the Battle of the Bulge took place as the Allies were moving across France and Belgium several months after D-Day. The Germans launched a counter-offensive the strategic objective of which was to force the allies to give up their goal of unconditional German surrender and force them to come to some sort of negotiated peace. The German effort was initially successful, opening up a large salient or ‘bulge’ within the allied lines. But the allies eventually recovered the lost ground. And I believe the general consensus is that the whole battle greatly accelerated the Nazis’ eventual collapse because they lost a lot of armor and other resources in the effort.

In any case, you don’t need to know those details to understand one key fact. The Battle of the Bulge began in the middle of December 1944. And it was over by the end of January 1945. So the whole thing lasted less than six weeks. It must have been an eternity for the American and British soldiers in this incredibly hard-fought battle in sub-zero temperatures. But in terms of time, or what Snow terms ‘impatience’, it’s simply not comparable to the last three years in Iraq.

As for polls, I don’t know about public polls. But the US government kept very detailed tabs on public opinion and war morale through the war. So I suspect something at least analogous to Snow’s hypothetical poll was done. And I’m confident that it showed very few if anyone saying anything like that.

Snow’s point isn’t just historically silly, it’s morally obtuse and cynical. It shows as much contempt for the public as the White House seems to have for our soldiers in the field. For the United States, the situation in Iraq is close to unprecedented in the last century in terms of the duration of time an American president has left a war policy on autopilot while more and more evidence comes in that it’s simply not working. Even in Vietnam, for all the mistakes the US made there, Richard Nixon kept escalating the conflict. There’s at least some strategic movement on the policy brain scan. I’m not saying that’s preferable. And I don’t want to get into an argument about bombing Cambodia. But it is at least different from letting a flawed policy grind through money and men for three years because you don’t have the moral courage to rethink it or adjust course. It’s denial elevated to the level of high principle.

Remember what the president said: getting out of Iraq is something that’s going to be up to the next president. He or she can get started in 2009.