Perhaps somewhat rashly, I wrote on August 12 of this year that the Democratic Party was headed for a major split.  Nevertheless, putting sound and conventional thinking aside, I stand by my prediction.  After watching the Democrats' behavior during two recent episodes, I am convinced that we are witnessing the beginning of an ugly little battle that will end in the formation of a new party.

That conventional thinking that I so cavalierly push onto the ash heap sounds something like the following.  The Democrats will never jettison, or even attempt to jettison, the hard left.  This is because they love power too much and will never jeopardize the base that holds the proxy to so much of it.  But this type of thinking assumes that Democrats don't or can't understand a simple political fact - that the leftists in the party are a huge drag on their fortunes in national and red state elections.  I may believe that Democrats hold the wrong beliefs but I don't for a second think they are stupid.

Hugo Chavez is one of the leftistphere's heroes.  They like him because he hates George Bush and because he knows how to bring the socialist rap.  Yet there were Charlie Rangel and  Nancy Pelosi actually taking him on, and not with appeasing platitudes and semi-excuses.  Their criticisms were unequivocal.  Pelosi called him a thug.

And then there was Hillary Clinton's recent castigation of the movie "Death of a President".  Has there ever been a stroy on celluloid better designed as a cult classic for the socialist left?  (Imagine getting to dress up like Stalin or Mao and go watch a Republican president bite the dust!  Beats vampires in drag all to pieces, man!)  Yet once again there is no equivocation from Ms. Clinton, just condemnation.

That Rangel, Pelosi, and Clinton took these issues on without a hedge or a little fuzzy logic to leave future wiggle room speaks volumes.  It tells us they aren't worried about having to defend themselves to Michael Moore.  It tells us that, instead of avoiding a fight with Daily Kos,  they're spoiling for one.

The mainstream Democrats know that they cannot fully capitalize on an unpopular war when Michael Moore offends more than half the country every time he opens his mouth.  They know that every crazy conspiracy theory floated by a leftwing blogger calling himself a Democrat hurts their chances to win in '08.   They need a battleground, an issue they can use to split the left from the rest of the party.

I guess they could have come out in full support of the war, but it is unpopular even with non-leftists.  Not a good political move, unless something horrible happens, such as winning the war.   And their history on the subject is a little inconsistent, to say the least.  Can you imagine John Kerry turning around now and supporting the war?  How many jokes would Jay Leno get out of that?

It must have been with joyous hearts, then, that these majority Democrats watched the spectacle unfold at the UN general assembly, as the assinine leader of a failing Third World country did what such leaders are wont to do - namely, make a donkey out of himself.  (The fact that more than half the world doesn't recognize this may say something about the efficacy of unilateralism).  If ever there was a perfect issue to fire some shots over, this was it.  For the trio it must have looked like pennies from Heaven, a fight with their left flank that would leave them looking good and would make anyone doing photo-ops with Chavez appear to be a pandering socialist. A safer beachhead there has never been.

I call this a battle and not a war because I don't believe the aim will be to kick out the left, but to destroy the party.  Maybe its counter-intuitive, but think about this.  The left have dug their trenches deep and they aren't moving.  How many times have we been told that no Democrat can win a primary without appeasing that base?  They have control of the grass roots, they are the grassroots, and to take this metaphor way too far, to get rid of them you have to destroy the whole lawn.  If you just leave the party and start your own you run a huge risk of splitting the blue vote so much you won't win any elections except in Michigan and Delaware.  So the strategy for the moderates has to be to turn their guns on their own ship, set it ablaze, and then jump to a new one.  They won't be able to sink it, but unless they leave it damaged beyond repair their strategy won't work.

So the Pelosis and the Rangels and the Clintons of the Democratic Party will continue to fire on their own extremists until the little nasties can't stand it anymore and erupt in a perfectly grand display of anti-American, socialist vitriol.  When that happens, instead of hiding and obfuscating and hemming and hawing and spinning and leaving themselves plenty of opportunities to speak out of both sides of their mouths, the moderates are going to meet them head on.  They'll hammer them with everything they have.

Will they try to drive them out and "save" the party?  Maybe, but there will be a Plan B and they'll go to it soon.  America will have a new party.

Mark my words.

Some people may quarrel with me when I say that the defeat of Joe Lieberman marks the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party, perhaps arguing that the DP has been dead for a long while and it just doesn't know it yet.  I can't argue.

A year or so ago it seemed to me that the situation within the Democratic Party had gotten to such a point that there would soon be a third party formed.  I couldn't, and still can't, really, judge whether that would happen by the far left leaving the Democrats or vice-versa.  Well, now I think it will be the versa, and that it will happen before the next presidential election - specifically that Lieberman, the Clintons, and the Democratic Leadership Council will pull out of the Democratic Party.  And the little stone that started the landslide is the defeat of Lieberman.

It will be called the "Centrist Party" or the "Freedom Party", or maybe even the "Moderate Party".  And it will appeal to a large cross-section of independents, libertarians, minorities, and conservative Democrats,  as well as quite a few leftward-leaning Republicans.   Though the initial effect may be to split the Democratic vote and hand the Republicans some easy victories, I believe they will soon rival the Republicans in power and may even surpass them and start winning the Presidency again.

The effect of all this will be to pull the country more to the right, as the political argument will no longer be between anti-war socialists and pro-war free market capitalists.  That is an argument of the "what".  What are we, what should we be?  Should we have a command driven economy or a free market?  Should we have individual rights or group rights?  Is America worth defending?  Is there any moral superiority to Western enlightenment values over a feudal theocracy?  And are we at war with the Islamofacists or not?

After the third party is formed, most of those questions will have been answered.  What we will then be arguing about is the "how".   How will we go about ensuring a contined free market, individual rights, and American sovereignty?  How can we spread the values that make America what it is?  How will we win this bloody war with the Islamofacists?

It may be that, after a few upticks for the Republicans, their fortunes begin to get worse and worse as the new party becomes more and more accepted as the traditional counterweight.  But if America moves away from its flirtation with the nightmare of socialism, wouldn't that be a good thing?  And if the Republicans felt threatened, wouldn't they have a little incentive to clean house, stop playing the power brokers on Capitol Hill, and try a little reform?  Yes, probably too much to hope for, but one can dream.

The rump left of the Democratic Party - the socialists, communists, radical feminists, lawyers, and college professors - will probably hang around for awhile.  But they will be marginalized and will eventually have no effect on the politics of the United States.  Have you ever heard of the U.S. Green Party?  And that is the most ironic part of this whole picture - that at the moment of their greatest triumph, the leftisphere has critically hurt its chances to play a major part in the politics of America.

Thank goodness.

Where's the data when you really want it?

As did a large number of people, I read the news item from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) about the average temperature of the continental United States in the first half of this year being the warmest on record.  Whew, that is an ugly sentence, but what can you do with such raw material?  I assume there were a "large number" of people because I assume that it was a front page item on most newspapers the day it came out, as it was on my local  rag.

The only problem with the story is that it didn't give us all the facts, and the facts it did give seemed meant to mislead us.  To take the last point first, the way it was worded could very easily cause someone to think that this half year was actually three degrees hotter than any other half year, a fact which would be very alarming, indeed.  But alas for the global warming advocates, it just is not so.  The three degrees was against the mean of the whole 20th century.  Individual years may vary widely from the mean, but unless you can show an upward trend in the data, all you have done is prove what everyone knows - that weather is unpredictable.

Which brings us to the lack of facts.

What the news story reported was that the average temperature for the first six months of 2006 was the highest on record - that is, since 1895.  And it said that that average was something like 3 degrees above the average for last century.  What it didn't tell us were two very important facts.  One - how much hotter was the monthly average for this period than the next hottest half year?  And two - when was that second hottest half year?

Now, if it were reported that this year was a degree hotter than the second hottest such period, and that the second hottest was in 2004, with 2003 being the third hottest and 2005 being the fourth, then even I might begin to see a trend.  But if the next hottest half year were actually in 1930 and the third hottest was in 1899 and the actual difference between 2006 and 1930 were a hundreth of a degree - well, let's say I wouldn't quit my job to join the "Al Gore for President" campaign.

Somehow, though, I have the feeling that if reality were somewhere close to the first scenario, we would have heard all about it.

I don't know what category to place this in, since it is about me.  I am obviously not Media & Culture, but that's where you find me.  I guess.  Unless that would be in Faith & Family.  I am not in Immigration, Foreign Affairs, or Social Security, although I am fast approaching that category with the fond hope that there will be something left for me when I get there.

Mzee is Swahili for "Old Man".  Being a term of respect in that culture, you don't actually have to be an old man to earn the sobriquet.  What is needed is to show some of the wisdom that is supposed to come with age.  Showing her own perceptive nature, my wife uses it as a pet name for me.

To pronounce the word, or at least to come close to a proper enunciation, you need to know four things about spoken Swahili.  The first is that "M" as the initial syllable of a word is generally said with closed lips, and the phoneme sounds like "umm".  (Actually, there is a fairly wide range of the pronunciation, from that just described to a "Mu" that sounds like your lips got stuck as they were trying to open for the "u".  And lots of variations in-between.)  Your second quick Swahili lesson concerns vowels, and it exposes the other three rules.  The first is that, in Swahili, you say every vowel.  Every one.  There may be exceptions, but I know of none.  The second rule is that you always put the emphasis on the next to the last syllable.  So if you have two "e"s that run togther, as in mzee, you say both of them but emphasize the first.  This sounds like an elongated "e" with a slight bounce.  Oh yes, and the last rule is that Swahili vowels are pronounced like Italian or Spanish vowels.  So the Swahili "e" is more like the English long "a" without the dipthong, the thing we do when we place a short "i" on the end of the vowel.  Go ahead, say "a" and see what I mean.

Put all those rules together now and say "mzee" . . . . Well, okay, I didn't think you would get it right the first time, but a little practice and you'll be saying "old man" in Swahili like a Kenyan.  Oh, one other hint.  As a Kenyan once told me, when speaking Swahili (or, more properly, Kiswahili) it is all in the lips.  Get your lips working and your vowels pure and then I can teach you how to say, "Najua kiswahili ya kuomba maji".

By the way, use those rules with "Kwanzaa" and you will see that it is not even authentic in its common pronunciation.  What do you know.

Enough for tonight, I have to work tomorrow.  Kwa heri ya kuonana.

MzeeMartin