In any normal country, there would be no particular reason to expect 2013 to be an awful year. The right-wing Presidential candidate, who preached austerity, family values, and military adventurism, was soundly defeated by the center-left candidate, who favored, well, austerity-lite, personal freedom, and a fiscally convenient “peace dividend.” Overconfident and overfunded Republicans were similarly trounced in the House and Senate, losing seats in both despite stunning structural advantages.

It seemed that the Right’s perennial hobby horses, from favoring the wealthiest above all others and demonizing minorities of every type, to demanding that every non-military expenditure be slashed to the bone, had clearly been sent to the glue factory by the electorate. Alas, things are never what they seem in Washington.

Another proud moment for Western Foreign Policy and its legacy.

Wonder what Willard, Huck and the Quitter are going to say after it passes in the Senate — since they all think gays in the military should stay in the closet.

None of Lieberman’s Republican buddies, on or off Capitol Hill, are backing Dennis Kucinich’s probe of Rahm Emanuel. These are the people that went ahead with impeaching Bill Clinton for trying to hide a few blow jobs that were none of their business, yet they won’t go after Obama’s right-hand man? How– curious. Why, you’d think that the Republicans liked seeing Rahm stay right where he is.

American Political Violence…It would hardly be a problematic issue if there were no American citizens out there who feel that it’s acceptable to settle a grievance at the barrel of a gun, or with fisticuffs or perhaps the more subtle rock thrown through a window belonging to an opponent. The McCain campaign seems to somehow be suffering from a distorted “50 first dates” syndrome…

How appropriate Sen. John McCain didn’t mention the words “middle class” in this week’s presidential debate—or in the first presidential debate.

Because as a proponent of and heir to the greedy, corrupt, rich-first regime of the past eight years, McCain and the conservative ideologues he’s trying to distance himself from to win the election, are reaping the rotten fruits of policies that have systematically devastated the sound financial foundations of America’s working families.

McCain’s weakness means we’ll see perhaps the most vicious right wing attack campaign yet in 2008. I blame Charlemagne, the birth of the belief in redemption through violence, and the right’s irony-free blindness to the fact that they are the today’s bad monkeys.

A recent New York Times profile casts John McCain as a tough guy for his response to the attacks of September 11. The fact that McCain was duped by the charlatan Ahmed Chalabi doesn’t seem to detract from the senator’s reputation as a straight talking maverick. For that matter, nobody outside the blogosphere seems terribly concerned that McCain’s top foreign policy and national security adviser was one of Chalabi’s closest American allies.

The Wire Service that Must Not Be Named is reporting that our old pal Maverick McMaverick is now saying that The Owner of Nope is probably, maybe sorta-kinda right about a phased in 16 month withdrawl (how do we rework that old Vietnam-era joke… withdrawl is something that George Sr. should have practiced with Barb about 62 years ago) from Eye-Rack.

Although I’ve expressed concern in the past that the public is absorbing their opinion of McCain from a fawning press and it’s hard to get any traction on him, I don’t think the extended primary is to blame. And like Digby, I don’t think the situation would be a whole lot better if the primary came to an end:

To me, this primary is actually a good thing for the fall.