The quote was typed by hand from an actual paper book held in my very own hands. Funny how we assume instant gratification through links and forget about books.

"Take It Back" is a Democratic strategy book for this season, by James Carville and Paul Begala. I've had some discussions with Tom recently about my critique of the Republican side's playbook, "Painting the Map Red: The Fight for a Permanent Republican Majority", and Tom challenged me by asking if I'd ever read "Take It Back", implying that it was just as bad. I hadn't read it at the time, but picked it up yesterday, and found it to be night-and-day different. I'll be making more posts about it as time goes on.

I asserted you'd have to go back to McKinley to find a historical parallel, but that doesn't mean it's an exact parallel. Except for the intervention of time travelers, history never repeats itself exactly. What's interesting here is the same pattern of hubris powered by success in a "splendid little war" leading to a grim, unpopular war, that history judged as a tragic mistake and a terrible error in judgment. If you're missing the parallel, think of the pattern "Afghanistan, then Iraq".

To return to the point--and it really isn't the parallel between McKinley and Bush--I don't think that the label "liberal" to describe Bush's foreign policy is at all apt. He's departed from a foreign policy that's been developed over more than a half a century by both Liberal and Conservative Presidents, and as a result probably couldn't be labelled either conservative or liberal. Its basis in "cowboy diplomacy", expansionism, and riding roughshod over anyone who opposes it is more reminiscent of the time of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt than any time and policy since. A fundamental policy debate today is whether a 19th Century foreign policy really serves us well at the beginning of the 21st.