WASHINGTON, Sep. 28 NEWS SUMMARY
Congressman Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) is sort of like Congressman Mike Pence (R-Indiana), only with courage.
(That's a joke intended largely for the two Congressman and their press secretaries.)
We refer you to the Honorable Mr. Flake's Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, in which the self-term-limited Member (no Nethercuttian reversal here) decries his party's inability to limit deficit-inducing spending.
One of Flake's subsidiary points is key: that his party is going to have to learn to be less reliant on spending without much of a threat of being punished at the ballot box in 2006.
Why is the threat virtually non-existent?
Flake writes, with an antiseptic non-fervor that nonetheless reveals the dirty little non-secret that explains why the Republicans Party is not panicking in the face of hurricanes-gas prices-Iraq: ". . . endemic Democratic ineptitude makes Republicans more attractive when graded on a curve."
It ain't a new point, we concede, but it nicely delineates the environment into which the President is about to launch a new Supreme Court nominee through the eye of the Democrat-media-Collins-Dobson needle.
Simply put: Nothing the Democratic Party is doing is putting fear into the hearts of the Republican Party.