"The duty of the opposition is to oppose." True enough, in a quasi-tautological way, but it begs the question. Just what is the point of political opposition?

In a free market system, consumers have choices. In a well functioning democracy, voters have choices. The point of choices is this: if one vendor's product isn't doing the job as well as you'd like, you switch vendors. If the old vendor doesn't like this, he'd better get his act together and start competing. Partisanship among voters is simply brand loyalty in the political realm, and every bit as stupid. Competition makes the free market work. Competition makes democracy work.

Except when we substitute opposition for competition.

In politics, the product is government. That means upholding the law, and securing citizens' rights and liberties against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The parties can best justify their existence by competing to do this better. But they're not. And that's the problem.

On September 11, 2001, an event occurred which woke half of our country out of its complacency, and pushed the other half into desperate denial and conspiracy theory mongering. Happily, the party in power catered to those who wanted to face reality and deal with the problem. George W. Bush may have his faults, but he's not so low as to let Islamist terror rule the world by default.

The Democrats had two choices at this point: compete or oppose. They chose to oppose. That means take the opposite position, automatically, regardless of merit, and then try to come up with a justification for it. They've been doing this for six years now.

(Well, not all of them. After the November 2006 elections, enough sane Democrats came into power that the immediate Iraq withdrawal the Left had hoped for never happened. But I'm speaking collectively, not categorically.)

This was a stupid, unthinking choice. Did it ever occur to them to concede that previous approaches to dealing with terror simply weren't working, and a more tough minded approach was clearly called for? No. Their first, last and only thought was to oppose, and try to put the government out. This is the most criminal failure of moral imagination our country has seen since the politicians cut and ran from southeast Asia. Maybe even the worst since the abandonment of Reconstruction.

The out party having decided not even to try to compete, it would make no effort to come up with any constructive criticism, nor to outdo the in party in dealing with the Islamist problem. Instead, they opposed, the only way they could - by denying the problem and trying to change the subject. Here the Left was useful in showing them how to do it. But it never occurred to them to ask *whether* to do it.

And now they've got a problem. Opposition has been losing traction lately. The surge shows signs of real progress, the Petraeus report backs it up, and what can the Democrats do? They're irrevocably committed to opposition - not by principle, or by circumstances, but by their own inability to conceive of any alternative. Lately, they're getting desperate. They attack the surge before it begins. They attack Petraeus with increasing shrillness. Their Leftist friends blunder by slamming Petraeus even *before* he's made his report, with an unhinged full page ad in the New York Times. The Democrats are visibly embarrassed by this, but they can't distance themselves from these freaks. They don't know how.

If there's anything to be learned from the Republican scandals of 2005-2006, and from the ongoing Shamnesty battle, it's that we need competition. Instead, what we've got is opposition. I see a major upheaval coming in our two party system. I doubt if either major party will survive in its current form. They're both awfully low on political capital.

The duty of the opposition is to oppose. But the duty of the out party is to compete. Our enemies provide opposition enough.

Oh, and about that phrase: "loyal opposition." What exactly is a loyal opposition, anyway? Anyone know? I know what friendly competition is, but I've never seen anything I could describe as a loyal opposition. Unless they're loyal to our enemies.


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They didn't dare oppose him openly at that moment in time. That very, very brief moment in time. But as soon as the polls blew over...