Democrat is a noun, the name of their party. democratic is an adjective,

Hey me, (it’s not often that I get to talk directly to me, now that the guys in the white coats keep insisting I take those medicines), I’ve got to disagree with you there. The party is called the Democratic Party. There’s no grammatical reason why it can’t be an adjective – it’s modifying the noun “party.” It would be incorrect to call party members “Democratics,” which is why we use the noun “Democrat” to describe members. (And that’s where your point about “Republican” being both a noun and adjective comes into play.)

And in any event, the party’s formal name is the Democratic Party, so insisting it be called anything but that seems to me to be a case of unfairly editorializing. Calling it the “Democrat Party” isn’t quite as bad as the Internet name-calling of Dumbocrats and Rethuglicans, but it still seems a bit pointless to me.

fatman, you make an interesting comparison to Truman’s infamous “Do-Nothing” Congress. What would a Democratic Congress do? Well, I guess they’d take a stab at raising the minimum wage, a fairly pointless exercise which plays well. After that? They’ve got no unity on taking action the big issues of the day – Iraq, immigration, world trade, etc.

Plus, if the Democrats got control of both houses, how would the DU morons explain the Diebold machines suddenly working properly again?

Simple. They always did work. It’s just that in ’04, the Republicans were the highest bidder.;)

Seriously, Mark, consider this:

In 1946, after twelve years of uninterrupted control by the Democrats of both Congress and the Whitehouse and a long, debilitating war, the voters threw the Democrats out and elected Republican majorities to both Houses of Congress, putting Harry Truman in roughly the same position George Bush will be in if the Democrats win this November. The result?

The GOP wasn’t ready for primetime. Their platform was basically opposition to anything the Democrats did (sound familiar?). They got nothing done and two years later the Democrats returned to power, and except for the first two years of the Eisenhower administration, held both Houses until Ronald Reagan was elected. And Truman pulled off one of the greatest comebacks and upsets in this country’s political history.

Now the analogy isn’t perfect. This war hasn’t ended yet. And Truman wasn’t a lame-duck. But even if the Democrats do take both the House and Senate this year, it won’t be the end of the world. We’ll still have the Whitehouse. As for ’08, we’ll just have to go out and convince the voters that the GOP deserve to be returned to the majority again. And I have no doubt that our esteemed colleagues from the left side of the aisle will be doing what comes naturally to them; proving that the GOP deserve to be returned to the majority again

ain’t gonna happen.

the media can have their fictions, but they will remain fictions, no matter how hard they try to bring them from the page to reality. worst case scenario is a 2 seat loss in the Senate and an 8 seat loss in the House. And I think it’ll be a lot closer to the status quo on both counts.

Dales at RedState, the best diviner of polls I know of, sees a -1 Senate, and (I think) -3 in the House. I’d trust him over any so called expert.

Bush has been consistent in his policy, if the GOP recieves a slap in November the voters will be repudiating that policy, I believe the message will be “democracy for arabs was a noble ideal but it failed. Get out and let the barbarians slaughter each other, a thousand dead arabs is not worth one dead marine.”

In any case, a humble admission of fault in the face of voter anger is a much wiser policy for the repubs than the foul-mouthed, infantile temper tantrum the lefties threw when they lost. Shrug, take it like a man and prepare for ’08.

Also, thinking strategically, it’s good for the electorate to be able to register an exasperated protest vote in ‘o6 and get it out of their system rather than in ‘o8 where a republican rout would do real damage and maybe hand the whitehouse to the dems.

This is a complete inversion of where I was a few months ago, but now I’d say the Democrats have a better chance taking over the Senate than the House, assuming they can win the 2 open seat races in the South, topple DeWine, Santorum, Burns and Chafee (all but Chafee are currently trailing in the polls), hold Minnesotta and Maryland and keep Lieberman from caucusing with the Republicans when he inevitably knocks off Lamont in the general election. Its still a long shot, but they can do it.

It’s kind of silly and childish thing to do, and I don’t much care for it. Does it make any real difference? Well, the Democrats are obsessed with “framing” lately, so I understand why it would bug them, but I have a hard time believing people are really paying that much attention.