As Arthur says in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show, we're not panicking yet. This is still just the culture shock.

We don't see what liberals have to be so damn happy about. We can understand that the nutroots are marching through the streets and figuratively dragging nobles to the guillotine. That's the natural course for explosions of vulgar plebian resentment, and it's going to be a couple more weeks before "storming the Bastille" time becomes "revolution eating its children" time. Plus, it would be churlish to the Democratic base at least some celebration - they kind of earned it. Plus, they do need something to distract them from how they made Joe Lieberman, their most hated enemy, the one-man swing vote of the United States.

But what do real progressives - people who have thought out the relationship between their ideologies and their actions - have to be happy about? The Democrats rode to victory on a wave of isolationist, socially conservative, economically liberal Southern Democrats - or as we used to call them, coarse populists. So they get their incredibly unpopular immigration amnesty package passed and signed. Two things happen: (1) they lock in a black underclass for another few generations and (2) they help fill in the blank for the 2008 GOP talking point, "George Bush was a great President, but he made certain mistakes like __________ that the Democrats approved of and that you have to send us up there to fix". What happens after that? A minimum wage hike? Wow - that's really the stuff that revolutions are made of!

But - the smirking LA Times reader might say - now the Democrats are going to reign in Bush's war. To which we say: don't be an idiot. The US Congress doesn't get to set foreign policy. That's the executive's job. The Constitution is vague on many things, but upon that division of labor it is more or less clear - maybe in liberal Constitutions, the space where Article II usually goes has been cut out and replaced by the part that allows the government to grab private land for fun and profit. The Congress has oversight and control over the conduct of foreign policy, but no formal ability to set its course.

And what kind of control do they have? This is a great one. At their disposal is a single mechanism - the power of the purse strings. Oh, the House can indeed force the President to heed their demands - but to do that, they have to leverage their control over the defense budget. Or, as the GOP will describe it during the 2008 election, by "cutting money to our troops".

So that's what genuine, thinking liberals got. On the domestic side, their newly minted saviors are a mix of anti-abortion, anti-gay, social conservatives. On the foreign policy side, their leadership's vague talk about changing course in Iraq forces them to take a legislative stand against American soldiers while those soldiers are still in the field. The only thing worse in American politics than "cutting money to our troops" might be "killing babies", and they're not exactly on the right side of that rhetorical trope either (well, they are for us... but that's only because we support 5th trimester abortions). So maybe we haven't seen the last of Democratic Presidential candidates trying to talk their way out of voting for money to US troops stationed in Iraq - and that went so well last time.

We'd usually talk about how progressives shouldn't want to abandon the fight against political Islam anyway, what with Muslim courts now lashing rape victims for getting raped. But there's only so many times that one can go to that well before it just becomes repetitive. And depressing.

Previously: Anti-Semitism on the American Progressive Left, DKos Crazies Sure Are Crazy, Hezbollah Admits: Appeasing Violent Hatred Doesn't Decrease Violence or Hatred