The mid-term elections 2006
The Democrats take both the House and the Senate

Added on December 14, 2006
In the 23rd southwestern Texas District, the Democrat Ciro D. Rodriguez has defeated the Republican Henry Bonilla. The Democrats control now 233 seats in the House, the Republicans only 202.

Article added on November 13, 2006  
It took the majority of American voters until the mid-term elections 2006 to realize that the current president is the worst and most incompetent anybody alive has witnessed. The Bush Administration has a disastrous record, at least in the fields of defense and foreign policy.  Too many Republicans have followed their leader for too long like sheep.

When the Republicans conquered the Congress in 1994 and, even more so, after they took the White House with George W. Bush, they claimed to occupy the moral high ground. After 9/11, they wanted to spread democracy and human rights in the Middle East. Instead, they brought torture and chaos.

Bush should have fired and even indicted both Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. Instead he chose to appoint Alberto Gonzales as the new Secretary of Justice, rewarding one of the key figures in the torture scandal with a top job. Bush himself will be accountable for the torture scandal, if not to a judge, at least to history.

In Afghanistan, the situation is not encouraging with the Taliban on the rise and heroin production on record levels. In Iraq, US troops have been unable to restore order once they changed the regime and captured Saddam Hussein. North Korea has executed a nuclear test and Iran risks to develop such a weapon in the future.

The Rumsfeld doctrine, putting emphasis on high tech weapons, air strikes and highly mobile forces, has not worked out in Iraq. It seems that the Secretary of Defense even wanted to invade and control Iraq with as less as 60,000 soldiers. In the end, some 130,000 to 160,000 troops were sent into the country. They are unable to control the territory and they cannot count on the support of the population, a key factor in order to successfully combat insurgents and terrorists. The Powell doctrine, named after the former Secretary of State, put the emphasis on an overwhelming force, with a key element being ground forces. In the case of Iraq, the military requested some 400,000 troops.

The balance sheet of the Bush administration would be even worse if the senators John Warner and John McCain had not had the courage to stand up against their president who wanted to legalize torture. Still, the Bush Administration has managed to produce the worst moral disaster since Vietnam and Watergate, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo being two infamous keywords in this matter. The worst of all, thousands of innocents have paid with their lives for the incompetence of the US leaders. A revealing detail: President George W. Bush only learned after his 'axis of evil' speech from exiled Iraqis that there is a religious divide in Iraq between Sunnites and Shiites.

After the mid-term elections of November 2006, the Republicans have lost both the House and the Senate to the Democrats; in the Senate two Independents will be allied with the Democrats, giving them a 51:49 lead over the Republicans.

Since President Bush's Waterloo was largely due to the mishandling of the war in Iraq, after having refused  Rumsfeld to resign twice, this time the president had to replace the Secretary of Defense, last but not least in order to allow a fresh start in his relations with the Democratic opposition which now controls the Congress. Still, Bush looks pretty much like a lame duck for the rest of his term.

In the 2004 election, the Democrats run with the slogan 'Anybody but Bush' - and lost. In November 2006, they were still unable to present a coherent alternative, but the public was fed up with the current administration to the point that it did not matter anymore.

In addition to the foreign and defense policy disasters, less than a decade after Clinton's impeachment for a minor affair with an intern, the Republicans and the Conservative and Evangelical right also lost the moral high ground in domestic affairs. Some scandals also touched the Democrats, but at their epicenter were the Republicans, last but not least because they controlled power.

After the scandals surrounding the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, of which the Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay became a prominent victim in a campaign funding affair, came the ones regarding pederasty and gay sex implicating Mark Foley and Ted Haggard.

At the same time hundreds of billions of dollars fizzled out in Iraqi sand, without yielding any peace dividend. The fact that the U.S. unemployment rate sank to 4.4% in October was not a sign positive enough because it was upset by a slowdown of the economy in the third quarter of 2006 to an unexpected growth rate of only 1.6%, mainly due to a 17.4% slump in house sales.

Since the administration has been unable to deliver both on the domestic and the foreign affairs front, it is no wonder its representatives in both the House and the Senate had to pay the price.