Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Kerry "keeping hopelessness alive"

Wesley Pruden:

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Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of the new government in Iraq, went to Congress yesterday to extend his nation's gratitude, to "thank America" for the liberation. Old Europe and the Old Democrats sneer, but he sounded sincere, grateful and humbled by the American sacrifice.
Despite struggles and setbacks, he said, "the values of liberty and democracy are taking hold."
"We could hold elections tomorrow in 15 of 18 provinces ... . The insurgency in Iraq is destructive, but small, and it has not and will never resonate with the Iraqi people."
Members of Congress leaped to their feet several times to applaud; even some Democrats in the chamber seemed moved by the authentic emotion of the moment. This gravely undercuts Monsieur Kerry's determined mission to "keep hopelessness alive." He scoffs that Mr. Allawi — who might not even speak French — is little more than a feisty terrier sent by George W. to bark at Congress.
Monsieur Kerry imagines American voters are longing for dreary pessimism and morbid despair. Ronald Reagan set the standard for success with his flags, bunting, stirring music and his invocation of "morning in America." The monsieur thinks it's time now for "mourning in America," and for crepe, funerary music and doleful obsequies at the burial of the dream of better days in the Middle East.

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Monsieur Kerry was particularly upset by the prime minister's reassurance that elections would be held in Iraq in January, as scheduled. The latest Kerry campaign, reconstituted for the third time, is premised on the prospect of unremitting disaster in Iraq. "The United States and the Iraqis have retreated from whole areas of Iraq. There are no-go zones in Iraq today. You can't hold an election in a no-go zone."
Neither Monsieur Kerry nor his men (and women) appear to get it. Americans have never warmed to messages of despair. The Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Crow would still be hunting buffalo, undisturbed on the high plains, if the early European settlers had not been drawn to the new world by optimism, hope and cheerful confidence in their ability to accomplish the difficult, the arduous and the impossible. John Kerry would have been waiting at Plymouth Rock to warn them to go home, that the Indians would eat them if the wild beasts didn't. (Fortunately for all of us, on the day the Mayflower sailed into Plymouth, he was wind-surfing off the coast at Cannes.)