Braxton Bragg on the wave

It seems to me that the best comment on the 2014 mid-term elections came from General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A., who made the comment in 1863.  Reviewing the outcome of the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a battle in which the Confederate Army of Tennessee got its clock cleaned by the Union Army of the Cumberland, General Bragg wrote to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States that “the disaster admits of no palliation and is justly disparaging to me as a commander.”  He then spent the rest of the letter explaining why the disaster wasn’t entirely his fault.  I thought of this while watching the former junior senator from Illinois trying to explain why the Democratic unpleasantness that occurred on Tuesday had nothing really to do with him. He may actually believe this, although he may still be trying to process what just happened.  I have often thought that our Illinois Incitatus appears to think of his current office as being akin to being the Mayor of Chicago, except with better golf courses and nuclear weapons.  For any Mayor of Chicago, the Republicans are something of an abstraction; you know that such people exist somewhere, but they are not anyone you have to deal with and they are certainly not people whose opinions you have to give any consideration.  For our prairie solon, the first two years of his term must have seemed like a golden age, a time when He was the master of all he surveyed, but all such ages must come to an end, and now his enemies surround him like paparazzi on a red carpet.  I think that it’s going to be an interesting two years, yes I do.