"They take their right to privacy seriously"

Always useful to have these pundit accountability momements. Here's David Broder the week after George Bush's reelection...

before throwing yourself over a cliff or emigrating to Sweden, consider a couple of things.

George W. Bush was reelected by 51 percent of the people. His first significant action following Election Day was to retain Andrew Card, a Massachusetts-based business moderate, as his chief of staff.

His second was to accept the resignation of John Ashcroft, the hero of the religious right and the favorite bogeyman of civil libertarians, as attorney general. Ashcroft's replacement, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, will receive close scrutiny from Democratic senators, but almost all of them who commented said they welcomed the choice.

That's a funny way to start "another dark age."

Republicans will hold 55 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Among them are many, including such conservatives as Pat Roberts and Thad Cochran, whom I would trust to defend my journalistic freedom -- or Dowd's -- no matter how much they disagreed with what we wrote. I can count two dozen Senate Republicans who have experienced with their own families and friends the pain of mental or physical illness, or poverty, or racial or sexual discrimination.

Do you think they would stand silent while a vendetta against any of those groups was carried out?

Republicans won 53 percent of the seats in the House. Their caucus is dominated by conservatives, but -- this may come as a shock -- all conservatives are not of one mind. Freed from the constraints of a presidential election year, some of them will pester Bush to get serious about budget deficits. Some will urge him to take a cue from Arnold Schwarzenegger and rethink his restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. And some self-described "real right-wingers" from states as red as Idaho will insist on changes in the USA Patriot Act before it is renewed, because they take their right to privacy seriously....

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