From his column in today's Post: "In the primary, Lamont found his most prominent support on the far-left flank of the Democratic Party. His organization was a hand-me-down from the Howard Dean presidential campaign, bolstered by a blizzard of Internet blogs from outside his home state. His roster of visiting campaigners was uniformly of the same political slant--notably Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Rep. Maxine Waters of California."

How, then, does Broder account for 52% voting for Lamont, with a very high turnout for a non-presidential primary in August??

I guess they must have been brainwashed by all those soft-on-national-security, far-left Deaniacs and bloggers.

Broder has never been remotely fair to Howard Dean, always painting him as a radical left candidate when his record as Governor of Vermont and as a presidential candidate wholly belied that. He shares the MSM cluelessness and dismissiveness not only of the blogosphere but to feelings of disgust with Republican-run Washington that are widespread in the country, not something Howard Dean or bloggers could concoct out of whole cloth.

I respected him more back in the days when his counsel consistently, with respect to threats to the newspaper business in particular, was always words to the effect of: provide value and you will have an audience. I suggest that he and far too many of the Washington pundit class are caught in a time warp.

He notes later on: "The opposition to current policy in Iraq is building--and so is dissatisfaction with a Washington that seems to be drowning in partisanship and incapable of breaking its policy gridlock on immigration, energy or health care...In this environment, incumbents of neither party can feel safe."

Opposition to policy in Iraq building? No kidding! Where has he been? It's been substantial for several years now. Pity it has taken Tuesday's election results for him to notice. Perhaps if 80% of the public decides enough is enough so long as there is no apparent viable plan in place, that would really get his attention and keep him from dismissing critics of the war as the loony left and its dupes.

Note as well the dissatisfaction he senses not with the Republican party, which controls the federal government, but with Washington writ-large. It wouldn't be, say, extreme partisanship by the party in power, an utter failure of leadership at the level of the President, and a simple lack of any serious interest in dealing with any of these issues by the Republican party that might account for the unresponsiveness in Washington, would it? No--it's Washington writ large that is the problem. It's the usual double standard: when things are going badly under the Democrats, it's the Democrats' fault. When things are going badly when the Republicans are running things, it's Washington's fault.

The disgust is real, it is widespread, and it is not going away until some changes are made. Oblivious until now, apparently, of these developments, Broder drips with condescension and smugness towards those who reflect them.

This past weekend's Washington Post Book World contains reviews of two books on Iraq. I am struck by contrasting accounts of the relationship between Sunni and Shia Iraqis prior to the war in these two reviews.

One review is of Peter W. Galbraith's The End of Iraq, by the Post's David Ignatius.

The other is of Fouad Ajami's book The Foreigner's Gift, by R. Steven Humphreys, a professor of ME history and Islamic studies at UC Santa Barbara and author of Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age.

Galbraith argues there is no good solution to the mess. He believes if the US scales back its ambitions it can help stabilize parts of the country and contain the civil war, if it acts quickly. He believes that, looking at Iraq's 80 year history, it has been the effort to hold it together that has been destabilizing.

Ignatius pushes back on letting go of the idea of an Iraqi state: "...the reality is that the old Iraq was a genuinely heterogeneous society, with Sunnis and Shiites sharing neighborhoods, inter-marrying, even being members of the same tribes. Saddam Hussein's regime was built on the idea of 'Arabism', a shared identity that transcended religious and ethnic fault lines--by force, if necessary. Still, this ideology was remarkably successful. It's common now for analysts like Galbraith...to say that this Iraqi Arab identity was fused at the point of a gun, but that misses the yearning for modernism and secular society that animated the educated middle class in the old Iraq. The only group that always remained outside this national consensus, in my experience, was the Kurds."

Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is described by Stevens as an alienated Arab intellectual, born to a Shiite family in south Lebanon.

Stevens: "Throughout, Ajami emphasizes the way that his fellow Shiites (in Iraq in particular and the Arab world in general) are seen by Sunni Arabs--as a foreign, unassimilated element in Arab society and culture. They are not real Arabs but quasi-Iranians, Persian stalking horses characterized by dissimulation, un-Islamic heresies and emotional religiosity. They are regarded with condescension and contempt but also with fear and sometimes (as among Sunni jihadists like the murderously anti-Shiite Abu Musab al-Zarquawi) virulent hatred. For Ajami, the Sunni-dominated insurgency is simply a Sunni refusal to accept the inevitable democratic consequences of empowering Iraq's Shiite majority."

So which is it? Have Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq in recent decades tended to get along remarkably well...or not so well? How full was the glass?

Ignatius has been to Iraq many times. A not so wild guess is that, where he has stayed in homes, he has tended to stay in the homes of journalists and other middle class professional types--a significant but still small minority of Iraqis prior to the war, no doubt. He does not say the heterogeneity was typical of Iraq as a whole, just this subset of its population. What he may not have sufficiently appreciated is that a small number of people committed to terror can get a very large snowball rolling rapidly when there is no government security presence to deter or reign in matters in their early stages.

Ajami's perspective on Sunni treatment of Shiites is no doubt strongly felt and driven by many personal experiences. I am left to wonder when was the last time he lived in Iraq, or visited for some stretch of time?