The late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a commander during the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt in 1967. 

We join our story in progress:  By nightfall, Sharon’s forces had advanced three-quarters of the way from Abu Agheila to Nakhl. Their progress had been extremely difficult and slow, following the course of a wadi through the desert. Their average speed for much of the way had been a snail’s pace of 3 mph. As they continued their advance by night, they ran into a minefield and lost one of their armored troop-carriers. Sharon decided to halt their advance for the night. . . .

At dawn, as they advanced on, they suddenly came face to face with a whole brigade of Stalin tanks, much more powerful than their own tanks.  Behind the tanks were several large self-propelled guns. The Israeli tanks charged into battle,  but the Egyptian tanks, strangely, made no move at all. The Israelis couldn’t believe what they were seeing: every tank was intact but their accompanying troops had left.  Later, after the battle, Sharon spoke with the commander of this Egyptian tank brigade, who had been taken prisoner.

He told Sharon that he did not believe his armored brigade could resist the Israeli attack (although he had no idea of the size of the Israeli force) so he had decided to escape with all his men without even stopping to blow up his tanks.

He sorrowfully told Sharon:

You spoiled all my plans.

The Egyptian, El-Naby, said that on Tuesday night, he heard the noise of a large body of tanks coming up on his position nearby. The tanks in fact turned out to be an Egyptian armored brigade that was also moving up from the west about which he had not been told.

On Wednesday night, El-Naby again heard tanks advancing toward him. By now he had been informed of the Israeli advance, and, afraid that he was about to be attacked, he decided to abandon all his tanks and artillery and withdraw his men in half-tracks westward toward Bir Thamada, which he believed was still in Egyptian hands.

A grinning Sharon replied:

 It wasn’t.  Our boys were already there.

After a brief battle with the Israelis, El-Naby skipped out on his troops and, taking with him a lieutenant-colonel and a major, headed south-west on foot.

In an interview with Charles Mohr of the New York Times, when asked why he did not destroy his tanks, he said:

I had orders to withdraw. My orders did not say to destroy my tanks. . . . If I had blown up the tanks the Jews would have heard me. It makes a lot of noise to destroy a tank.

El-Naby said that the first part of his withdrawal took place ‘in very good order’ with his troops still organized by units and responding to discipline. The trouble happened at a road junction in the central desert when Brigadier El-Naby’s men hit what he called an ‘ambush’ or an Israeli roadblock:

Because of the ambush we had to take different roads and head for the Mitla Pass further south.

Why didn’t he try to fight his way through the roadblock?

He said:

That was impossible.

An Israeli captain who was monitoring the conversation broke in:

Why? What kind of force and weapons do you suppose we had in that roadblock?

The Egyptian replied:

Well.  I heard light machine guns and I think I heard .50-calibre heavy machine guns.

The Israeli captain threw his hands and eyes upward and said:

You had a whole brigade and we held the roadblock with light forces. (A brigade is 3000 to 5000 men.)

El-Naby Said:

Yes , but you must remember that I had left the tanks behind. . .

At the Mitla Pass, the brigade fell to pieces, although it was not in contact with enemy forces.

The Egyptian added:

I lost all my order at the Mitla.  Everyone wanted to flee for his own skin. All vehicles were abandoned and the men set off on foot to cross the mountains to the west.

Many of the Egyptians discarded their weapons, helmets and much of their personal equipment.  Brigadier El-Naby left in such a hurry that he did not take any food or water with him when he started his own trek.  He was asked whether he attempted to keep any men under his command with him. He answered:

No, no. As I said, everyone wanted to save his own skin.

Some accounts say it was a desert mirage that caused El-Nady to see hundreds of Israeli tanks where there were no more than a dozen.  The Israelis will tell you that it was Divine Intervention.

On November 3, 2008 , in an article for the New York Times titled The Republican Rump, Economist Paul Krugman said:

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

On Tuesday, November 2, 2010,  a Political Tsunami, fueled by a Conservative awakening, is scheduled to sweep Conservatives back into political relevancy, thanks to the failed policies of a tone-deaf president who said the following while on a trip to Turkey:

Now Progressives will say that Tuesday’s Midterm Elections, predicted to be the biggest Congressional sweep since 1894, is nothing more than a cyclical event that happens all the time.  However…there are  a lot of Americans who have spent a lot of time on their knees before their Creator (You remember Him:  The One who gave Americans our inalienable rights?) who know better.