How the Republicans Let It Slip Away

[Nightwing]

The great unraveling has finally ocurred!! This is a great read from the WaPo. Celebrate fellow DU'ers; Victory is close at hand!!
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The Republicans come to their present troubles from different directions: President Bush thought he was making a safe, pragmatic choice in nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, but this soulless maneuver enraged the party's right wing and set it on a fratricidal binge. Tom DeLay thought he was ramrodding a permanent Republican government, but he managed to get himself indicted and, well before that calamity, had angered House Republicans who concluded that "The Hammer's" leadership style was marching them off a cliff. Looming over all these little problems is the crucible of Iraq.

<snip>

What you sense now, as conservative and moderate Republicans alike take potshots at their president, is that the GOP is entering the post-Bush era. A war of succession has begun, cloaked in a war of principles. The cruelest aspect of Bush's predicament is that the conservatives are treating him with the same disdain they showed his father. What a denouement to the West Wing Oedipal drama: A son who did everything he could to avoid his father's humiliation by the conservative wing of the party is now under attack by the right himself.

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101321.html?nav=hcmodule

[henslee]

1. If the Repub. party is in shambles and so is the Dem.party, when will

there be a riper time for a viable third party?

[Kolesar]

2. gops seem pretty powerful to me right now

This is a zero sum game. The gops may have thrown a gutterball, but the power certainly has not gone to my party.

They get to pick a huge number of judges in the next three years. Those *-hole lawyers in EPA and Interior get to rewrite federal rules enabling development and destruction and there is not a goddamned thing that can be done to stop them.

[bemildred]

3. "Slip away" my ass.

Plunged heartily into the cesspool is more like it.

Here is Max Boot in the LA Times comparing Bush to Raygun
after Iran-Contra hit, AND spinning it as an optimistic
scenario for Bush:

The best analogy is to the Reagan administration. In the middle of his second term, the Gipper was mired in the Iran-Contra scandal. Conservatives were disenchanted over his unwillingness to cut domestic spending and his willingness to deal with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. In the 1986 midterm election, Democrats regained control of the Senate. The next year they torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the high court, leading Ronald Reagan to appoint Anthony Kennedy, who has earned right-wing ire. Yet all these setbacks turned out be mere footnotes to the Reagan presidency. By the time of his death last year, Reagan was universally lauded for winning the Cold War and reviving the economy.

Likewise, Bush's legacy will not be defined by who he put on the Supreme Court, how he responded to Hurricane Katrina or what he spent. Posterity will look at the bottom line — his record on peace and prosperity. And what will it find?

First, despite an accumulation of woes, including a devastating hurricane and soaring oil prices, the U.S. economy remains robust. According to the latest statistics, growth is at a healthy 3.3%, unemployment a low 5.1% and inflation an inconsequential 3.6%. On all but the latter, the U.S. is outpacing other industrialized countries. The euro area, for instance, is growing at a paltry 2%, and its unemployment rate is a hefty 9%. The economy is generally outside a president's control, but Bush's tax cuts helped produce our enviable record.

The second point, which is obvious but needs restating, is that there hasn't been any sequel to 9/11. None. That probably will change before long, but it's still pretty amazing that, four years after 9/11, the U.S. has not experienced any terrorist attacks on its soil (with the possible exception of the anthrax letters), while other countries that are lower-priority targets, including Britain, Spain and Indonesia, have suffered terribly. Some of it may be because of sheer luck, but Bush nevertheless deserves credit for aggressively fighting terrorism and keeping the United States safe — at least for now.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boot12oct12,0,5046605.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

[beltanefauve]

5. GOPee propoganda alert!!!

"First, despite an accumulation of woes, including a devastating hurricane and soaring oil prices, the U.S. economy remains robust. According to the latest statistics, growth is at a healthy 3.3%, unemployment a low 5.1% and inflation an inconsequential 3.6%. On all but the latter, the U.S. is outpacing other industrialized countries. The euro area, for instance, is growing at a paltry 2%, and its unemployment rate is a hefty 9%. The economy is generally outside a president's control, but Bush's tax cuts helped produce our enviable record."

Any mention of REAL WAGES here???

[Demeter]

8. What Bushshit!

He's not going to have any record worth mentioning, other than his prison record. The fraud perpetrated in the economic data alone ought to be worth a paragraph in history's pages.

[katty]

4. Yup! Arrogance fosters mistakes..OK to chill the champagne

[cwydro]

6. what is sad

is I don't think they are even in the least bit worried...

[loudsue]

9. Why should they worry? They own the voting machines...

Those little black boxes whose programming nobody gets to look into.

They try to "spin" that they're worried, and the voting machine owners may make sure they lose ONE house of congress, or the presidency in 2008. But they will NEVER NEVER NEVER let the Democrats take over BOTH houses of congress, unless the DLC is firmly in place. If REAL Dems were allowed to take both houses, they could come back and throw the whole lot of these assholes in jail!

As long as the DLC is there, the republicans are safe. That's why they fund the DLC. A bought Dem is a "safe" Dem.

:kick:

[Boo Boo]

7. "President Bush thought he was making a safe, pragmatic choice in

nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court..."

:wtf:

How do they come up with pablum like this? Pragmatic in what sense? Certainly not in the sense that she is in any way qualified to serve. Jeebers. OTOH, it is certainly a pragmatic choice in the sense that she is a fawning Bush toady that will unquestioningly back his brazen power grabs and gross abuses of the office of the Presidency.

But I doubt that is what this reporter was referring to.