If we win in '06 and '08, what do we win?

[bribri16]

Help me out here.

[NAO]

1. Less than we think, if the Courts are packed with Rightist Extremists

[Xipe Totec]

2. A chance to clean up a huge pile of elephant dung

and a chance to get blamed for giving the elephant the runs.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

3. The biggest mess to clean-up

It needs to be done some time. Better sooner than later.

[napi21]

4. Our name in history for having saved the Republic from

total failure!

I'm convinced that history will record the beginning of the 21st century as being the near failure of that great experiment called "The United States of America".

We will be recorded as the party that saved it!

[AX10]

5. Besides a bankrupt treasury, loss of trust, right wing judiciary...

etc...I don't know what else we'll get.

[wli]

6. crippling national debt, major financial, energy, climatological crises

Not to mention all the foreign hostility, a judiciary so right-wing it might as well be wearing SS uniforms instead of robes, and so on. An economic collapse may very well be unstoppable even within Bush's term, forget afterward.

There's a serious question in my mind as to whether we'll be allowed to win them even beyond that.

[WMliberal]

7. the chance to begin to unfuck America

[VOX]

8. The thankless job of being blamed for the fallout from BushCo's insanity..

When the "war is good for big business" bubble bursts, Democrats will be blamed. When extremists -- whose fanaticism has been quickened by the bloody invasion of Iraq -- finally take action, Democrats will be blamed. When the debt-load of having cut taxes for bloated corporations comes home to roost, Democrats will be blamed. And the Supreme Court will have a right-wing majority for decades. Things are so totally fucked up now, there's really not much to recommend in taking it all back.

And yet take it back we must. What's been done to this country is a tragedy, and what, in turn, this country has done to the world is a tragedy. **Sanity** needs to be re-introduced back into everyday life, for starters. It will be one of the biggest cleanup jobs in history, and there will be a horde of right-wing naysayers on the sidelines hampering every good effort. But if this country is to survive, the work must start somewhere. And 2006-2008 will mark the beginning. :thumbsup:

[Lexingtonian]

9. the GOP blowing up

:Boooom:

Seriously, they're at a point where they won't survive a major defeat. Everything's overleveraged politically. Only a greed and lust for power and an agreement between partners in crime to share it at Democrats' expense is holding them together. The greed and lust can't be changed, or the criminality. But when the power is lost the agreement fails too, and they'll start victimizing each other for the bit that is still in their possession.

I'm pretty sure the Christian Right disintegrates when that happens and the disgruntled hardcore social conservatives give up on national politics. (Well, they become rather like the Tories are in England now- they're so noxious all other parties' first priority becomes to prevent them from regaining power.) The GOP becomes a CEO/businessfolk party again.

As for what Democrats will do...90% of what they do will be clean up or utterly obviously the will of a majority, i.e. necessary. Locking up a solution to social issues in the law and the courts will go along with the Christian Right walking out of politics. As for economic issues, I don't think there are any options. Health insurance has to be investigated and reregulated, taxes re-progressed and restored on the wealthiest (America- love it or leave it). Iraq will take care of itself- like the economy, there will only be one course of action left to take. Bush will get the choice of signing bills Democrats pass or getting himself and Cheney investigated, impeached, and removed over concocting the WMD fraud- making Nancy Pelosi the President pro tempore....