This is a hoot.

OJ.


http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?op...iew&id=2738&It
emid=188

May 8, 2009

Goodbye, GOP

BY JOY-ANN REID


Once upon a time, there were two relevant, functioning, political
parties.

The Democrats were the party of Tip O’Neill, Pabst Blue Ribbon, union
guys and the “rainbow coalition.

Republicans were the party of bosses who drink cognac, and Alex P.
Keaton.

The parties traded the White House five times between 1960 and 2000,
with the four Democrats and five Republicans who won the presidency
emerging from mixed geographies:

Ronald Reagan was once governor of “liberal California, Jimmy Carter,
of conservative Georgia.

There were Rockefeller Republicans across the Northeast, and “Reagan
Democrats in Detroit.

There was nothing particularly disturbing about either party (if you
discount Richard Nixon and Iran-Contra,) though both parties had their
share of scandals.

You knew at the end of the day that Democrats fought poverty and
Republicans fought taxes.

It was all so simple then.

Today, I’m not sure there are two functioning parties.

Democrats, who dominated Congress for most of the last 60 years, do so
again, having survived the “Republican Revolution of 1994 that
created Republican majorities in the House and Senate for the first
time since Eisenhower, and gave Republicans total control of the
federal government (thanks to the Supreme Court) in 2000.

Since then, something has gone terribly wrong with the GOP.

For starters, the party seems completely stumped by a popular
president, Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, it’s scrambling to both defend and distance itself from the
failed presidency of George W. Bush.

The economic mugging the Bush administration and Republican-controlled
Congress perpetrated on the country for six years was bad enough;

Mr. Bush was simply signing every bill his party put in front of him.

As for tax cuts that made about 400,000 very rich Americans even
richer, and the total economic collapse on the way out the door?

As Dick Cheney would say, stuff happens.

And then there are the Bush-era national security ideas that, while
they had the complicity of some weak-kneed Democrats after 9/11, are
now Official Property of the GOP.

Some of these ideas are so radical, they’re not recognizable as
American:

the all-powerful “unitary executive, indefinite detention without
trial, “sneak and peek searches of private homes, pre-emptive war,
warrantless wiretapping, and worst of all, torture specifically, the
kind of torture waterboarding made infamous by the Spanish
Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge, Maoist China and the Japanese and
Gestapo during World War II.

Add them to the list of Things Republicans are Defending, while
simultaneously declaring a 3-percent tax increase on the rich to be
“tyranny.

Even as they are haunted by the ghost of George W. Bush, Republicans
keep scaring up the ghost of Richard Nixon, as when former Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice told a group of Stanford students last week
that when the president authorizes waterboarding, it’s not torture.

Meanwhile, a raft of memos detailing torture techniques with cold
precision are in a sense, Bush’s “Pentagon papers.

Add to this baggage the outsized importance of the religious right,
and carnival barkers like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and “the boss
himself, Rush Limbaugh.

The requirement that elected Republicans swear fealty to both has only
accelerated the GOP’s transformation into a rump party with narrow
appeal and virtually no coherent national message.

And with the party’s political talent bench consisting of Sarah Palin,
folksy-talkin’ Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Britney Spears concert fan
Eric Cantor, bumbling RNC chair Michael Steele, and lately, Jeb Bush
whose last name is BUSH, it’s no wonder the religious muckrakers and
right-wing shock jocks have the floor.

Demographically, the GOP has all but disappeared from the West Coast
and the Northeast, and moderate Republicans are becoming an endangered
species.

After Sen. Arlen Specter’s convenient exit, there are exactly two
Republican senators from the entire northeastern region both from
Maine.

Just one in five Americans calls himself or herself a Republican,
according to the latest Washington Post/ABC and NBC News/Wall Street
Journal polls, and the party is practically walled into the South and
Appalachia.

Republicans have long since lost black voters, and they’ve also
spurned the fastest-growing ethnic group: Hispanics, due to a strange
obsession with erecting a Berlin Wall across the Mexican border.

The 219 Republicans in the current Congress include zero blacks, five
Hispanics (four of whom are from Florida) and one Jew: Rep. Eric
Cantor of Virginia.

And what’s the GOP’s answer to this tale of unending woe?

Tea parties.

Hurray.

___________________________________________

Harry
-- It's amazing what you can do. If... you put your mind to it.