...in the 1990s. Government shutdown, a bogus impeachment, unending persecution of both Clintons -- by now my feelings toward the GOP range from anger to outright fear.

As far as presidential elections go, they win some and lose some, but as long as the GOP controls the Congress they continue to do incredible damage at all levels of government, all the while telling their lizard-brained base that government cannot work and that the elites are screwing them over.

I don't know what's to become of us as a nation. For one thing, we need two parties that function by agreeing on certain core principles of governance. For a very long time -- 30 years or so -- we have not had that.

I am reduced to hoping that Trump and the GOP obliterate each other this year, and stay obliterated for a long time. When it comes to how they managed to get Trump for a nominee, I understand how he eliminated his competition one by one. We all watched it. What I don't understand is how and why none of those 16 other candidates did oppo research on Trump at the outset. That was just insane.

I'm looking forward to the encounter on Sunday evening -- if Trump shows up, it should be epic.

As a former history teacher, he thought he'd try to make some of his own, and failed miserably, except in one category. He demonstrated that with a leadership united in evil intentions, the Congress can be perverted and diverted from its constitutional purpose of legislating, acting as a check on the executive, and the "advice and consent" function for presidential nominees. From Gingrich onward, every Republican speaker and Majority leader has shown anything from a tendency to an outright obsession toward obstruction for the sole purpose of thwarting a Democratic president.

In the case of the Garland nomination, the Republican Party has done a perfect imitation of a savage satire on world politics by Peter Ustinov from the year 1960. In one section, the book is showing how diplomats of various countries record a "NO" vote, and Ustinov shows the diplomats (all played by himself) all explaining their positions. For example, the "no" vote from the USA shows the American diplomat frowning, saying "The unexpected support of the Soviet Union for our motion is one of the most callous, cynical....." The negative attitude of the Congressional Republicans of late resembles the "No" vote of the diplomat from France, who stands scowling with his arms folded, saying: "Since France was not consulted about the subject under discussion, we now refuse to be told what that subject is."

Very easy: Ustinov's Diplomats. I checked, and Amazon had a used copy for sale.

Make sure you aren't drinking or eating anything. You will be sputtering with laughter!

The Democratic party will have a historic chance to put this country back on the path it departed from long ago.

We need to be a country not just for the white and rich, but a country for ALL people!

The American Imperial Age needs to end like it should have back at the end of the Cold War.

This country needs a massive rebuilding effort NOW!

I think their last relatively reasonable candidate was '56 Eisenhower, even he didn't like Nixon. The embryonic birch society was just starting to form, and didn't have the firm grip it has since gotten on the party. It built that grip up through raygun and poppy's admins, and solidified it under little bush. It's mainstream, inside the tent, since '08.

In their fury after Watergate, and as a rebranding attempt, the repugs politicized religion, and launched both the ''pro-life'' movement and turned the NRA into a far right political propaganda and lobbying powerhouse. 2 factors that allowed the existence of some reasonable repub elected officials during that period was their Murdoch machine was just ramping up, and the Dems controlled the House of Reps for a long time, which gave moderate Rs some breathing room.

The small number of reasonable republican house and senate members were slowly winnowed out in the '80's, and the last few were gone under little bush. There's no where for them to get their next reasonable or moderate qualified candidates. They don't have any governors who aren't birch-like crazy fascist and crooked, and their private sector stars have been universally extreme crooked and nuts, too.

On McCain, he was the only repug among the Keating Five, the other 4 powerful, long serving, well known Dem Senators all wound up out of office, and he's the only one who got to stick around. The repugs created the S & L rip offs, and benefitted from them, financially, then politically, when the Dems were the only ones who paid the price for taking money from S&L thieves. (Post Watergate, investigations into Abscam and Koreagate ''scandals'' targeted Dem pols to eliminate the repugs' competition the same way.)

About Gingrich the "historian", I remember when he tried to appoint a holocaust denier as House Historian, and also remember his amusing little "historic fiction" book where the 3rd reich won WWII.

He was in DC for 50 years, but his papers were one-horse towns along the St. Lawrence Seaway. So he knew all the NY congressional delegation. Javits, Rockefeller, all those guys good and bad. He was friends with NY senators as diverse as Bobby Kennedy and Al D'Amato. After Javits and Charlie Goodell, the roster of reasonable Republican Senators from NY (and Jim Buckley was one in spirit if not in Party label) declined to zero. Their party took a while to decline completely on a national level, but by the time 1980 came around, Bush, Sr. was close to the last hold-out. He had his chance, but his handling of the economy (what Reagan left of it, that is) and the lasting resentment over his approval of the Willie Horton ads, among other factors, left the country in the mood for some fresh faces and voices. The Clintons had the luxury of coming along at the right time. Had Bill Clinton and Mike Dukakis switched years to be the Democratic presidential candidate, I'm fairly sure Bush, Sr., would have defeated Clinton in 1988, and Dukakis would have become president in 1992.

Gingrich, though ever more odious of late, had moments of lucidity in his time as Speaker. In early March, 1995, Clinton had a low point, depressed over the big Republican victory in the 1994 mid-terms that brought Gingrich the Speaker's gavel. His re-election was suddenly being publicly doubted. During the Gridiron show in Washington in March, when Clinton had the room spellbound and in stitches of laughter, Gingrich was seated next to my mom, leaned over and told her, "anybody who thinks this guy is going to be a pushover in next year's election is fooling themselves."

Last edited Wed Oct 19, 2016, 09:07 AM - Edit history (2)

The inside view of the NY delegation is interesting. Nationally, in terms of moderate gopers, there are a few anomalies where people like McClure, Hoekstra, Frank Murkowski popped up and said something reasonable or moderate, occasionally. Probably they were representing financial interests that are competing with those bad republican ones that they reasonably were attacking. It looks like the last hold outs for moderate republican pols came from the Pacific Northwest and the New England North East. Snowe and Collins got progressively more right wing and unreasonable as time went by, though. Chafee and Jeffords were probably the last high profile gasps of the N.E. moderate Rs. People tried to laud my Sens Specter and Heinz as moderate, but they were so abysmally unreasonably repug, 70% of the time.

In rank and file terms, what's really keeping PA blue in Prez elections is the republican suburbs around Philly and Pgh, while every other "rust belt Dem majority used-to-be reliably blue voting" county -- in the 6 to 9 county west side "underarm" below the low population rural T etched out by red colored counties -- all those old blue counties in my "underarm" end have gone red, in the last 3 prez elections. Like McConnell's Kentucky, we have a strong majority Dem registration in almost all of them. We're losing in all those counties, and only the moderate rank and file suburban Rs are preserving our wins. I don't know why those voters don't switch registration to the Dem party, but at least they're voting "moderately". I believe that we're losing the other Dem counties around here because the region's party officials have been co-opted, but that's just an opinion.

Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry all lacked fiery surrogates, though I backed them all. We have a lot of good ones, this time around.

Gingrich may very well have the ability to think and analyze political realities lucidly. But he's not only completely, criminally without ethics and morals, he's also often gone off into some insane sci-fi orbit, mentally. Talking about zero g sex, or saying that inner city people would all become entrepeneurs and rise economically via high tech, tech boom computer activities, either part of the information economy, or by using computer connectivity to sell their ''wares". He's a nasty, socially darwinistic space case, and was on the government dole his whole life, until he switched over to the campaigning flim-flam industry.

Poppy bush was always a very immoral, hard right oil-energy-banking-intel flunky. Poppy giving pro-Rev Moon speeches puts him in the category of dangerous rightie nutjob, even if he didn't believe what he was saying. The moonies' cartoon-reality fascism is matched exactly by that of the current repug party-dominating birchers. It is interesting to see the apparent division between old line connecticut nazis like bush and Buckley, and extremist bircher repugs. To me, the bottom line regarding that division is three part:

1) Murdoch is a creation of US intel, his far right propagandic media empire has Aussie organized crime connections, and that organized crime got its massive boost and trajectory from US intel Golden Triangle drug money laundering operations in Australia, as exhibited by the Nugan Hand bank. That Murdoch tabloid/Fox kind of far right propaganda drove the popularization of both today's bircher dominated repug party and Poppy/Buckley's political ideas. There's no schism or fight there.

2) Poppy and Buckley were both intel people from far-right oil interests, just like the bircher Hunt family and Koch brothers. Both George and Bill lied publicly about their intel membership for decades. Both Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom and gop Senate candidate Poppy were rubbing elbows and bumping uglies with the extemist bircher elements swirling around Dallas and inveighing against Kennedy up until his November '63 visit. No friction existed between the old connecticut right and the new crazy zany spacecase bircher right. You should check out the different groups that YAF alums have spawned. Unsurprisingly, the bircher Koch brother-promoted ALEC was founded by a former YAFer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Americans_for_Freedom

3)The birchers are just a rebranding effort for pre-WWII era nazi-backing repug party dead enders; "can't say we love hitler anymore, but we can push his ideas". Of course, poppy's dad was intimately involved with the nazis. The far right part of our intel existed before the big post war developmental boom of our Intel apparatus; the Birchers first emerged in the late '50's, but were named after some religious rightie who got executed as an intel agent, by China. The righties in our intel represent regressive money and power interests, who say they deserve, and who receive, a seat at the table in controlling some aspects of our intel apparatus. The birchers were founded by right regressive money and power interests, and promote the exact same philosophies and goals that rightie intel does, even if they do it in a Murdoch / National Enquirer style. (Wanna take a guess about who founded the Enquirer?) Did intel found the birchers, or did the big money righties, who founded and control the right wing part of our intel, found the birchers? Same results, in the end. The same discussion could be had regarding the crazy bircher-oriented fundy christian political movement, post-Watergate.

The only beef I see between old line types like Poppy and Buckley and new fangled open bircher righties is that the former group says "we're the pros, who are these wacky amateurs?", though after all both groups are servant class. But the former group has used the latter, often, as tools, and both serve the same interests, and there is no daylight between the 2 groups in philosophy and policy goals. (Though they may disagree about lizard aliens, fluoridation, Moon is Jesus, etc.) The split seems to only be around the old guard whining that "we're not crazy, we should be the servants in charge of carrying out the exact same crazy concrete nazi policies we agree with the birchers on. Though we've used the birchers' craziness ourselves, to advance the goals we share in common with them. We never believed all that zany stuff they believe, that we held a candle to."

What the old guard Poppys and Buckleys should realize is that they can't really have that argument with the kooky deranged cavemen birchers, who are the ascendant servant class of the same interests the old guard serves. Because the counter argument is just "Ug. Og smash with rock."

To Reagan in the '80s. Incompetent but made it through due to his acting skills. Oh and criminal activities of his team holding back Iranian hostages.

And then there was Bush, Sr. By 2000, they had dropped all pretense.

This is the Republican Party that Goldwater bequeathed to posterity.

His vision was more in tune with Rockefeller, or, a decade later, Gerry Ford. Nixon made nasty and crazy their standard, and JFK beat them out of it. LBJ let Vietnam and that war's promoters defeat him and re-install Nixon, who institutionalized the evil Republican presidency, but didn't make it eternal. That goal, as I see it, was established during Bill Clinton's presidency. Only the mess left by Cheney (dba Bush Lite) ensured Obama's cake walk of 2008, and even then, the insertion of Roberts and Alito during Cheney's reign onto the SCOTUS was the first move toward making Citizens United the law of the land. It probably didn't even have a name at the time, but you can't convince me it wasn't a major topic when Cheney was interviewing candidates for the Supreme Court when W had his 2 chances to nominate new Justices.

And how well has it worked out for them since Reagan?