Ugly: The Future of the Republican Party
by David Michael Green | June 13, 2008 - 11:29am
Republicans are going down.
Let me say that again (‘cause it feels so good): Republicans are going down. Hard.
A tsunami this way cometh, and it’s got GOP loaded in its GPS.
Apart from the fact that the Democrats are about to nominate a black candidate in a still racist white country, there could hardly be a more perfect storm of Republican-focused discontent imaginable in 2008. And Obama’s color may actually turn out to be a neutral factor, or even a net gain. African Americans are going to come out in droves to vote for him, possibly even putting certain Jim Crow states, such as North Carolina, into play for the Democrats for the first time since the civil rights movement. Moreover, young people are going to turn out and vote in huge numbers this year, and it won’t be John McCain who is the glimmer in their eyes. And then there are the angry people – which is just about all of the rest of us – who are going to be voting in big numbers as well. They may not necessarily be voting for Obama, but they will be gleefully voting against anything on the ballot stupid enough to have an R after its name (and there will be one helluva lot less of those, by the way, in 2010 than in 2008).
This is the year in which Republicans are going to come to join the rest of us in their levels of affection for George W. Bush. They are the only constituency whom he hasn’t yet taken over a cliff, but that will change on November 4th. Bush won’t be on the ballot. He will be the ballot. Every angry American (hey, only a record-breaking 82 percent of us think the country’s on the wrong track) will be thinking about how much gas costs, about how their expenses are going up, their income is stuck in neutral and their job is headed for India. They’ll be thinking about two wars turned into twin debacles, and the lies associated with them. They’ll be thinking about the dead bodies, the stink of torture, the tortured reputation of their country, and the people who made all of that possible. They’ll be thinking about the mountain of national debt their kids are gonna have to pay back, plus interest, so that the fantastically wealthy in this country could matriculate into becoming obscenely wealthy. They’ll be thinking about environmental destruction. They’ll be thinking about arrogance and incompetence and corruption. They’re gonna want somebody to pay, and – worst of all for the party of Rove and Cheney and Bush – they’re not really afraid anymore.
As if things weren’t bad enough for the GOP we got a glimpse of their coming horror show on the Tuesday night of the last primary. Could there possibly have been a greater contrast between the prime-time performances of Barack Obama and John McCain? There was Obama, every inch the eloquent statesman, the perfect fit for the crises of his time. And there was McCain, more wooden than a cigar store Indian, less authentic than a sit-com laugh track, unable to even read a speech without sounding like a shrill robot with serious software glitches. Oh, Baby. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Bring. It. On.
Forget what the polls are now saying about the closeness of the race. Obama is going to clean McCain’s clock, both in the electoral and popular votes. The guy is finished, and I couldn’t be happier that it is George W. Bush who is taking him down a second time, and destroying forever his life’s aspiration. After what Bush and Rove did to him in 2000, McCain should have left the GOP, dragging his dignity along behind him. That he stayed, and that he then participated in the nightmare for democracy that was the Republican convention of 2004, going to bat for a punk like Bush and dissing Michael Moore over a movie McCain hadn’t even bothered to watch, sealed his fate forever. Mr. Maverick laid down with the nastiest dogs this side of 1930s Berlin, and it is only right and proper that he will be buried choking in fleas.
Another of the wonderful ironies of the Great GOP Implosion of 2008 is that in so many ways, they were victims of their own success. These guys don’t know anything about how to govern, and they couldn’t be less interested. Remember that old expression about New Dealers who came to Washington to do good, and also wound up doing well? Well, these guys came to rape, and also wound up pillaging. Nobody in America outside of Greenwich, Connecticut or Orange County, California has any interest in having that kind of government. We’ve seen it in Zimbabwe, and it isn’t pretty. Which is why it was always amazing that these gluttons could keep winning elections. But that’s where they were so good. Nobody can do marketing miracles like the GOP. Historians will have so much to say about our time, decades and centuries from now, but surely they will be most stunned by the simple fact alone that a thing like George W. Bush could have twice been propelled into the White House, out of 300 million possible choices. That’s the power of quality marketing, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Anyhow, November 4th is going to be a serious party in a whole lot of households across the entire planet, but November 5th is in many ways going to be even more amusing. For, along with getting clobbered in the race for the White House, the Republicans are going to get smashed all across the ballot, from the US Senate all the way down to local dogcatcher races. They are going to be shell-shocked zombies. The walking wounded. Poster-children for PTSD. And, they are neither going to know what to do about it, nor will they have any particularly attractive options from which to choose.
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