The Sudden Decline and Fall of the GOP

Party Down
Like the Democrats during the 1970s, today's GOP is hidebound and out of touch.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

In late July, on a gauzy, impossibly hot Washington evening, I met a friend of mine in a quiet sushi restaurant a few blocks from the White House. My friend, a conservative aide to an even more conservative senator, is from the suburbs of Atlanta; his favorite word is "ignorant," by which he means some combination of insufficiently educated and totally deluded, and which he usually uses to describe Bill Clinton's foreign policy, or his ex-girlfriend, or a particularly memorable English professor. On this particular night, though, he was using it, liberally, to describe the Republican congressional approach to policy-making, on issue after issue.

I hadn't expected this line from him. My friend is the kind of tough-minded partisan who screens dates for political affiliation and who says that whenever he gets weeping calls from retired constituents about too-expensive prescription drugs, he thinks to himself, "You should have saved more then, shouldn't you?" A year ago, he was gearing up for a life on the Hill; now, he's taking the LSAT and planning for law school. He won't vote for Bush this year, either, a choice he says was "unthinkable" 12 months ago.

"What's infuriating," he told me, "is that it's hard to know what the party stands for beyond defending a bunch of interests. I mean, look at the leadership--who do you have? Frist? Hack. DeLay? Hack. Hastert? Total hack. I can't figure out if the administration are hacks or just don't care. John Kerry's running on budget deficits--that's supposed to be our fucking issue." He started slamming his hand against the table. "In 15 years, the whole federal budget blows up because of Medicare, this ridiculous prescription-drug benefit that no one even likes, our taxes go through the roof, and the economy breaks down. And this time, it's gonna be our fault."

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...But both of these historical analogies are hopeful fantasies about what the GOP might someday become, not reasonable guesses at the near future. The truth is, for all its apparent strength, the modern Republican Party has worked itself into a position of profound and growing decay. Worried Republicans are right to look to the past to help sort out their future. But the right date isn't 1994 or 1904. It's the late 1970s--and the party to look at isn't the Republicans, but the Democrats. Like the Democrats of that period, the current version of the Republican Party is supremely powerful but ideologically incoherent, run largely by and for special interests and increasingly alienated from the broader voting public. Today's GOP is headed for a profound crackup. The only questions are when, exactly, the decline will start--and how long it will last.

Read on, for more: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.wallace-wells.html

The Grand Old Hairball Party.

and they are wimpy compared to the Repukes.

If they are so irrelevant, then how come they run EVERYTHING.

The analogy is to the Democrats of the late 1970s. Read the whole article. The point is that if Democrats can get their act together and be insurgent, campaign against Washington and be aggressively pro-reform then the GOP is doomed because the party has calcified.

THAT'S WHY they were able to paint the Democrats as being out-of-touch
then, and continue to do so today.
It doesn't mean that we are.
WHAT HAPPENED during the late '70s was that right wingers with lots of money
BOUGHT up the media. They OWN THE NEWS.
The Democrats have been practically irrelevent since then BECAUSE THE MEDIA SAYS THEY ARE!

All CW is toast

Or maybe someone should just keep them away from the voting machines untill the votes are ALL counted.

I know I know about the fraud, now we need to prove it

That said, No facts actually spoke some facts before teh election

They were Chenneyed if they won and they were chenneyed if they lost

So we may still see that civil war... pull up a chair