Grunwald: For GOP, new issue is whom to blame

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061109/LOCAL19/611090475/1008

November 9, 2006

For GOP, new issue is whom to blame
Fingers are pointing at almost every possible scapegoat


By Michael Grunwald
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- After minutes upon minutes of soul-searching, Republicans are now in recrimination mode. And the GOP's various factions all agree: This wouldn't have happened if the party had listened to us.

After the historic GOP losses Tuesday night, moderate Republicans quickly concluded the party needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans declared it should be more conservative. Main Street is angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP congressional leadership.
The party purges formally began Wednesday, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., agreed to step down before they were pushed. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., had already decided to leave Congress, but GOP insiders said Tuesday's debacle should eliminate him from presidential contention in 2008.
By day's end, Republican fingers had pointed at every conceivable Republican scapegoat: ex-Rep. Mark Foley of Florida and his scandal-plagued colleagues, Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, presidential adviser Karl Rove, even Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Of course, everyone agrees Iraq is a huge problem as well, although no one seems to think that getting rid of Rumsfeld will solve it.
"We ought to just mend our wounds, bury our dead, learn from our mistakes, and move on," said GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers. "But first we're going to have go through this. Look, bad policy and bad politics makes for bad elections."


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All of their own arrogance brought them down.

The extreme Conservative dominance over moderates destroyed their real base in the northeast and other places. At the same time the grumbling minority that had real strength as the Conservative party in NY for example lost its identity in the worst way possible. By granting the third party, the WH inner circle complete control of the party for its own purposes and using and abusing ALL factions, sidelining them even as a legislative force, so that all small d democratic bases in this warped coalition have been gutted and dependent on undemocratic control.

Now the head of the beast, befuddled and incompetent and rejected is STILL there. After all it is somewhere in the bowels of the Bush faction that all purging power resides. The head lopped off or hanging on by strings leaves moderates and conservatives of all stripes groping in the dark, ruined, bewildered in finding ANY other real source of unity or help from the gutted leadership rivals to the Bush dynasty. And most of all, in their perpetual state of arrogance and denial they probably are mentally unable to see their situation just as they are morally unable to come up with any real leadership and intellectually bankrupt so much they can't even critique conservatism in its gross failures and desertions of its own principles.

A three way meltdown, in effect, EACH too weak to prevail, each to bankrupt to see its true state, each dedicated to the ruin of the party as an entity- crowded on this life raft by an unpalatable gaggle of RW religionists even more deluded and divisive to the business of making the GOP viable. Where do you go after dictatorship? ANOTHER, better dictator? There is a stubborn Republican wing to the Republican party among their own traditional people, but if you thought Dems had trouble in fashioning a viable party, pity the honest Republicans, oxymorons among the decadent.

This will drag out mercilessly until Bush goes whatever the Democrats do. It will become the GOP Great Depression.