I've never seen the Republican party this desperate.

I've been watching American politics since I was a kid in the '60s, and I've never seen anything like the current Republican campaign for sheer ugliness, idiocy, race baiting and name-calling. When you start suggesting that your opponent's a socialist because he proposes what is essentially a return to Bill Clinton's center-right tax structure, you have lost the war of ideas. It's going to get a whole lot worse, too, between now and election day—and afterwards there will undoubtedly be a flurry of crazy lawsuits aimed at de-legitimizing the Obama win. Also, expect the Bush administration to leave all sorts of political (if not literal!) booby-traps behind. I'm not going to rest easy until January 20th, when Barack Obama's sitting with his feet up on the Oval Office desk, smoking a good cigar.

I hear where you're coming from. You are probably a few years older than me, but we've both experienced the same monopoly of power by the Republicans over the last few decades (with a few, short-lived exceptions maybe).

I think this is the end of the Republican party as we know it -- the party consolidated under Goldwater IS NO MORE!

And Democracy is standing between the rabid animal and the door.

There is zero danger that any RW babble will addle my brain and affect it.

BTW, I managed to vote for exactly NO Republicans. It can be done. :)

desperation of the Republican party. They are losing respect from all sides.

What we need right now is a president that will unite this country, not tear is apart and McCain/Palin are going.

I too am waiting to officially call Senator Obama President Obama.

is how half of our country's citizens came to be rabid, raving Republican maniacs. Maniac is the only definition that seems to cover them.

Turn on the T.V. machine and you can see our corporate masters at work.

Turn on the radio and listen to the modern day descendants of Goebbels spew their hate. War = $$$$$$$$$$$$$$

is much more serious than I think we would let ourselves believe. there are many pockets of this country that, like it or not, has not come to grips with an african american running things. thats why the attempts by the GOP to de-humanize Obama have worked on the base, these people are so shallow and gullible that they believe all of what they're told and I fear it has done irrepairable damage to what the outcome of an Obama presidency will be. This country may have been put on the path towards another civil war by the minions of the right, its already led to race-baiting and fear mongering, think of what it will do when the nutjobs realize that their party won't regain power for years to come?

whenever they lose an election. Or even a Supreme Court decision. That's how much they love America, I guess: they support it as long as they get their way. But I'm not too worried about hordes of radicalized wingnuts actually taking up arms and storming progressive strongholds, or whatever. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything more ludicrous. I do think we'll have the occasional Timothy McVeigh style nutball trying to blow shit up and blaming their psychoses on the left; if Obama's as smart as I think he is, he'll have his (restructured) DOJ infiltrate every rightwing hate group in the country first thing out of the box. It's the corporate guys at the top of the ladder that worry me: they're the ones who can really make shit happen if they want to.

Republican campaigns have long featured sheer ugliness; we're just getting better at exposing these fuckers, from what I can see. We're also doing a better job of tying this ugliness directly to the candidates and the campaigns.

But yeah, the desperation is palpable on the Republican side. They're facing a loss of gut-churning, epic proportions that will make the wilderness years between 1952 and 1994 look almost fun by comparison. Just one fr'instance: The bench and the farm system. Who's coming up for each party? Both sides have the old hands and old pros, but who has the up-and-coming candidates in their 20s and 30s working their way up through the party? Who is going to replace Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and the rest of the Republican Old Guard? These guys don't have much more than 10 years left, at best.

Maybe in the next quarter century we can restore a little balance to our society, and loosen the death grip big corporations have on our nation's throats.

mccain pandered to them by selecting palin because they weren't happy he was the nominee.

palin became the candidate through which they could channel their hatred.

old school republicans see this and are horrified b/c they realize the responsibility they face for giving life to this christ-fascist monster. Their only honorable option is to support Obama.

The die hards that are left in charge of the republican party are the outright racists and the looney toons religious idiots.

My concern is that this whacko base will become so desparate that they will resort to tactics like, oh, I dunno, making up an attack by a black man on a white woman b/c they only have things like race baiting to give them any traction..oh wait...

the sooner they self-destruct, the better all off all of us, even mainstream republicans, will be.

And right now, yeah, the tail is wagging the dog. But all of this "socialist" business isn't coming from the religious right: they don't even know what a socialist is. That's a rightwing jab straight out of the 1950's; the fact that it's been trotted out in 2008 is evidence of how crazy the right is getting in the face of a historic blowout. I think this will be a transformative election in a number of ways, and I think our prospects going forward are pretty good: we know that young people are much more progressive than their parents, on average, especially on social issues (the gay marriage boogey man will pretty much be moot in twenty years). We also know that the Republicans have done and continue to do a fine job of alienating the booming hispanic population. But the thing I worry about is the turn our country has begun to take into a kind of slow-motion, soft-focus fascism. We need to clean house, and we need to do it now: the longer we wait to purge the neo-fascist elements from the federal government, the harder it's going to be to get rid of them. I really think it's Obama or a slow, steady drift into a permanent state of fixed elections, suppression of the opposition, media control, and stealth suspension of the Constitution. So, a lot at stake.

"I really think it's Obama or a slow, steady drift into a permanent state of fixed elections, suppression of the opposition, media control, and stealth suspension of the Constitution. So, a lot at stake."

Civil war. There is no way that a significant majority of the population will simply roll over for an indefinite period of economic suffering. I totally agree that an Obama administration must vigorously rout out the neo-fascists subversives in the government and prosecute any and all law-breakers. If Clinton had pursued justice in the case of Iran-Contra, our democracy might not be on life support today.

She let the Repig party's proudly ignorant, racist kook base out of the attic. Now they are standing in the living room shrieking their kookery at the whole dinner party. The establishment, elite Repigs are horrified because ultimately they don't give a hoot in hell about race and religion, only power and money. To them, vulgar racism is declasse and rude. The Reagan party is in the process of cannibalizing itself and the kooks are at the controls, knocking over everything they can with the wrecking ball of hate and racism. They are doomed.

They aren't able to steal and blackmail for money anymore.

I think a LOT of corrupt Republicans will be going to jail, including highly placed members of the Bush administration. That's part of the reason they're all losing their minds.