Circular Squad

According to Friday's New York Times, there's a circular firing squad forming over this mid-term election, and for the first time I can remember, it isn't the Democrats who are shooting each other over their failure to win.

It's Republicans, various brands of conservatives, blaming each other for an election they haven't even lost yet!

The article has the Social Conservatives (outlaw gay marriage, abortion, good TV shows) vs. the Neoconservatives (invade Iraq, nuke Iran, make the U.S. a global pariah) vs. the Economic Conservatives (cut taxes so only those wealthy enough to have a safety net, social services or economic justice gets any).

Okay, okay, I'm not just biased, the article's giving me license to gloat, and that's a very dangerous emotion three weeks before an election. And even if Karl Rove doesn't steal by Diebold or strategic vote contesting or even win squarely on GOTV (Get Out The Vote -- the GOP has the most technologically advanced GOTV in human history), there's no gloating really, because one election is only the first step towards saving our nation.

In the meantime, check out these poll-dragging bickerers:

In the case of the Republican Party this year, the skirmish among conservatives over what is going wrong has begun unusually early and turned unusually personal.

From Dick Armey, one-time rightwing Congressman, an evangelical who's outspoken against the Religious Right:

“The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about the things people care about, like how do I pay my bills?” he said.

If you had asked me 10 years ago, I'd have that when Dick Armey is talking sense, it's the First Horseman of the Apocalypse.

“Economic conservatives,” he argued, were emerging as the swing voters in need of attention, in part because they had become more likely to vote Democratic in the years since President Bill Clinton was in office. “A lot of people believe he brought us from deficits to surpluses, and there is a certain empirical evidence there,” Mr. Armey acknowledged.

That's right -- remember prosperity? Like we might have had under President Gore?

Meanwhile, with the Iraq War no longer deniable by anyone but El Presidente as a disaster, here's how the Neoconservatives are rationalizing their role:

“There is a bit of a battle between people who say, Hey, your tax cuts wrecked our war and people who say, Hey, your war wrecked our tax cuts,” said David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who was among the war’s proponents.

How about, "Both ideas suck!"

Then there are those pesky Social Conservatives not satisfied enough at, say, the Terry Schiavo intervention that made so many freedom-loving Americans wonder why the hell Congress was intervening in a single tragic family matter:

Christian conservatives began complaining last year that the Republicans had put proposed Social Security changes and tax changes ahead of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, risking the support of social-issue voters.

Hey, here's a clue: That's because for knuckle-under rich guys like Bush and Cheney, what they really care about is increasing the wealth and power of their own oligarchical class -- at the expense of everybody else.

I mean, look at that phrase they love to use as a weapon against any Iraq War critic, "Support the Troops."

F-you, George W. Bush, if this is how you Support the Troops.

If the GOP loses one or both Houses of Congress on November 7th, it'll be because there's only one way they know how to govern.

Shamefully.