The Truth of the Moment

I've been predicting this for months, ever since the healthcare reform bill passed, that any poll numbers pointing to outsized GOP gains in the November election would erode by that time. Once the lefties had time to get over their wounds on the reform not being as lefty as they'd have liked, once the actual candidates became better known, once it became clear that the President and Dems had delivered on most of their promises, once Obama started campaigning, once America began seeing the Tea Partiers irrevocably subverting the Republican Party.

Dana Milbank has the goods, and the best piece I've ever seen from him -- worth reading in full, but here's a taste:

Future historians tracing the crackup of the Republican Party may well look to May 8, 2010, as an inflection point.

That was the day, as is now well known, that Sen. Robert Bennett, who took the conservative position 84 percent of the time over his career, was deemed not conservative enough by fellow Utah Republicans and booted out of the primary.

Less well known, but equally ominous, is what happened that same day, 2,500 miles east in Maine. There, the state Republican Party chucked its platform -- a sensible New England mix of free-market economics and conservation -- and adopted a manifesto of insanity: abolishing the Federal Reserve, calling global warming a "myth," sealing the border, and, as a final plank, fighting "efforts to create a one world government.

...

In the Alabama gubernatorial race, a conservative attack ad charged that a Republican gubernatorial candidate "recently said the Bible is only partially true." The outraged candidate reaffirmed his "belief that this world and everything in it is a masterpiece created by the hands of God."

In Utah, just a couple of days after Bennett's fall, conservative Rep. Jason Chaffetz talked about trying to topple none other than Sen. Orrin Hatch (89 percent lifetime conservative rating) in 2012.

In Arizona, Sen. John McCain, who once said a fence is the "least effective" way to secure the border, continued his fight against a conservative primary challenge by releasing an ad demanding, "Complete the danged fence."

Democrats are having purity putsches, too, in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Colorado. But these are mild compared with the sort of uprising Republicans are experiencing in places such as Maine, tranquil land of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow...

This is the fruit of the Ronald Reagan deal with the Far Right religious bloc and the California Birchers. The conspiracy theorists on the Left are in abeyance, the Democratic Party led by the calmest President since Eisenhower (and his daughter endorsed Obama), but on the Right they are in the process of completely hijacking the Republican Party. There's no common-sensors from New England coming to save the day; they just lost their very own convention.

It's like Dick Armey, who's FreedomWorks is behind much of the teabaggin' organizing, has his own political party. But the grassroots side of it is the biggest incursion of terrified, angry and self-righteous reactionary force into contemporary politics since the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, the Dick Nixon Southern Strategy. If this works, if these Beck-blinded psychos get control of the House, Senate or, God-forbid, White House, you can rewind America thirty-odd years.

With this in mind, I say it's time for the Dems to toss out some of their old and put some of our own worthy anti-incumbents in place. Joe Sestak should defeat Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Senate Primary. Arkansas Dem voters should replace Sen. Blanche Lincoln with candidate Bill Halter. In an anti-incumbency election, fresh blood where weakest.

Then see which way America goes.

Bonus video: Sneak preview of the winning campaign theme:

Conservative Success

The hard right wing of the Republican Party has won another battle. They have forced 29-year Senate veteran Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to switch sides. Now former Club For Growth President Pat Toomey will likely win the 2010 GOP nomination, while Specter is likely to slide into the Democratic spot with the active support of a bunch of top Dems -- Gov. Ed Rendell, Vice President Joe Biden (who evidently had much to do with the switch), and Mr. 81% himself, President Barack Obaaaaama.

Even the GOP itself now realizes that it is a regional rather than a national political party:



Let's let the gloating subside and talk about the future. This certainly doesn't mean that everything the Democratic leadership wants will sail through and, in fact, may even embolden the "Blue Dog" Dems like Nebraska's Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman (I-Dem), Evan Bayh of Indiana and others. However, this victory must also be chalked up to Obama's huge turning of the tide in this past Presidential election, hence a call from the Prez to Specter should help grease the wheels. I expect he'll use it rarely and with great care, and let's not forget the more conservative aspects of the President's own leanings. He's progressive and arguably "liberal", but he's proven himself more pragmatic than ideological.

Which brings us to the real problem with today's Republican Party: it has shown no recent ability to govern on a national level. It's policies have proven disastrous and its management capabilities have proven inept, i.e. in response to actual disasters, even those not of their own creation.

One of the diminishing GOP "moderates" in the Senate, Maine's Olympia Snowe, lays out what is on the face of it an appealing bare bones ideology for that party in response to the loss of Specter and increased GOP purity wars:

It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, “We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only ‘litmus test’ of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.” He continued, “As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.”

In practice, this will become the thinking of an arm of the Big Tent Democratic Party, which will require a strong, charismatic, focused and popular leader to keep herded; so as it was with Reagan it is with Obama.

As for the Republicans, it will take a generation of breeding out for them to return, accompanied by some eventual corruption within the Democratic Party (power tends to do this to any organization over time), and eventually there will be smart leaders running on the GOP side just because the Dem side has locked them out for the wrong reasons. Witness Mayor Bloomberg, who switch to GOP because he knew the NYC Dems would never give him the nomination. Witness Arlen Specter in 1966, who switched from Dem to Rep because he wouldn't have won the nom in Pennsylvania against a corrupt machine.

There is one other possibility. There's still the chance that, once the last of the GOP "moderates" bites the dust the party will fracture further. What do social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, Libertarians and hawks have in common?

Enough for another charismatic leader to emerge and unite them again?

Corpus

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) have a bill to rescind the evil legislation signed by Bush with his GOP Senate enablers a year ago, the one that essentially suspended one of the bedrock rights our great nation was founded on, habeas corpus.

You know, post-9/11 thinking. You know, creeping fascism.

Habeas corpus means you have to be charged and know that charge. They can't just come and throw a bag over your head, and whisk you away into some unknown hellhole forever.

Let Keith Olbermann and his guest, Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley explain it.

Oddly enough, all the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee besides Specter voted against the bill. Voted against protecting our Constitution. Essentially voted against America.

Patriots or Tories?