The Sinking Ship

At Salon.com, Gary Kamiya sums up "The Republican Shipwreck" pretty well:

There's something surreal about how fast the GOP has gone from arrogant triumphalism to its death throes. Just yesterday, the GOP's mighty Titanic was cruising along, its opulent decks lined with fat-cat financiers and neoconservative warmongers, all smoking cigars, drinking champagne and extolling the deathless virtues of their fearless captain. The compliant media issued glowing dispatches. Karl Rove cackled with glee as he plotted out a permanent Republican majority.

Then the luxury liner hit an iceberg known as reality. The biggest damage was done by the Wall Street crisis, which happened just in time to tilt a close race toward Obama. But the economic meltdown was only one of the disasters for which the GOP is largely responsible. The war that was going to establish American hegemony forever turned out to be one of the worst foreign-policy blunders in our nation's history. The GOP's free-market idolatry led to the gravest financial crisis since the Depression. Its ideological insistence on cutting taxes for the richest Americans ran up a record deficit. Its embrace of torture and denial of due process assaulted the Constitution and eroded America's moral standing. Its doctrine of the "unitary executive" concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of the executive branch. Its anti-scientific denial of global warming endangered the entire planet.

Of course it's more than a little premature to exult in the demise of the Grand Oil Party - they've stolen elections before and they could do it again - indeed, they're trying* - but it does seem that a clear majority of Americans now realize what a house of cards "movement conservatism" was and is. If we're lucky, we may see the Republican Party move backs towards the political center and away from its dual (laissez-faire and religious) fundamentalist base. That would be a step forward for America and the world.

* (For information on how you can stop them from stealing this one, see STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE!)

UPDATE: GOP uses trumped-up ACORN allegations to distract from their efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters... and the "liberal media" gives them a pass, as usual