It doesn't matter what the Republicans do. What matters is that the citizens of the country are represented in congress, which means that those in congress represent their views, needs, and work for their interests.

Our entire discourse has become positioned wrong, the perspective is always from the political parties outward, wondering how they can manipulate people into voting for them. That's certainly a concern to the political parties and there's a whole profession devoted to the study of it, and to those people it matters very much. However what we should care about is the opposite: How to get members of congress who represent who we are, what our views are, and work for what we want.

If the Republicans vanish it won't hurt me one bit. If they're too far gone on the extreme right to know it, or how to crawl back, then they can fail, and disappear, or turn into a regional Southern "rump" party. The rest of us will focus on bringing this country back, and another party will appear to take their place if that's what it comes to. Maybe the Democrats and the Green Party will be the new opposing parties. Maybe not. The point is, we're what matters, not the fortunes of one party.

I wondered out loud whether the GOP would wake up and join reality again, facing the fact that the mainstream is waaaay over there to the left, at least compared to how far off on the extreme right they've wandered, or whether this would happen.

These same very loud constituents of the GOP were insisting during the election that Sarah Palin was going to win the election for McCain. Don't listen to the liberal media, they said, people love her "conservative" views!

Blind, deaf and dumb, in political terms. And why? Well, they all listen to Rush Limbaugh, for starters.

Since they still are, it also seems fairly clear that their already shrunken support (five states would go GOP in an election held now, a recent study showed. Five) will just keep shrinking, opening up the very real possibility of another party taking their place in the not-too-distant future. Even more amazing is that it's far more likely to be the Green party than it is anything smacking of conservatism, given what that tainted word now means to most people.

It means Bush, for those wondering. It means Rush. It means Sarah. Yes, I know a lot of you don't like this fact, but it is a fact, and insisting that it's not changes nothing.

Here you are, newly-elected chair of the RNC, an African American with no shortage of reactionary attitudes yourself, but the next thing you know you're hanging out with those who elected you and they're a bunch of white people, and I mean white as a sheets, and they're saying "You da man!", literally, actually saying "da" man, and then prostrating themselves into giggly fits as Rush Limbaugh rumbles onto the stage and makes your reactionary right wing stances seem like those of Fidel Castro by contrast to his, and they're all praising him and if they dare cross him they're instantly ostracized until they crawl to him and repudiate any criticism-- I'm sorry Rush! I didn't mean it! - again quite literally, pretty much those words...

Ah, life is entertaining if nothing else.

Rahm E. played it absolutely perfectly yesterday, but it's the Republicans who have orchestrated the whole thing for him.

- Rush wants any attempt to revive the economy to fail, for pure, openly-admitted political motives.

- GOP congress members are calling Rush the leader of their party and groveling in apology the next day if they dare say otherwise.

- Thus the GOP wants the country to fail, for pure political spite.

They couldn't be better opponents for the Democratic Party if we wrote their speeches ourselves.

In every sense of the word.

Rush Limbaugh and other Republicans can quibble about whether he's the "leader" of their party now, but there's no real doubt that Limbaugh's followers, representing less than five percent of the population, are now completely in control. Any Republican they start screaming about instantly backs down and grovels at his feet.

So a small group of extreme right fanatics have the entire party cowed now, right to its top officials, cowering shamelessly in full public view, asking for their forgiveness if he dares to criticize Rush.

This got better before I thought it would.

They said the same thing about books, 2000 years ago. Durn things were gonna cheapen knowledge, since real learning was only what could be memorized in ones own, tiny, brain.

Who among us wishes they won that fight?

If technology has a slight tendency to make people dumb, don't overlook the fact that the exact reverse of that is even more true.

Around the same percentage of people will do stupid things with technology now as they did when the latest thing was chiseling on stone. Most of the ancient tablets they uncover are long groveling praises of some long-forgotten leader. The rest are inventory lists.