I was thinking today that Steele and in a much milder form, Kantor had shown the first glimmers of the GOP moving away from the extreme right of Limbaugh, Palin, and so on. It would bring them back, someday at least, closer to the center, even though they can barely see it now.

No more. The one-two, then one-two-three, combinations they've thrown at themselves this week should knock out any chance of them returning to anywhere near the mainstream for years to come.

Rahm Emanuel's words on Sunday were what many of us were already thinking, but they were definitely bold, to imply that anyone in the GOP who dares oppose the extremism of Limbaugh has to then run to grovel in apology. It had really only been one or two congress members so far.

No more. One day later, in spectacular fashion they demonstrate to the whole country that Rahm was right on. Thus the rest of what he said, that Rush Limbaugh = the GOP, and thus the GOP wants the country to fail out of pure political spite-- is true.

Limabugh joked about Hari Kiri, but it's no joke for the GOP, he's doing it for the whole party, en masse.

Yes, you only get to be "da man" as long as you don't actually act like one.

It's an old story.

"our country is now run by a president and a Bolshevik-leaning Democratic Party that are unfavorable to stocks and the people who own them."

As opposed to the Republican party, why I bet if those guys ever had a President and control of the Congress at the same time, the stock market would never go down the way it has now.

The "Republicans are good for those who own stocks" myth has about as much credence right now as the "fiscal conservatives" line.

Yet they keep acting as if what just happened didn't happen.

As your basic knee-jerk lib, I'm beginning to feel a little sorry for Mr. Steele. He is in an impossible position.

He is?

Yes, he could grovel and reverse himself in humiliating submissiveness to Rush Limbaugh, which would immediately ruin his credibility and confirm to everyone that Rush Limbaugh now runs the party, just as Rahm Emanuel claimed the day before. This would pretty much nail down the perception that Rahm Emanuel was right in the rest of what he said also, which paints the entire GOP as now hoping that the country fails, and doing so out of pure political spite.

Or, he could not. Steele could stick to what he said, which would make the first tiny steps of moving the party away from the bigotry and racism of Limbaugh, and put it back on the road to being relevant again someday.

I can't for the life of me see any downside to the second choice, except that lots of dittoheads would complain, loudly. If Steele made the mistake of thinking that this is something that actually matters, it was a big mistake indeed.

Reading the comments over at where Frum posted that, as well as articles today by Kathleen Parker and David Plouffe at the WAPO, one assertion that keeps being made is that Limbaugh is being "portrayed" as the intellectual core of the Republican Party, with all of these people insisting that the Obama White House is at least half-responsible for "elevating" him to this position, and some like Parker claiming that it's pretty much entirely the White House's doing.

What's being spun out of existence is the fact that this all started because Limbaugh IS pretty much the intellectual force behind the current Republican Party. In addition to whatever that means about Limbaugh's stature, no pun intended, it means that the GOP has become more like him, they've changed, not him. It's not very hard to see that the current GOP, shrunken to its remainder of hard core extreme right wing members, holds views on the whole more like Rush Limbaugh than say like David Gergen or even David Brooks.

Anyone who thinks that the Limbaugh-worshipping CPAC is just some fringe group should remember who the actual GOP nominee for Vice President was last year: Sarah Palin.

That's not fringe, that's the party picking a potential President. That's also a party gone to the extreme right.

The White House loves this and will make political hay from it, to be sure. However the idea that they've just invented it as political spin is nonsense.

Writes:

"Are we really that simple-minded?

It wasn't the Bush administration that deregulated mortgage lending. We also can't blame him for lender and lendee vices that exacerbated an already internally corroding financial system.

Living on credit, spending without earning, was certainly a hallmark of the Bush administration. But that's a hallmark of American fiscal policy in general."

.

On this second point, my response would be, yes, okay, so that's what President Obama is proposing that we change. At which point the Jim Cramers of the world start screaming against the idea. Which is what this article is saying.

Another small point: I might think of some criticisms of Reich, though not many actually, but "simple-minded" is the last thing I would call him.

Re your first point, about deregulation, please read the following:

"But perhaps Greenspan's most important contribution has been as the policymaker who, through the power of his office, the force of his intellect and the cunning of his behind-the-scenes maneuvering, engineered the wholesale deregulation of the U.S. banking and financial system."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/AR2006011903180.html