Months and months ago on haloscan. Even before the last election.

http://tinyurl.com/2ngxxp and http://tinyurl.com/2ua789

Republicans have long since passed the point where they can safely back off on their slander, hatred, and xenophobia. By now, their only reliable supporters are the hardcore "liberals/gays/democrats = terrorists" type. To back off from that, to revert to an attitude of "We're all in this together, we just have different ideas" will come off as ridiculous to the people who abandoned them but also totally alienate their remaining base, who have bought into the bullshit wholeheartedly. That's no good, so they'll _intensify_ their Rovian tactics, believing that if they can just paint the Democratic party as sufficiently treasonous, people will come swarming back. This will not work, of course, but that will only make them try harder, like a religion watching the past 50 years doesn't get hip to the times, but instead just regresses further into the past. Party leadership will fall to more and more extreme people, thereby causing more and more people to leave. Basically the GOP will become more like itself; the cynics who've merely been using the party line to benefit will leave for greener pastures, leaving only the True Believers. Imagine an entire party of Katherine Harrises.

This is how the GOP will die. They can't back down from their insanity, lest they get set upon by their own. Anyone not actively pushing the party towards more radical extremes is The Enemy. Anyone who dissents _must_ be smeared into the pavement. The remaining party will get smaller and more extreme, because they've set up an environment where only hatred and xenophobia are tolerated.

You see the same behavior in religious cults and, ironically enough, terrorists.

Isn't that exactly what we're seeing now? The viable GOP candidates are one-upping each other and becoming more extreme, and the dissenters are actively getting kicked out.

The upshot is, I believe we are quite literally witnessing the death of the Republican party. They have started down a path of hateful rhetoric that they cannot turn back from. They cannot now become the pro-human rights & civil liberties party any more than the Klan can become supporters of the NAACP.

Anyone else pleasantly surprised by the high turnout in Turkey of Muslims demanding the continuation of separation of church and state? Basically marching against the party/candidate who claims it's total fiction and would turn back the clock if he could? Hmm, why's that sort of person sound so familiar...

Hey GB, when was the last time you saw a million American Christians get together to denounce Bush's War on Secularism and Reason?

> The poll about the Muslims’ views on violence is manipulated but the poll about Americans’ views on violence is correct?

No, you don't have it straight at all. What we have here are (probably highly accurate) poll results being deliberately portrayed in a vacuum, with no context or comparison, so as to make a particular American demographic look bad.

Malkin gets her panties in a twist when a poll shows same percentage of American muslims express support for attacking civilians, or refuse to condemn bin Laden, or put church before country. But because right-wingers are insanely intellectually dishonest, they refuse to place those results next to the same questions asked of "good christian Americans". Because if they did, they'd find that their own demographic is just as mindlessly bloodthirsty, if not moreso, than the one they are trying to cast as savage barbarians.

Same principle behind their dismissal of terrorists of their own faith as indicative of anything in general. Muslim terrorists show the whole religion to be full of whackos about to go on killing sprees, but christian terrorists are "bad apples" or "overly zealous" and are summarily dropped down the memory hole.

Of course, all of this was explicitly written in Glenn's articles. Makes me wonder why you are posting here when you didn't actually read them.

what cohen or glenn think? Two ranters arguing.

You're right, tiberius. There's absolutely nothing of interest on this blog. You should do yourself a favor and go away and never come back, because there's nothing here for you. You should try FreeRepublic.com, you'd fit in just marvelously there.

Who cares what polls show about the nation confusing the threat of Hussein with 9-11? A great many of our citizens can't find their state on a map, so I don't expect them to understand the complexity of the circumstances that led us to Iraq.

Why shouldn't we be concerned with lethal levels of ignorance on the part of the citizenry, appalling laziness of the press, and self-serving misinformation from the government? Gee, I dunno...

The president stands before the camera and tells the country that they need to invade and bring democracy to those poor people living in ... Idaho who have never known the sweet taste of freedom. Who cares what polls show about the nation confusing the threat of "Butch" Otter (current governor)? A great many of our citizens can't find their own state on a map, so I don't expect them to understand the complexity of the circumstances that led us to support declaring war on their fellow citizens.

This is obviously a stretch, but if the people were this easily suckered into picking a fight with Iraq, what's to stop the next warmongering administration from doing the exact same thing all over again? Thanks to the aforementioned ignorance, laziness, and selfishness, we've got huge swaths of the populace that thinks that the Iraq War had perfectly valid reasons for being waged that should be repeated, and that if we lose it can only have been the fault of "being stabbed in the back by the enemy within". Do I really need to elaborate what variety of madness lies down _that_ road?