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Kidding. I now hear you, though. I'll give you my nutshell version of what I feel happened.
During the course of the Nixon administration a lot of questionable characters managed to work their way into the mix, because Nixon was truly brilliant but equally disturbed (I believe he suffered from two complimentary personality disorders). The seeds of the "proto-authoritarian" regime were sewn during that period. It was a very disturbing epoch and locally it felt a lot like 1968 all over again, as the world started to split open (at least to my saucer-eyed point of view). People like Ollie North and Newt (or as I like to spell it, Gnewt) Gingrich lied and backstabbed their way into positions opened up by retiring or just plain disgraced Republicans. The virus spread really quickly, and the continued existence and presence of G. Gordon Liddy and others helped spread the poison.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so the lowest forms of life allowed themselves to come squat in the vacated seats in the house, Senate, and especially in advisory positions. Meanwhile the Deal was made with the Devil and innocently titled "Contract With America." The plan, as near as I could tell, was to seize control of the government through backing a Hollywood actor as President, use him as the congenial and avuncular (sorry) figurehead, while forging a virtual copy of the facist regime of none other than Benito Mussolini. This is not a figure; those on the fringes of this movement (Robertson, Buchanan, Falwell, etc.) were quite frank in their admiration of Il Duce, and if it weren't for Jerry Ford I likely would have jumped ship right then (and no, I didn't support, nor did I vote for Ford, a family friend, but I did listen to what he had to say off the record).
Dean has called the neocon movement "proto-authoritarian", but a viper,by any other name, is just as poisonous. The party had become, until very recent reversals, a neofacist force. There have been a number of apostates who have hung in there out of dedication to the hope put forth by Ford that the party could only be saved by being taken apart from the inside. The job has proved to be overwhelming, but the thing seems, at long last, to have begun to fall beneath its own weight. It will be a while before we can hope to see what rises from those ashes, but it sure as hell won't look like John McCain. It may, in fact, give birth to a new, possibly third, party.
Anyway, it is late, but I hope that is fairly intelligible. There was no accident of fate involved; certain people saw the opportunity they had been waiting for as Nixon began to go over the edge. That collapse was what laid the groundwork for the atrocity that passes for the Republican Party today, at least the staggering, lumbering, dying beast that is the neocon wing of it.
And now I just wait for the liquidations to begin.
