Letters to the Editor
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Fester: Oh, That John Dean!
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.
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sesanders
If only I had a dime for every time you said "not worth my time."
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@veronica - ding ding, we have a winner
But then, again, maybe the Democrats don't really want to win. Maybe they just want all the new money Obama has brought into the party, and maybe the office holders just want to get re-elected.
Can you spell "Obama's donor list", kids? Nice chunka change, huh, Harry, Nance, Johnny, Teddy, John John, and all you other guys and gals in the gang?
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veronica
it's fairly well documented that Kennedy's father rigged West Virginia. And your meme about transposing primary results into electoral college outcomes in the November election are disingenuous at best and just stupid at worst. McCain will not come close in NY or California. As a reluctant Californian myself, I ask myself how the budgetary bungling and horrendous mismanagement of California by Ahhhnold the PIg will provide fertile ground for a republkan in November. IT will not. McCain has no chance, except for the hellhole between Modesto and Bakersfield. The rest of the state: faggedabouddit. The Clinton loyalists always paste together the straw man that the state's she's won could not be won by Obama in the general. Horsehockey. What is true that some state's he's carried- Wyoming, Idaho, Utah- won't vote for a Democrat. If Washington and Lincoln were running on the Dem. ticket. those crackers wouldn't vote for 'em. Some "solid south" states, like the Carolinas, Florida, Louisiana- may be in play for Obama when they would not be for Hillary (it's academic; she is finished). Alabammie and Mississloppy are still confederate states. But Georgia might be on our mind. So, read up and wise up. There a new wind blowing, and it's not the one that was blowing Big Bill.
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ding-aling!: GOP getting crushed in polls, key races
Another perspective:
In case you’ve been too consumed by the Democratic race to notice, Republicans are getting crushed in historic ways both at the polls and in the polls.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10238.html
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Forget it they want it to be 1956
You make excellent points about California, Jeffersonian. He's been trending upwards there, recent polls show Obama beating HRC there if it were re-ran, and most think he would have beat her there intially if it weren't for early voting when many still went along with the media narrative Hillary was unbeatable.
Fester and others have attempted to post real data about the complex new electoral map we're looking at and the challenges we're facing. I've tried to talk about Missouri, Virginia, Colorado, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, and South Dakota (due to the break up of 2 particular Congressional districts there.) We've tried to tell them about the burgeoning youth vote, why we think we can hold the Latino vote (it also has to do with the high number of young Latinos), the AA vote and hopefully some of Hillary's vote. We've even admitted Obama basically is down to either just a Pennsylvania or Ohio problem depending on which he feels he needs.
They just don't want to engage in it. They're convinced we're looking at the same electoral map we were in 1956. This recent bent about Kennedy winning West Virginia just further proves the point to me, that they're only even now progressing to the 1960 map. There's just no point now. There convinced Obama can't win no matter what we tell them.