A brilliant epitaph.

My hope is that the Republicans stay the course. I can't see too much of Sarah Palin. I know they will not disappoint me.

The doctrinaire inflexibility of the right has landed them on the garbage heap of history, and their willful blindness will keep them digging ever deeper.

Stop being so smug. What the GOP since Reagan has done is manipulate the press. Business pages are cheerleading advertisements. The American press has failed us as much as the GOP. Thank God for Glen Greenwald and Youtube!

The Dems are probably going to win the election by 1%: 51%to49%...or thereabouts... and the Republican ship is sinking? I'm afraid the fascist right-wingers have their hands much tighter around the hearts of their sheep than you think they do...

In America everything slugs along with a near failing GPA, forever. There's really no way to distinguish success and failure, in anything. So all that matters is how much you insult and hate and get others to hate everyone who disagrees with you. It's really not going to matter as Obama swings ever more to the Center and coops the salient points of the right in order to get RE elected in 2012. We'll still be in Iraq and Afghanistan. We'll still be limping along economically. The right will still be screaming about abortion and gay marriage. Bridges will still be falling down. Airports will still suck. Healthcare will still be unaffordable.

And the Democrats will run with the premise of "Imagine how much worse it could have been" while the GOP runs with "These commie queer terrorists will force you to have gay sex while they raise your taxes".

It must be noted that the ideologically conservative platform of the Republican Party has never garnered much success. It is a philosophy that needs to be studied at some length in order for someone to support it.

However, the nonsense that is now the purview of the conservative right is Jerry Springer politics. That is, out-of-date positions used to grab the emotions of the lowest common denominator. It is politics based on winning rather than governing.

The Republican Party thinks of these cognitively challenged voters, their base, as the owner of Mandingo thought of his slave. The slave owner prepared a giant kettle of boil water and asked Mandingo to enter the pot. That’s the difference between the Joe the Plumber and Mandingo. Mandingo had the common sense not to step into his own ruin. Today’s Republicans cheerily jump in, offering thanks on the way.

This is amazing stuff from Kamiya who now seems to have adopted the persona of Mystic Meg with gifts of clairvoyance: You will meet a tall dark stranger who's going to change your life forever and you'll live happily ever after in the Elysian fields. When Jimmy Carter was elected President he announced that in foreign affairs he would put "human rights" above all other concerns and he did achieve the Camp David Agreement with Israel and Egypt, President Sadat of Egypt was later assassinated. When a British journalist once asked the leader of a political party why the electorate had rejected it, his answer was "Events, dear boy, events..." and it was soaring inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis that did for President Carter.

I think he was a well-intentioned man who was devoid of snobbery, sending his daughter to a public school rather to some swanky private establishment but "events", mainly unforeseen, were his undoing, Gary Kamiya's certainty is that of a person who hasn't come to understand that fate lies in ambush for everyone but, in particular, for politicians.

I was watching the PBS "American Experience" program on Ronald Reagan the other night and saw Governor Reagan standing up for lower taxes and smaller, more efficient government. Presumably the reason for these positions would be to allow people to live their own lives as they saw fit, without government interference. All this is very laudable, very Jeffersonian. Then he appears to rail against students at Berkeley and elsewhere in California who actually want to express themselves outside the constricted social paradigms of mid-20th century American culture. In other words, he was for freedom before he was against it. The freedom these students advocated endangered the Hamiltonian power monopoly of big corporations and arms manufacturers. (Full disclosure: both of my diplomas for bachelor's degrees at UC Berkeley are signed by Ronald Reagan as ex-officio President of the Board of Regents).

I watched a video of Herbert Hoover's address to the 1960 Republican convention in which he said pretty much the same thing: one moment he was railing against big government and the next moment he was ripping beatniks and pinkos, people who actually used our Constitutional liberties to experiment with alternate lifestyles, which, in a practical sense, why we have these liberties in the first place.

Until conservatives can decide either for or against liberty and either for or against the kind of big, invasive government that the "conservative" Bush Administration promoted, they will always be in a muddle.

...Gerbers.

When I was growing up, conservatism was explained to me this way:

- Conservatives believe in pay-as-you-go, even if it means higher taxes. Deficit spending is unacceptable because it burdens the future.

- Conservatives believe you take care of essentials and don't go galavanting around the world trying to fix everybody else's problems. The USA will defend itself when attacked but is not the world's policeman. (It's not isolationism to mind your own business).

But since 1980 those conservative principles have been ignored. The result is the mess we're in today.

-

...does anyone remember this little gem from Nov. 2004?

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/11/02/zogby/index.html

It's one pollster's prediction, and hours before the nets weigh in with their calls, but at 5 p.m. ET, pollster John Zogby calls the race for John Kerry, with landslide proportions: 311 to 213 electoral votes, and only two states too close to call: Nevada and Colorado. But, what's this? Zogby's final-final poll has Bush winning the popular vote, but just barely, 49.4 to 49.1 percent, and not really, when you consider the margin of error, +/- 3.2 percent.

Keep plugging away, Senator Obama, because as that great political philosopher Yogi Berra once observed, "It ain't over 'til it's over."