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Turn out the lights, the Grand Old Party's over

 

So now the party of Lincoln has been thrown into disarray by a black man's campaign for the presidency. Anyone think Abraham Lincoln is rolling over in his grave? No, I suppose not... I doubt that he would even recognize his party at this point.

 

The uneasy alliance between Wall Street and Wal-Mart, between fiscal conservatives and right-wing wackos, seems broken beyond repair, and without that alliance, there is no modern Republican party. In fact, when it comes to the GOP, America may become a larger version of Kansas, where an unofficial center-right/hard-right split in the party happened years ago, effectively creating a hyper-troglodyte third party.

 

The struggle between Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin for the heart and soul of the party got started early last week, and it will likely feature many of the same highlights of the bloody battles between Stalin and Trotsky, minus surrogates for the two crawling on floors with bullets in their stomachs.

 

It's hard to tell exactly when the political worm turned in America. It very well may have been the Terry Schiavo saga: that strange, Orwellian debate about feeding tubes played out in our congress, as if the debate had any validity at all. Maybe it was Hurricane Katrina, when we found out that George W. Bush appointed a dressage specialist to be the head of FEMA. I also remember thinking that something had changed irreparably when the David Brooks-George Will-Peggy Noonan elitist wing of the party deserted Bush as he tried to put the utterly unqualified Harriet Myers on the Supreme Court.

 

Or maybe, as detailed three years ago in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, it was the 2005 vote on House Resolution 3010, a seemingly mundane Appropriations Act for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. Fiscal conservatives and social moderates within the GOP, rightly fearing that Bush's newly plummeting poll numbers could spell doom for them in the 2006 midterms, had stripped the bill of several earmarks, most notably the use of Medicaid funds for erectile-dysfunction drugs. Republican members who had been bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, like California scumbag Bill Thomas, deserted the bill, leading to a 224-209 defeat. The perfect metaphor for early 21st century American politics had just played out: these clowns literally could not get their votes up without Viagra. 

 

The failed resolution ended a remarkable winning streak for congressional Republicans, and they were never the same. 

 

Molly Ivins, that great observer of Texas politics, did not live to see Barack Obama elected president, and the rest of us, tragically, do not get to read the Molly Ivins Kisses The Bush Era Goodbye column that she would have knocked out of the ballpark. A paraphrasing of a line from one of her last columns, the one that she wrote after the 2006 midterms, will have to suffice:

 

"Guys, it's been rank - racist, sleazy, and most of all, incompetent."

 

May the voters of America never forget the incompetence, and may we never again elevate to high office a creature like Tom Delay, who was the rotten face of Republican rule from 1994-2005, and who has become, in his increasingly hilarious television appearances, the symbol of the fall of the party as well. Sometimes justice is poetic indeed. Nonetheless, we have been left one hell of a hole to dig ourselves out of. Let's get to work.

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