Mm. If it had a soul, that would frame well.
From the party that brought us moral AND fiscal bankruptcy! A fight to the death!
A civil war in which insufficiently rightwing very rightwing rightwingers get excommunicated, and the litmus test is -- Sarah Palin!
Sarah who? Oh you know, the winky mavericky demagoguey stealth Talibangelical! The pro-government-forced maternity gal with pesky ethics and grammar issues.
But, wait, it gets better! Sarah Palin then turns into Ronald Reagan! No, really, she does!
From the Guardian UK:
But the real bile has been saved for those conservatives who have balked at the selection of Sarah Palin.
In addition to Mr Frum, who thinks her not ready to be president, Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's greatest speechwriter and a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, condemned Mr McCain's running mate as a "symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics." Conservative columnist David Brooks called her a "fatal cancer to the Republican Party".
The backlash that ensued last week revealed the fault lines of the coming civil war.
Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of right wing talk radio hosts, denounced Noonan, Brooks and Frum. Neconservative writer Charles Krauthammer condemned "the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama", while fellow columnist Tony Blankley said that instead of collaborating in heralding Mr Obama's arrival they should be fighting "in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country".
During the primaries the Democratic Party was bitterly divided between Barack Obama's "latte liberals" and Hillary Clinton's heartland supporters, but now the same cultural division threatens to tear the Republican Party apart.
Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as "cocktail party conservatives" who "give aid and comfort to the enemy".
He told The Sunday Telegraph: "There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"
Mr Frum thinks that Mrs Palin's brand of cultural conservatism appeals only to a dwindling number of voters.
He said: "She emerges from this election as the probable frontrunner for the 2012 nomination. Her supporters vastly outnumber her critics. But it will be extremely difficult for her to win the presidency."
Mr Nuzzo, who believes this election is not a re-run of the 1980 Reagan revolution but of 1976, when an ageing Gerald Ford lost a close contest and then ceded the leadership of the Republican Party to Mr Reagan.
He said: "Win or lose, there is a ready made conservative candidate waiting in the wings. Sarah Palin is not the new Iain Duncan Smith, she is the new Ronald Reagan." On the accuracy of that judgment, perhaps, rests the future of the Republican Party.
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Full Metal Meltdown.
3 comments:
no blood for hubris:
All of the big name conservatives now jumping ship are RESPONSIBLE for Palin's even being in the race. It is people like Noonan and the rest of the dysintelligentsia in the GOP that pushed the GOP so far to the right that their campaign song should be the Horst Wessel Leid.
democommie
Hm. I thought Palin was a Rove pick. It was his boy who paid for her $150K wardrobe. And I thought it was Talibangelical pressure on McCain that resulted in the Palin pick, because the Talibangelicals wouldn't back Lieberman or Romney or Giuliani. Dobson's choice.
no blood for hubris:
Oh, I agree that it was Rove who pulled the strings for Palin. But I really think that ever since Nixon got his last ride on Air Force One that the GOP's apparatchiks have been happy to embrace the whackaloons, while thinking that they were co-opting them. Looks like the opposite is what actually happened.
democommie
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