It's a Dead Man's Party

Back when legendary supergroup and noted Rodney Dangerfield enthusiasts Oingo Boingo released Dead Man's Party, they probably weren't thinking about the Republicans in 2006, but I sure am.
And I don't mean to connote the party of Abraham Lincoln, one of America's most famously dead people for approximately the last 140 years. Since Lincoln joined The Great Majority, his party has moved through a variety of stages, lately arriving at the point known as "off the deep end". Republicans are currently facing an uphill battle to keep the party alive.

Let's start with Bush. The neoconservatives had their moment in the sun on his watch. Now that Donald Rumsfeld is gone, following the earlier departures of people like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney is the only prominent neocon left in the administration. The new defense secretary, Gates, is a product of the Brent Scowcroft/Bush #41/James Baker school of being evil while at least acknowledging the existence of the real world. As Maureen Dowd puts it in the New York Times,

Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.

Gates has two principle strikes against him. Strike One: he played a central role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Said affair was one of America's all-time sleaziest moments, an illegal and immoral international embarrassment under Reagan and #41. Strike Two: at the CIA he was responsible for establishing the precedent that you should manipulate the intelligence you have to make it look like the intelligence you want. In his days, that meant everything was a sign of Communists, but many of the managers he trained at the CIA were still there at the beginning of this decade. And they are the ones who produced the infamous 2002 National Intelligence Estimate showing the "indisputable proof" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But back to Bush. He made a rare acknowledgment of the existence of the real world in his press conference yesterday. Unfortunately, for a moment of honesty it was strikingly dishonest.

Q. "Just a few days before this election, in Texas, you said that Democrats, no matter how they put it, their approach to Iraq comes down to terrorists win, America loses. What has changed today?"

Bush: "What's changed today is the election is over, and the Democrats won."

So, in other words, he lied because of the election, and he expects that excuse to vindicate him. Huh. At least all the cries of "filthy liar" he inspires are confirmed, as if there were ever any doubt. The crowd surrounding #41 mostly confined their lying to big things. You know, things like illegally selling weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages and money and funneling the profits to anti-democratic terrorists in Central America. W just lies about everything, all the time, no matter what the situation or consequences, for any reason. Big deal if he accuses the earnest opposition to the policies he privately realizes are failing of treason if it might help him grab more power, right? Why would anyone think that was wrong?

And this attitude of doing whatever it takes to get some power is all over the party. By way of example, one of the various scummy tactics Republicans used on election day was pretending that Michael Steele, the would-be Republican Senator from Maryland, was a Democrat. Forces friendly to Steele (he obviously knew nothing about it) bused in homeless people from Philadelphia to tell black voters in Baltimore to vote for him as a Democrat. One of the homeless people has spoken up, and his story is heart-wrenching for anyone with a comitment to democracy or social justice:

"People started screaming, at us, 'Do you think we're that stupid? What are you trying to pull?' " said El-Bedawi. "I said, 'I didn't know it was a lie! I'm from Philly!' And they said, 'Then go back to Philly!'

[and]

"I am so angry and upset, I don't know what to do," said El-Bedawi, who's particularly shattered that he and at least 200 other Philadelphians didn't get home from Maryland in time to vote here.

"These people think we're too stupid to understand the magnitude of what we did."

[and]

"I might not have a home," El-Bedawi told me yesterday, "but that doesn't mean I don't care about right and wrong. No one has the right to use me that way."

This is becoming the problem for Republicans: people are starting to realize how much they care about right and wrong. It is becoming more and more obvious to people across the country that no matter where Republicans say they stand on a given issue, they just can't be allowed to rule.

Once upon a time, Karl Rove had a dream of building an unstoppable Republican super-coalition. He would maintain all the current Republican support and add black evangelicals and Latino social conservatives, yielding a permanent majority. Not only did this election shatter that dream in the short run, but it looks like Rove may be building a permanent majority for Democrats. The youth vote apparently fell to Democrats by a margin over 20% this cycle; other polls show that the younger people are, the more support they have for things like gay rights. And Latinos and blacks, shall we say, did not exactly fall in line. This year, Latinos gave 69% of their vote to Democrats while blacks voted 89% for Democrats.

Democrats will probably pick up some more seats next election, especially in the Senate, while the GOP fights its civil war between the maniacs and the evil reasoners. Eventually Republicans will bounce back to some degree. But there aren't many trends looking good for them right now, and it looks like they're dead in the water for the time being. I'm sure more than a few wish their party could be more like that one dead man's party.