Sidney Blumenthal adds some sorely needed historical perspective on what is shaping up to a epochal defeat for the GOP:
"The drama of Richard Nixon's resignation 30 years ago this month has long overshadowed his political achievement. Nixon's criminal White House seemed an aberrant episode rooted in only his pathologies. But Nixon was the father of the modern Republican party....
George Bush did not make a new coalition or offer a refreshed Republicanism, despite the trope of 'compassionate conservatism'....
In Illinois, a former presidential bellwether, the Republican party has fallen off the map.... the state Republican party has imploded: unable to find a credible Senate candidate against the star of the Democratic convention, Barack Obama, it has now come up with its own African-American, Alan Keyes. A screeching religious right fanatic, Keyes, who has worn a lapel pin featuring the feet of a foetus, is Jerry Falwell as played by Little Richard....
The party that Nixon built is crumbling. Bush is the candidate of canned talking points and a party whose instincts have become rote and often counterproductive....
Can Bush dump Cheney without being seen as desperate and repudiating his entire term? Bush's father owed his political career to Nixon's patronage; now the son is in danger of inheriting the wind."
different voices
10 years ago