Must Reads

Suzi Parker: Protecting the Palin Brand: Sarah and Bristol Go for Trademark Status

Gin and Tacos: Bobby Franklin: A Case Study in Good Gub'mint

Mahablog: Missouri Legislature to Puppies: Drop Dead

Tim Fernholz: GOP Proposed Cuts Get Smaller the Closer You Look

Nicholas Kristof: We Are All Egyptians

Ben Dimiero: Attention Fox Nation: There Is More Than One Version Of The Bible

Gail Collins: The Siege of Planned Parenthood

Will Bunch: Five Myths About Ronald Reagan's Legacy

Chez Pazienza: And Now A Word About Charlie Sheen, From Chez's Evil Twin, Garth

Must Reads

Drummond Pike: Stop Supporting Fox News or You'll Have Blood on Your Hands

Gin And Tacos: NPF: Really, Craiglist?

Doctor Biobrain: Hating the Laws They Love

Maha: Drowning in Propaganda

Eugene Robinson: 2010: The Year of Politicking Insanely

Charles Johnson: Pamela Geller and the Bloggers of Hate

Bob Herbert: The Mississippi Pardons

I just had a bit of a rant about the "Obama" economy in a previous post, so I'd like to add these reads as well to refresh some memories or in case you missed them:

Jackie Calmes: TARP Bailout to Cost Less Than Once Anticipated

Mark Zandi: Stimulus Helped Us Avoid Collapse

Must Reads

Gail Collins: Congress, Up In Arms

Paul Krugman: A Money Too Far

Ezra Klein: When Bad Economic News Is Good News

Timothy Karr: Net Neutrality's Weird Week

Danny Schechter: Was The Market Pushed?

Charles M. Blow: Trying To Outrun Race

Mahablog: Why Are Righties So Obsessed With Labels?

Must Reads

The Rude Pundit: Fox "news" Takes Us To Its Leader

Dan Froomkin: Want Obama To Be Bolder? Take To The Streets!

Bob Cesca: Hope, Change and The Long Road: One Year Later

Robert Fisk: America is performing its familiar role of propping up a dictator

Mahablog: Republican Health Care Still an Oxymoron

Brian Beutler: Reid Continues To Target Republican Obstruction

Must Reads

Wonkette: David Brooks Went Running On The Mall And Saw No Racism!

driftglass: Unjust For Men

Derrick Z. Jackson: Soda tax: It’s the real thing

Bob Herbert: The Scourge Persists

Christopher Brauchli: The Internet and The Ignorant

Joe Conason: In defense of ACORN

Maha: Strangling Ourselves With Selfishness and You’ll Get a Kick Out of This, Maybe

Roy Edroso: Their Negro Problem - And Ours

Must Reads

Howard Zinn: Changing Obama's Mindset

Joe Conason: We Tortured To Justify War

Tom Andrews: Time to Stand Up as Congress Stands Down with War Funding Bill

Mahablog: The Unrelease

Bob Cesca: The Real Motive Behind the Cheney Family Torture Tour

The Rude Pundit: Nancy Pelosi Restores the Natural Order of Things

Must Reads

Robert Parry: Who Betrayed 'Objective' Journalism?

Mairead Maguire: Finding Heart and Courage: An Open Letter to President Obama

Karen J. Greenberg: Kiss the Era of Human Rights Goodbye - What Bush Willed to Obama and the World

The Rude Pundit: Friday Fun Quotes (Texas "Education" Edition)

Glenn Greenwald: Ronald Reagan: Vengeful, Score-Settling, Hard Left Ideologue

Armadillo Joe recommends...
driftglass: A Reader Asks...

TRex: Death To Crapitalism

Mahablog: Why Is There an Economy?

Outstripped by Reality

posted by Armadillo Joe

I have been struggling to compose a post about the oncoming implosion of the Rethugli-twit Party and the self-induced death spiral they just can't seem to pull out of, but the Specter defection yesterday seems to me to be that threatened implosion made extant. James Wolcott at Vanity Fair quotes from a very glum David Frum:

The Specter defection is too severe a catastrophe to qualify as a “wake-up call.” His defection is the thing we needed the wake-up call to warn us against

About which Wolcott opines:

The iron-girder he-men of the conservative blogosphere have greeted former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter's defection to the Democrats with whiskery hoots of "good riddance/get lost/don't let the door hit your withered buttocks on the way out" and similar pleasantries. Many of them appear defiantly resigned to the Republican Party becoming a regional bastion of true believers, the Branch Davidian compound of the Confederate Jesus. To those, however, who still share the same sky as those in the real world and think that the best escape route out of minority status and possible extinction is to win elections (crazy, I know), the Specter defection is a disaster.

But Lance Mannion is pretty sure that Specter switching labels is something of a collapse (caused by the inhabitants) of the last pole holding up the GOP's decaying tent:

Everything the Republicans and their paid propagandists in the Media have been doing and saying since November 5 has had one goal.

Holding the Party together.

It's always fun to remind them who won the last election, but they really don't need the reminding. They know the results. And they know what the results suggest about what's in store for them. They can read the polls. Barack Obama is wildly popular. Independents have abandoned them. The demographic trends are against them. If things continue this way in less than a generation it will be easier to find a person under forty who identifies as Zoroastrian or philatelist than one who identifies as Republican.

Under these circumstances, the sensible thing to do is fall back and re-group. Gather the most loyal and reliable and determined troops together and do everything you can to keep up their morale and ready to fight back when the time to fight back arrives.

The smart thing to do, then, would seem to rally the base, keep them happy and energized, and donating, and get them out there working for the next election.

The trouble with this for the Republicans is that their base is their problem.

The base is insane.

And Maha sez that such a spin out of control and off into Kukoo-Land is too long a trip from which to walk back:

the Republican Party is acting like an apocalyptic cult — a small number of true believers waiting for some Big Cataclysmic Event that’s going to change everything, to their advantage. For that reason, present reality doesn’t interest them, because present reality is just a temporary aberration (which it may be, but not in the way they think). Thus, movement conservatives brush off opinion polls that show their positions to be wildly unpopular. They don’t need to worry about election losses, shrinking party membership, an aging political base, or senior senators who jump ship. They don’t need to change with the times. They’ll be vindicated when the Mother Ship arrives.

Frankly, I say it couldn't happen to a finer bunch of assholes. They and their fellow travellers have spent the better part of fifty years (to say nothing of kicking it into high gear over the last ten or so) calling me and all my friends traitors and ni**er-lovers and slutty wimmins and faggoty perverts and terrorist-pal-around-ers and otherwise generally spewing eliminationist rhetoric directed at us, yet only thinly disguised as "satire" to avoid being arrested for incitement. They have been inviting this circular feeding frenzy for decades.

But we need to be cautious. The end of the GOP as an effective political party is not the end of the fight. Not hardly.

The Rethugli-puke Party does not circumscribe The Reich Wing or conservatism in toto or the Ruling Class or any other group of those self-identified classes of toxic political actors who are collectively and as individuals all a deep, mortal and existenstial threat to the free and just America that those tending-toward-blueishness among us revere. The GOP has merely been the political wing of that movement since all those dirty fucking hippies and promiscuous wimmin-folk and uppity negroes scared the bejebus out of Ma and Pa Goober back in the 1960's and they decided that war-mongering plutocratic corporate overlords were better political allies than anything to be found in the ranks of LBJ's ni**er-lovin' party. Ever since, the GOP has been acting as the political expression of a particularly nasty, fearful, racist, violent, authoritarian strain of American nativism. The Rethugli-goon Party has been their political wing just as Sinn Fein acts as the political organ of the IRA.

No, the deranged GOP clown car of liars, degenerates and reprobates, with their socially corrosive tax codes and hostility to the public sphere, with their racism, sexism, authoritarianism and bigotry, with their love of War and Jesus as the Answer for Everything and their brittle, tinny jingoism, with their haughty sanctimony and sadistic, mean-spirited glee at the sight or even the thought of others suffering in pursuit of their petty aims have all been begging to be blasted into oblivion for decades. Any chance we have now to chase these cockroaches, to pursue these scurrying, slithering hordes as they disguise themselves in women's clothing and shove onto the lifeboats or change into civilian clothes, burn their uniforms and try to blend into the general population ahead of the advancing army, any chance we have at all to chase them relentlessly, to shine a light on their true identities and expose them as liars and thieves, to ruin their chances of making a living anywhere but anonymously shoveling manure out of a barn in southern Patagonia, we must take and take without mercy. Because we didn't clear decks after W's grand-pappy tried to overthrow FDR and we didn't clear the decks after McCarthy and we didn't clear the decks after Watergate and we didn't clear the decks after Iran-Contra, because we failed to track down and destroy the bad actors back then we are at war in Iraq today, cheerlead the whole way by survivors and descendants of all those previous scandals.

The time to end this cycle is now.

Even as Specter's departure marks the likely historical end of the 20th Century Republican Party, the American political landscape left in its wake remains ravaged by the war they've waged, as de-forested as an Agent Orange'd jungle, as pock-marked and cratered as a World War One no-man's land, a smoldering remnant of one political party's scorched-earth march to hegemony, littered with political landmines and unexploded human ordnance, hiding and poised to maim and bedevil our peace-loving descendants for generations, no matter how many swords Obama inspires us convert into plowshares in the coming decades.

Must Reads

The Rude Pundit: Torture and the Permanent Republican Majority & A Long Quote to End Torture Week 2009 (Probably Just the First of Many)

Mark Seibel and Warren P. Strobel: CIA Official: No Proof Harsh Techniques Stopped Terror Attacks

Sarfraz Manzoor: How To Tell I'm Not a Terrorist

Armadillo Joe recommends...
James Scurlock: The TARP Queen - Why we should all bow before Elizabeth Warren (even if you've never heard of her).

David Sirota: Don't Pooh-Pooh Populism

Mahablog: Devolved

Digby: Nobody Said This Was Going To be Pretty

Must Reads

Farah Stockman: W.Va. Guard members may have been exposed to toxin in Iraq

Marcia Kramer: Jewish Leaders Blast Clinton Over Israel Criticism

Rude Pundit: Why Glenn Beck Needs to Be Repeatedly Cock-Punched (Apocalype Edition)


Armadillo Joe submissions:

Mahablog: Gimmicks and the GOP

Dr. Biobrain: Assumptions of Class Warfare