GOP Reality

This column needs to be acknowledged coming from one of our 'own':

“GOP is a mummy-wrapped skeleton sitting in its own chilly mausoleum of bilious resentments and creepy sentimentality.”

I'm not a regular listener to Mr. Batchelor's syndicated show but having Larry Johsnon of Plame fame as a returning 'expert' doesn't really say too much. He probably met him through some research done for Human Events before the election on the Chicago scene when Johnson was trying to get Hillary elected using some of his CIA tactics.

From his archives at the NY Sun he appears a classic conservative more in the vein of Pat Buchanan, Barry Goldwater or Ron Paul, who hold a noble but rather unrealistic view of how America should proceed in a world full of WMDs, ICBMs and global communications.

But I'm not interested in debating his conservative persuasion on whole, just his stated view in the column, and that dim screed unfortunately reflects well (although his view of the past is overly pessimistic) the current state of the GOP. Nothing says epic fail more than than this:

The truth about the House Republicans—cowards, sycophants, and snobs just like 1930’s lot—is illustrated by the fact that 85 of them voted for the ludicrous AIG bonus-confiscation bill written on the back of a parking ticket.

Somthing I also noted at the time (illustrating the blind squirrel principle). Anyone who could vote for a knee-jerk 90 percent tax on individuals should be run out of the party on a rail, even if they knew it would never pass.

The problem is Mr. Batchelor failed to mention the available alternatives--partisan snorters like Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid; and Nancy Pelosi, who appears to be a political creation of George Lucas' animation studios with a cartoonish liberal memory chip inserted. But again, that was sort of the point, I guess.

Sometimes a city full of brushy trees needs an ice storm to come along and prune out the dead wood. The hearty trees will survive the trauma, with limbs and branches growing back even healthier and stronger than before. The weak ones will wither and pass away. It's a natural cycle. Perhaps there's a lesson, and some hope, in that.