Zandar's Thought Of The Day

I'd like to thank Arlen Specter for proving my point from this morning:

The Purge Of The Moderates from the ranks of the GOP is most certainly underway. That hardcore 20% of America that remains proudly Republican are not the Arlen Specters or the Mitt Romneys or the Susan Collinses of the political world. They are the Steve Kings, James Inhofes, and Michele Bachmanns of the fringe, extremist far right, the paranoid few who scream endlessly about Obama's fake birth certificate, fascist re-education camps, the global warming hoax, gays and lesbians destroying the world, the need to provide creationism as an alternative to the "unproven theory of evolution", and how the Swine Flu epidemic is just a ruse to get Kathleen Sebelius a job at HHS.

These are the kind of people who are now left in the GOP at this point. I forsee 2010 and 2012 will purge many of the remaining moderates from Washington as the party becomes not the Mighty Elephant but the Screaming Wingnut, the kind almost begging for another terror attack to hit the US so they can feel vindicated.

The kind of people who are left in the Republican Party are the kind of people who lament Dick Cheney not having run for President in 2008 not because a man with an approval rating even worse than Dubya would have actually won, but because it the campaign season would have purged the weak, useless moderates from the GOP much sooner and the GOP of today would be in better shape to fight Obama now, having already re-emerged from the civil war to reforge itself down to the ashes of Neo-Hoover, Neo-Goldwater conservatism instead of fighting that war now.

That internal GOP struggle is now a full blown civil war thanks to Arlen Specter. The results of that war are just as important to Democrats and Independents as they are Republicans. We must absolutely have a viable alternative to the Democrats when they do stupid things, and right now the Republicans just ain't it, man.