Andrew Sullivan on Inversion 2
One man’s take:
. . . All the states Lincoln fought against are now the bastions of his own party.
(snip)
The GOP is now very much the party of Dixie; and the consequence of this election is that the Congressional leadership is even more Southern than it was before. The irony is that it was the moderate Republicans who were disproportionately punished electorally by the extremists in their midst. And so the party that lost because of its extremists now sees itself more dominated by the extremists. Nixon’s cynical ploy – played beyond the extreme by Rove – has, in other words, come back to haunt and defeat his party in the end. Because it over-reached.
November 8, 2006 at 8:23 pm
“And most of the rest of the country – especially the sane, common sense conservatives of the MidWest whence Lincoln himself hailed – have been forced into the Democratic camp.”
The Civil War continues. The people who smack Southerners over the head with Lincoln lessons never read the one about “with malice toward none.”
November 9, 2006 at 1:44 pm
Being a Southerner and having watched head-smacking all my life, perhaps I’m inured to it (or my head is pretty hard).
I saw Sullivan’s comment more ironically, I think, than you did.
Nevertheless, I do think there is a strong case that many voters were “forced” into the Democratic column in this election because the policies of the current Federal Administration and its sycophants have been policies of invective, divisiveness, and exclusion.
Oh, yeah, and lying. Lots and lots of lying. And it caught up with them.
This is not a statement on the traditional values of the Republican Party which I believe, as you know, are in eclipse. This in an incontrovertible truth about the behavior of the clowns in Federal office right now.
And all the nicey-nice soundbites and posed photo ops in the world have been attempts to get us to take our eyes of the cut of the cards, because the cut is crooked and the deal is double.