@dyslexia,
dyslexia wrote:
For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.
For example, Larry Sabato, the election forecaster, predicts that seven Senate seats currently held by Republicans will go Democratic on Tuesday. According to the liberal-conservative rankings of the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, five of the soon-to-be-gone senators are more moderate than the median Republican senator " so the rump, the G.O.P. caucus that remains, will have shifted further to the right. The same thing seems set to happen in the House.
Also, the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, believe that Mr. McCain is losing “because the mainstream media is biased” rather than “because Americans are tired of George Bush.”
But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.
This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.
Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/opinion/03krugman.html?th&emc=th
paul krugman---
Well, this is all very self-congratulatory, but at any given moment about half the country wants to vote Republican, including now. Sometimes it's a little more, and sometimes it's a little less, but it's usually about half. It's not just a handful of nuts, as you present it. Indeed, Obama's success is due at least as much to his unusual speaking ability as to his platform, and if he were more average in his speaking ability, McCain would either be winning or even. This is not any kind of unusual repudiation of the current administration.
As for the question of systematic dishonest by the current Republican administration, if I asked for an example, you'd collapse like a house of cards, by which I mean that you'd escape through an insult, a joke, claim it had already been proven or is obvious, or else describe a case in which the Republican leadership was mistaken, but not lying. You all repeat your slogans to each other, and try to shout down anyone with an opposing opinion, but you pretty much can't back up any of it in a simple, dignified, objective discussion of the issues.
