Anyone know when and where the GOP funeral services are?

[Cary]

I don't want to go to the wake, but I'd like to send some flowers nevertheless.

[Canuckistanian]

1. I hope Fred Phelps pickets it. n/t

[Algorem]

2. at Mount Misery,Rumsfeld's house,where Frederick Douglass was tortured

[customerserviceguy]

3. History should teach us not to gloat

The Rethugs looked quite dead after the 1964 election, when LBJ's landslide victory looked like something from the best of the FDR elections. They also looked like they couldn't fog a mirror after the 1976 elections, too. And the case could certainly be made that the so-called "Reagan Revolution" was over with after the 1992 election.

We all know what happened next.

[jacksonian]

4. no, don't gloat

but history also tells us now is very different from those times.

1964 was a referendum on a national tragedy, the Kennedy assassination. Watergate was one man's scandal, and the party itself could claim "I didn't know" and had plenty of party leaders unaffected. Carter never had widespread support and just barely won. Clinton never got to 50% even in re-election.

All of those events provided potential to permanent Dem majorities, if the government could rally support to itself and increase rather than lose support. In each case this didn't happen. What is happening today is completely different. The majority is in place, not hoping to be in place someday, and you have never seen such a hard political majority in your lifetime, unless you're old enough to remember Roosevelt.

Things can always change, and probably will. But right now the Dem majority is as permanent as any politcal majority could be looking forward.

[Cary]

6. Things will absolutely change.

That is the only rule, and it is the key to the Whig's fatal mistake. To this day they think they don't have to adapt. Evolution is anathema to them because, they say, the cannot compromise their "values."

I know, it's disgusting and it's enough to make you puke. But this is what they're saying.

[customerserviceguy]

9. You make some good points

1964 was indeed a referendum on a national tragedy, but to a lesser extent, can't we say that about the last election? As yesterday's news reported, we're officially in the deepest recession in over fifty years, the people at the heart of it didn't need a group of government economists to tell them that in November. And it's clear that the mounting death toll of US soldiers in Iran and Afghanistan were as much an issue for Bushco as the mounting death toll in Vietnam was for Johnson and later, Humphrey in 1968.

While the center of the Watergate chapter of our nation's history was indeed Nixon, the taint of it spread to all Republicans. The 1974 midterm elections produced a huge swing from the GOP to the Democratic Party, even though the Republicans were already in the minority, and the Nixon had already resigned. As far as GOP party leaders being safe, generally one becomes a party leader because they keep getting re-elected from a "safe" state or district. But as we saw, it didn't go that way for a lot of leading Democratic Senators in the 1980 election, where we lost Birch Bayh, Frank Church, George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson, and Warren Magnuson.

It is a good point that Jimmy Carter was not broadly supported, much of his support came from the South that was ready to abandon him when they had the choice between him and Reagan. One could make the observation that a goodly part of Barack Obama's electoral votes came from states that were formerly reliably GOP such as Indiana, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and a few others that voted Republican about half the time. They may be in play in a few years if things are not perceived to get better.

Among the people here, President Obama had great support during the general election campaign, but I'd make the case that his support among much of the country was a mile wide and an inch deep. Compared to the weak candidacy of McLame, people decided to give a young man with a fresh promise their support, rather than a doddering old man who was stuck in the past. While the President currently enjoys the reservoir of good will that he has built up since the election, and for the first hundred days of his Presidency, events happen which turn people's perceptions sometimes.

While it's my fervent hope that the President succeeds, and is perceived to succeed, we still have many challenges ahead. The economy has not yet bottomed out, the sooner we reach that point, the more time we have to recover from this recession before the elections. We are still mired in Iraq, and violence has resumed there between the factions of Islam. Afghanistan and Pakistan are still great looming questions. Plus, we have no idea when President Obama's "Katrina" moment will be. It could be the current swine flu, and he will be seen as effective in dealing with it, in contrast to "heckuva job, Brownie".

All I'm saying is that it's too soon to start looking in your closet for your black suit to wear at the Rethuglican Party's funeral.

[Cary]

5. It's different this time.

They continue to this moment to drown themselves in a sea of their own bullshit. Their coalition is broken and all the king's horses and all the king's men could never put it together again.

The lesson to be learned from them is not to not gloat. The lesson to learn from them is to never succumb to that kind of hubris. ;)

[Ganja Ninja]

7. We're going to have to keep things cheap due to the economy.

I suggest we put them in a plastic bag and leave them out for the garbage collectors.

[Homer Wells]

8. I'm thinking maybe a Public Cremation

down Crawford way!!

:evilgrin:

[Ilsa]

10. They aren't dead, just mentally ill. They are refusing

hospitalization and sequestering, though, for their violent tendencies. They are also refusing medication for their delusional and irrational thinking.