Bloodless Coup

Me too.

Actually if you are any kind of Rebuplican other than a Right-wing, FOX news only, evangelical Christian, you have a moral responsibility to your party (not to mention your country) to vote for John Kerry.

A Bush victory this November will be the final nail in the old GOP. McCain's failure in 2000 demonstrated that you cannot win the GOP nomination without the support of the Christian right. A Bush victory this year will demonstrate that the Christian right can win the general election alone. At that point the moderate Republicans will be simply an unnecessary inconvenience for the forces of the evangelical right.

Like the last Social Democrats in Stalin’s new East European Empire may be allowed by the party bosses to hang around for a few years, perhaps to be brought out as window dressing to show the "kinder gentler" side of the Party at election time. But as an independent political force within the GOP the moderates will be toast. Only a Kerry win will give moderate Republicans the leverage they need to take their party back. And only this will provide America with a sane alternative to the Democrats.

Stalin, it's good to see you are taking time out from oppressing the masses to join us again. Welcome back!

This sort of save-the-party-from-itself argument isn't necessarily new, but it does seem more and more appropriate. There is even an argument that W is akin to Carter in that in '76 the Dems had control of everything and no good ideas and Reagan came along and kicked their ass (and W is Carter and the '04 Republicans are the '80 Democrats).

I've been mulling over some sort of blog post wondering what happened to the moderates in the Republican party. What happened to all the people who really did used to believe in small government, national defense, and not sticking your nose into anyone elses business (politically, economically, internationally or personally). Where did all these people go, and why don't we hear from any of them?

I'm still mulling, but I'll post something like this eventually.

I am not sure if they went anywhere except that there have never been that many of them. The Christian Coalition simply mobilized a mass constituency, using the same machine-type politics perfected by the new deal democrats. Think of evangelical churches and there ministers as the modern equivalent of unions and their "bosses". Problem is that the Republican Party has few other constituencies that are as well organized. The Democratic Party always contained several such organized interests. In my view the evangelical right simply came into the GOP and kicked the asses of a bunch of disorganized upper class white business men. For a while they let the moderates run things simply because they didn't think they could win a general election, but now who knows??

I would be looking forward to your post.