"Knights of the Living Dead;" written by a Southerner, forSoutherners; filled with truth; damnyanke

Knights of the Living Dead

Four months ago, as the general public was getting its first taste of

Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, we beheld a rare congruence where the

most liberal and least liberal New York Times columnists offered

essentially the same impression, during the same 24-hour news cycle.

"To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a

fairly smart guy," wrote the liberal economist Paul Krugman, "and

nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid.

To appeal to the GOP base, however, you have to say some very stupid

things, like Mr. Romney's declaration that we should 'double

Guantanamo ...'"

The next morning, at the bottom of the same op-ed page, after boasting

that Romney graduated in the top 5% of his class at Harvard Business

School, the conservative David Brooks asked us, "Why do the Democratic

candidates pretend to be smarter than they really are, while the

Republicans pretend to be dumber?"

To answer Brooks as if he didn't know is condescending, so we assume

his question is rhetorical. But "the media" have become a bubble where

the people inside don't always grasp what is obvious to everyone

outside. What Brooks probably knows, he will never write -- that

Democrats pretend to be as smart as they can because they think many

of their target voters are intelligent and discriminating, while

Republicans pretend to be as dumb as they can because they think most

of their base is even dumber. (The smart ones, they think, understand

that the candidates are just whoring themselves to snare the slack-

jaws.) This humorously sorry state of the party, the wages of four

decades of cynical success, was pulled into focus by a Times headline

from the Republican primary camps in New Hampshire: "Candidates Spar

Over Who Is a Real Republican."

They can spar until Jesse Helms endorses Barack Obama, but the Real

Republican will never emerge from this pack or any other. In its

pursuit of power, the Republican Party has dismembered and reassembled

itself so that a thousand livid sutures are showing. It's not a party

but a Frankenstein monster, patched together from dead and

discontinued materials, organ transplants that may yet be rejected,

rough pieces that look familiar but never match. Since the party's

symbol is the elephant, the parable of the blind men and the elephant

is relevant: touch the thing here and it's a briefcase, over there a

cross, down there a bomb, a gasoline pump, a pistol, a golf club, a

fetus -- a noose? Republicans are no longer a party but a loose

coalition of Americans who hate things -- different things -- praying

that fear and aversion can win them another four years of power and

excess. Ed Rollins, the old Ronald Reagan operative now working for

Mike Huckabee, recently acknowledged the party's unnatural composition

and the fact that hasty old stitchwork is coming undone. "It's gone,"

said Rollins. "The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition -- social

conservatives, defense conservatives, anti-tax conservatives -- it

doesn't mean a whole lot to people anymore."

What is this quilted, decomposing thing, lurching across the

cornfields, scaring crows in Iowa and moose in New Hampshire,

terrifying the lowly possum in the South Carolina pinewoods? It used

to be my daddy's party, his beloved GOP. Without a coherent identity,

without appealing or plausible candidates who can even simulate

sincerity, the patchwork party's primary season has been a ghoulish

cabaret, scary-funny, more Mel Brooks than Mary Shelley. Every

morning's newswire yielded comic treasure. Did Giuliani really say "I

took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large

extent."? Is it possible that his panicked opponents have tried to

hamstring the surging fundamentalist Mike Huckabee, who repudiates

evolution, by calling him a liberal? And Huckabee, pressed to defend a

son who killed a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp---god love our working

press---did he say "It was mangy--it looked like it was going to

attack."?

John McCain earned his idiot stripes by declaring that "the

Constitution established the United States as a Christian country," an

embarrassment he could have avoided by reading our absolutely God-and-

Christ-free Constitution on page 498 of the new World Almanac. Romney

and Giuliani would reverse themselves up to 180 degrees on guns and

abortions; Romney styled himself a secret hunter, a closet Nimrod,

though there's not as much as a shotgun pellet to prove it. The

candidates were divided on the issue of -- torture? In their clumsy

passion to whore their way into the hearts of Republican

conservatives, these mangy candidates have the look of dogs that won't

hunt anywhere. And they seemed to have no handlers, no writers or

researchers, no scouts to steer them through the minefields created by

their own lies and evasions. Primary season has never been kind to the

truth; but in an age when any voter can check any lie online,

pandering to the base as if it has no mind, no memory and no

investment in reality has become a distinctly Republican perversion.

In their desperation to connect, Republican candidates could scarcely

be distinguished from cloacal right-wing propagandists like Rush

Limbaugh and Anne Coulter, who say absolutely anything that comes into

their heads and expect their audience to believe it because they want

to.

Logic dictates that presidential candidates of the patchwork party,

staggering under the weight of the Iraq war and their own mendacity,

will soon be as dead as the poor beast at the Scout camp, and that by

the time their burlesque is concluded the survivor will be begging his

Democratic opponent for a chance to die with dignity. But logic

dictated that George W. Bush was too inconsequential to be elected

governor of Texas. It dictates that a corrupt two-party system most

Americans despise will soon be replaced by something more democratic

and manageable, perhaps even less expensive. It dictates that a party

made of four or five belligerent constituencies with nothing in common

would lose every election -- yet up till the eve of the 2006 midterms,

the Republican Frankenstein was enjoying one of the longest winning

streaks in its checkered history.

Logic never amounts to jack s t in electoral politics, a warning and

also a source of hope for these relentless ego-prisoners whose

ambitions so flagrantly outweigh their abilities. The most logical

decision the Republican Party ever made was also its most immoral, and

naturally its most rewarding -- the infamous "Southern strategy." The

segregationist George Wallace split the Democratic vote and helped to

elect Nixon in 1968, that year of murder, confusion and heartbreak

that set the American stage for all the misfortune to come. Long

before Wallace began to sweep up primaries in 1972, Nixon's people,

the Karl Roves of their day, had drawn the obvious, odious conclusion.

The Democrats, chained to African-Americans, labor unions, Eastern

liberals and the antiwar movement, would never hold their once-Solid

South if the Republican Party came courting from the far Right -- and

turned its back on civil rights.

This is ancient history to people my age; 1968 would have been my

first chance to vote for a president, if there had been anyone my

conscience allowed me to vote for. But many younger people seem

unclear about the major ideological realignment that occurred when the

Southern strategy was implemented. Republicans from up North come to

the Carolinas with no idea that Jesse Helms wasn't always a Republican

or that he's not exactly their kind of Republican, and no clue to what

drove the old hyena to change his spots. A few years ago a young

reporter was interviewing the Hall of Fame baseball player Buck

Leonard, the pride of Rocky Mount, N.C. The great Negro League first

baseman, then in his late eighties, answered a question about his

politics by affirming that he was, of course, a Republican. The

reporter, perhaps raised out of state, asked Leonard how that could be

possible.

"Ever hear of Abraham Lincoln?" Leonard replied. Jim Crow,

administered by racist Democrats, ruled North Carolina until Leonard,

born in 1907, was well past middle age. The GOP was the only

respectable option for proud black people of his generation. The same

apparent contradiction -- along with undeserved taunts of "Uncle Tom"

and "sellout" -- plagued Jackie Robinson, the most famous of all black

baseball players and an outspoken activist for civil rights. Robinson,

who was born in Alabama, found a saner, kinder world in California and

with it a chronic weakness for his fellow Californian Richard Nixon,

who had charmed him with perfect recall of Robinson's athletic

exploits at UCLA. The relationship soured as the Southern strategy

began to spread its evil nets, but a disillusioned Robinson, who died

in 1972, lived to see Nixon nominate two Deep South segregationists

for the US Supreme Court. If it hadn't been for Watergate -- an equally

cynical but much less toxic Nixon stratagem -- Jimmy Carter would not

have been elected and Republicans would have held the presidency for

all but eight of the past 40 years.

Each Republican candidate, whatever he may have felt personally, has

been obliged to renew his party's pact with the devil. The midget

Republicans now running for president were described in this morning's

paper as "united in reverence for President Ronald Reagan." But the

great Republican restoration began with Ronald Reagan's notorious

"states' rights" speech in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1980, in the same

savagely racist town where Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James

Chaney were murdered by Klansmen in 1964. When Reagan launched his

presidential campaign by declaring "I believe in states' rights" in

Neshoba County, reaching out to embrace some of the South's worst

bigots in one of their most impregnable strongholds, the Republican

Party symbolically and permanently turned its back on black Americans,

the civil rights movement and the party's liberal wing, which quickly

withered and died. At this historic moment the GOP cashed in the last

of its self-respect, and so did Reagan, though abstractions like self-

respect were mostly lost on old Dutch. And it was no anomaly, no out-

of-character performance for Reagan, now generally canonized by

conservatives and offered as a role model to young Republicans. He

opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of

1965, which he described as "humiliating to the South." When I covered

the Angela Davis case as a novice newsmagazine writer, several of my

first drafts were rejected because I -- very young, a hereditary

Republican, from a place in the mountains where no black people lived

-- kept noting that Gov. Reagan's racial insensitivity was stupefying.

As president he opposed the Martin Luther King holiday (any word

against it was your password into the racist fraternity) and vetoed

bills to expand federal civil rights legislation and to impose

sanctions on South Africa for apartheid, both of which were passed

over his veto. Anti-black conservatives were the one piece of the

Reagan coalition Ed Rollins doesn't mention. If Reagan wasn't exactly

a Klansman, he was the white supremacist's best friend in Washington,

and the shame of his public record can't be erased by the myth of "The

Great Communicator" or by carving his smiling face on Mount Rushmore.

To put it simply, the Republican Party traded Lincoln's legacy for

Wallace's constituency. It sold its soul to the devil for a chance to

rule America. Or why not the world -- the party of Big Capital never

thinks small. The conspirators who conceived and negotiated this deal

(Harry Dent, Pat Buchanan, Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes?) must have been

well satisfied with the results. But the devil comes back to collect.

Some of us who lost our party and our faith in the American system

think we smell sulfur in the air, and see unmistakable signs that Old

Scratch is collecting now. We dearly hope so.

That's the scenario as I choose to see it -- the piebald monster

lurching and stumbling, leaving loose pieces of himself scattered

behind, the devil with his bailiffs in hot pursuit. Presented by a

Democrat, it would be just as plausible, but more likely to be

disregarded. It's primary season, after all. In fact I've never been a

member of the Democratic Party, never voted in one of its primaries.

If I could have stomached voting in 1968, I suppose I would have

registered Republican, like every member of my family up to that time.

By 1972 it was a different world and George McGovern was an

irresistible option. But up until the reign of George W. Bush, this

Rosemary's Baby that sleeping with the devil has produced, I would

have said that Republicans ruling unopposed was worse than only one

thing -- Democrats ruling unopposed, with their gutlessness, their

sanctimoniousness, their hollow rhetoric and empty promises. I always

registered under the capital "I," and the last Republican who won my

vote was the late John Lindsay, who today would be exiled to the far

left wing of the Democratic Party.

Since 2001, we've learned that there are far worse things than

unopposed Democrats. Ralph Nader, who said these parties were one and

the same, was dead wrong -- and his timing was terrible. But there's

plenty of guilt to go around. As Southerners we're compelled to admit

that the South has been the intractable problem, the worm in the

American apple. We're the poison pill the GOP had to swallow, like a

steroid, to swell its bionic body to the intimidating size that

changed its electoral fortunes. I've always railed against self-

righteous, ignorant Yankees who attack the South armed with nothing

but outdated stereotypes. If we produced the most terrifying bigots

who violated civil rights, we also produced more than our share of the

heroes who risked everything to defend them. But race is the dark at

the top of the national staircase, now and always. And the South is

the place, cursed by its history, where racism became an enduring,

politically formidable institution. There are no moral paragons, no

pure hearts in politics. Deploring Reagan's epic cynicism in

Mississippi, we can't fail to acknowledge that the Democrats were

duplicitous enough, Machiavellian enough to hold the Solid South

through FDR's New Deal, JFK's 20-minute Camelot and LBJ's Great

Society, all fondly remembered now as liberal moments. The Dixiecrats

won decades of disappointing concessions from the Democrats, then

demanded even more from the Republicans, and got them.

Are the diehard Rebels softening, even now? I asked my brother, who

teaches in a part of the Deep South where liberals are hunted like

squirrels and raccoons, if the ruinous war in Iraq and the

administration's amazing series of scandals and smoking guns -- as well

as its vandalism of conservative principles -- might change the way his

neighbors voted. "Not really," he said. "They're down on Bush but

they'll jump on any excuse to forgive him. To them it's just two

teams, and Democrats are the other team. It's like being born to root

for Alabama or Auburn, Georgia or Georgia Tech."

In 2004, someone said that 25% of the electorate would vote for Bush

if he were convicted of killing JonBenet Ramsey, or photographed

raping a goat. That untouchable base must include my brother's

neighbors. Southerners are a stubborn people, slow to trust, even

slower to change established loyalties. For conservatives under 50,

the GOP is the South's home team and family tradition. They're holding

up their end of the devil's bargain, and the latest candidates show no

sign of welshing on theirs. Still genuflecting to the ghost of Strom

Thurmond, Giuliani, Romney, McCain and Fred Thompson were all

conspicuous no-shows -- pleading "scheduling conflicts" -- at the PBS

forum on minority issues held at Morgan State University in September.

Even Newt Gingrich said he was disgusted.

The Republicans needed us and they got us. They used us and now

they'll go down choking on us. It was the marriage made in hell, a

fatal alliance that may be the South's final revenge on the Republican

Party for Lincoln, Grant and the War Between the States. As cultural

heterogeneity and relaxing racial attitudes continue to marginalize

the old Dixie worldview, Republicans will feel that Bible Belt

pinching tighter and tighter. By and by they'll hang themselves with

it. They'll scramble and cheat -- in black precincts they'll try to

inhibit voter turnout, in California they're already trying to steal

electoral votes with a shady referendum. But new friends will be hard

to find, when they've defined their party by what they hate,

discourage and oppress: minorities, unions, poor people, immigrants,

homosexuals, atheists, scientists and scholars, small farmers and

businessmen, journalists, pacifists, non-Christians, uppity women with

their reproductive rights. You can run a modern political party on

Wall Street's money, but you can't get by on its votes. Just as Wall

Street cares nothing about abortion or gay marriage, Main Street cares

nothing about tax cuts or inheritance taxes -- it never expected to

inherit anything but the kingdom of heaven.

If you think I'm being optimistic, you're mistaken. The devil gets his

due and the Frankenstein thing, the knight of the living dead, falls

apart at the seams in 2008. Trust me. But what does it leave in its

wake? The GOP's fragmented identity, along with his own lack of

candor, commitment or visible achievement, allowed George W. Bush to

ascend to the presidency (by fair means or foul, it doesn't matter

now) as a virtual mystery. Texas cowboy or Connecticut preppy,

Southern fundamentalist or country-club moderate, Wall Street or Main

Street, underdog or dauphin, who knew George? He turned out to be the

most dishonest, incompetent, imperious and radically secretive chief

executive we've ever suffered, with the most dangerously foreshortened

view of history and the most frightening array of scoundrels to do his

bidding. He's twisted and crumpled the Constitution like a cocktail

napkin. If the cringing Democrats in Congress had the courage and were

sure they had the votes, his impeachment would be sealed in 20

minutes. The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan --

which has real WMDs -- exposes the unbearable fact that we wasted

irreplaceable resources on the wrong war. It also exposes the deadly

risk, for even the richest and most powerful countries, when they

place their critical resources in the hands of liars and fools.

I have no consoling confidence that a fairly impressive selection of

Democratic candidates -- Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson,

even the brilliant, unreliable two-headed creature its enemies call

"Billary" -- includes that savior, that consummate surgeon who will be

able to stop the arterial bleeding in the Middle East. One of them

deserves a chance to try. But neither Iraq nor the gathering jihad

Bush has blindly nurtured is necessarily the end of the American

imperium. We still have money and weapons to spare, and ample manpower

once we start drafting college boys to replace the poor soldiers we

wasted in the wrong war, in the wrong country. The true firebell in

the night rang quietly, compared with the screaming sirens in the

Middle East. I heard it ringing in a New York Times story under the

byline of Adam Cohen. It appeared a few week ago and didn't create

much of a stir. It scared me to death. According to Cohen, a wealthy

trial lawyer named Paul Minor, a major supporter of John Edwards and a

bellwether of the minority Democratic Party in Mississippi, is now

serving an 11-year prison sentence for, in Cohen's words, "a crime

that does not look much like a crime at all."

Minor, son of a famous liberal journalist, was convicted of violating

the state's vague campaign finance laws. Apparently lawyers in

ethically easygoing Mississippi have always contributed openly to the

campaign funds of judges who may later hear their cases. But only

Democrats have been prosecuted for conflict of interest, and only

under the politicized Bush Justice Department recently run by Alberto

Gonzales. Minor was a major thorn in the local Republicans' side;

Cohen claims that his real crime was his fight to keep a slate of pro-

business Republicans from taking over the state Supreme Court in 2000.

"Disturbingly vague," Cohen calls the corruption charge on which Minor

was convicted, and his Draconian sentence effectively silenced all

political activity by trial lawyers, the chief support of the

Democratic Party in Mississippi.

You see where we're going. Cohen is implying, and not cautiously, that

Minor is a political prisoner -- a case for Amnesty International. He

suspects that former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, now serving a seven-

year sentence, was a similar victim. Gonzales' partisan manipulation

of US attorneys is the focus of hearings before the House Judiciary

Committee, where one Alabama Republican testified that she'd heard

Karl Rove himself directed the plot to "hang Don Siegelman." Another

indignant witness, who called the Justice Department's prosecution of

a prominent Pennsylvania Democrat "bizarre," was Dick Thornburgh,

Republican attorney general under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Savor the headline, "Opposition Leaders Jailed." Does it remind you of

our wonderful allies in Pakistan, and all those vicious little

countries where martial law is declared and words like "dictator,"

"strongman," "coup," and "junta" are routine? Never in the United

States, not in our wildest dreams. And these are wealthy men, these

prisoners, with the best lawyers and the best connections. If it can

happen to them, it can happen overnight to you or me. Eleven years?

You realize many murderers serve less. If Cohen has it right, this is

the final insult, the final straw imposed by a party that abandoned

every principle in its pursuit of power. Will you vote for these

thugs? Would you die for them? Islamic extremists have proven, to our

amazement, their readiness to die for their god and their prophet. The

beauty of America was always that our citizens would sacrifice

themselves not for god or king or Glorious Leader, but for a way of

life and a set of laws they believed in. (For African-American

soldiers, it was harder.) I don't know about you. But I wouldn't lift

a finger to defend a country where such a creepy, fascist, banana

republic trick could pass inspection.

Hal Crowther's most recent book of essays, Gather at the River, was a

finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Write him at 219 N. Churton St., Hillsborough, NC 27278.

http://www.populist.com/08.02.crowther.html

"Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names" <PopUlist349@hotmail.com> wrote in message

news:8b85e069-07fa-41d6-b103-e064166b08d4@q77g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...

> Knights of the Living Dead

> Four months ago, as the general public was getting its first taste of

> Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, we beheld a rare congruence where the

> most liberal and least liberal New York Times columnists offered

> essentially the same impression, during the same 24-hour news cycle.

>

> "To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a

> fairly smart guy," wrote the liberal economist Paul Krugman, "and

> nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid.

> To appeal to the GOP base, however, you have to say some very stupid

> things, like Mr. Romney's declaration that we should 'double

> Guantanamo ...'"

That is a totally stupic thing to say. Many democrats do not like what is

happening in Guantanamo. I have not heard a whole lot of Republicans

complain about Guantanamo. These guys are trying to win the Republican

nomination, not the Democratic nomination.

>

> The next morning, at the bottom of the same op-ed page, after boasting

> that Romney graduated in the top 5% of his class at Harvard Business

> School, the conservative David Brooks asked us, "Why do the Democratic

> candidates pretend to be smarter than they really are, while the

> Republicans pretend to be dumber?"

>

> To answer Brooks as if he didn't know is condescending, so we assume

> his question is rhetorical. But "the media" have become a bubble where

> the people inside don't always grasp what is obvious to everyone

> outside. What Brooks probably knows, he will never write -- that

> Democrats pretend to be as smart as they can because they think many

> of their target voters are intelligent and discriminating, while

> Republicans pretend to be as dumb as they can because they think most

> of their base is even dumber. (The smart ones, they think, understand

> that the candidates are just whoring themselves to snare the slack-

> jaws.) This humorously sorry state of the party, the wages of four

> decades of cynical success, was pulled into focus by a Times headline

> from the Republican primary camps in New Hampshire: "Candidates Spar

> Over Who Is a Real Republican."

There is a simple test. What is the demographics among democrats and

republicans when it comes to educational achievement. What is the answer?

>

> They can spar until Jesse Helms endorses Barack Obama, but the Real

> Republican will never emerge from this pack or any other. In its

> pursuit of power, the Republican Party has dismembered and reassembled

> itself so that a thousand livid sutures are showing. It's not a party

> but a Frankenstein monster, patched together from dead and

> discontinued materials, organ transplants that may yet be rejected,

> rough pieces that look familiar but never match. Since the party's

> symbol is the elephant, the parable of the blind men and the elephant

> is relevant: touch the thing here and it's a briefcase, over there a

> cross, down there a bomb, a gasoline pump, a pistol, a golf club, a

> fetus -- a noose? Republicans are no longer a party but a loose

> coalition of Americans who hate things -- different things -- praying

> that fear and aversion can win them another four years of power and

> excess. Ed Rollins, the old Ronald Reagan operative now working for

> Mike Huckabee, recently acknowledged the party's unnatural composition

> and the fact that hasty old stitchwork is coming undone. "It's gone,"

> said Rollins. "The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition -- social

> conservatives, defense conservatives, anti-tax conservatives -- it

> doesn't mean a whole lot to people anymore."

Another silly and this time dumb statement. BOTH parties want power, and

EVERY PRESIDENTIAL candiate wants the power that the office provides.

>

> What is this quilted, decomposing thing, lurching across the

> cornfields, scaring crows in Iowa and moose in New Hampshire,

> terrifying the lowly possum in the South Carolina pinewoods? It used

> to be my daddy's party, his beloved GOP. Without a coherent identity,

> without appealing or plausible candidates who can even simulate

> sincerity, the patchwork party's primary season has been a ghoulish

> cabaret, scary-funny, more Mel Brooks than Mary Shelley. Every

> morning's newswire yielded comic treasure. Did Giuliani really say "I

> took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large

> extent."? Is it possible that his panicked opponents have tried to

> hamstring the surging fundamentalist Mike Huckabee, who repudiates

> evolution, by calling him a liberal? And Huckabee, pressed to defend a

> son who killed a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp---god love our working

> press---did he say "It was mangy--it looked like it was going to

> attack."?

Well, the statement above, is probably correct. The "party" does seem to be

searching for what their sole is. But on the other hand, is that

necessarily a bad thing? Is it better to be "searching" or is it better to

be like a rock and not "search" at all?

>

> John McCain earned his idiot stripes by declaring that "the

> Constitution established the United States as a Christian country," an

> embarrassment he could have avoided by reading our absolutely God-and-

> Christ-free Constitution on page 498 of the new World Almanac. Romney

> and Giuliani would reverse themselves up to 180 degrees on guns and

> abortions; Romney styled himself a secret hunter, a closet Nimrod,

> though there's not as much as a shotgun pellet to prove it. The

> candidates were divided on the issue of -- torture? In their clumsy

> passion to whore their way into the hearts of Republican

> conservatives, these mangy candidates have the look of dogs that won't

> hunt anywhere. And they seemed to have no handlers, no writers or

> researchers, no scouts to steer them through the minefields created by

> their own lies and evasions. Primary season has never been kind to the

> truth; but in an age when any voter can check any lie online,

> pandering to the base as if it has no mind, no memory and no

> investment in reality has become a distinctly Republican perversion.

> In their desperation to connect, Republican candidates could scarcely

> be distinguished from cloacal right-wing propagandists like Rush

> Limbaugh and Anne Coulter, who say absolutely anything that comes into

> their heads and expect their audience to believe it because they want

> to.

>

The framers of our constitution were ALL christians.

> Logic dictates that presidential candidates of the patchwork party,

> staggering under the weight of the Iraq war and their own mendacity,

> will soon be as dead as the poor beast at the Scout camp, and that by

> the time their burlesque is concluded the survivor will be begging his

> Democratic opponent for a chance to die with dignity. But logic

> dictated that George W. Bush was too inconsequential to be elected

> governor of Texas. It dictates that a corrupt two-party system most

> Americans despise will soon be replaced by something more democratic

> and manageable, perhaps even less expensive. It dictates that a party

> made of four or five belligerent constituencies with nothing in common

> would lose every election -- yet up till the eve of the 2006 midterms,

> the Republican Frankenstein was enjoying one of the longest winning

> streaks in its checkered history.

I am betting on the survival of the two party system in this country.

>

> Logic never amounts to jack s t in electoral politics, a warning and

> also a source of hope for these relentless ego-prisoners whose

> ambitions so flagrantly outweigh their abilities. The most logical

> decision the Republican Party ever made was also its most immoral, and

> naturally its most rewarding -- the infamous "Southern strategy." The

> segregationist George Wallace split the Democratic vote and helped to

> elect Nixon in 1968, that year of murder, confusion and heartbreak

> that set the American stage for all the misfortune to come. Long

> before Wallace began to sweep up primaries in 1972, Nixon's people,

> the Karl Roves of their day, had drawn the obvious, odious conclusion.

> The Democrats, chained to African-Americans, labor unions, Eastern

> liberals and the antiwar movement, would never hold their once-Solid

> South if the Republican Party came courting from the far Right -- and

> turned its back on civil rights.

The goal of each party is to win and control the govenrment. It is winning

that is important to them, and whatever strategy allows them to accomplish

that goal, is what ultimately counts.