On Aug 10, 12:57 pm, Soldier in a Combat Zone gmail.com>
wrote:

Keep dreaming. The big tent Republican party is dead, and isn't
coming back. The libertarian wing, represented by Ron Paul, has split
off (Paul won't even support McCain). The evangelicals no longer
trust the neocons (witness James Dobson, who also won't endorse
McCain), they realize they've been played and nothing has been
delivered. The neocons with their "muscular" foreign policy have
disgusted the country with a long, expensive, bloody debacle in Iraq
that the nation wishes it had never started.

Meanwhile, the Republican disdain for government in geneneral has been
shown to produce corrupt and ineffective institutions, with the
incompetence of FEMA in the aftermath of Katrina shocking the
conscience of the nation. The long round of tax cuts aimed at the
rich has weakened the nation's fiscal health without producing
benefits for the middle class - the lie of trickle-down voodoo
economics has been exposed. Which is why McCain (who previously
opposed Bush's tax cuts) can't get very far trying to sell that snake
oil today.

After years of denying global warming existed and refusing to move our
energy policy away from sucking up to oil and coal companies, the
Republicans are seen as the party of ignorance and incompetence, now
that the environmental and economic costs of their policies are
obvious. Their utter failure to manage reform in any of the areas
important to most Americans - health care, social security, job growth
- has disillusioned the American people, and will keep the Republicans
a minority party for the next 15 or 20 years.

Republican greed and incompetence has shifted the American public away
from their disdain for government and towards a view that they want
leaders to go to Washington to lead, not to dismantle the agencies
already in place. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found
that, by a 53-to-42 percent margin, Americans want government to "do
more to solve problems"; a dozen years ago, respondents opposed
government action by 2 to 1. That's a gigantic (and continuing) shift
towards the viewpoint of the Democratic party.

You think a couple of years of President Obama could possibly reverse
this course? That period will see a slew of investigations in to the
war-profiteering by the likes of Halliburton and neocon cronies in the
Pentagon, the neocon lies and propaganda that fooled the public in to
supporting a useless war, the astonishing incompetence of Bush
appointees throughout the executive branch, and the brazen corruption
of Republican members of Congress. The constant drumbeat of stories
will cement the views already in place after 8 years of the GOP
wrecking the economy. When people can't get a mortgage, can't afford
health insurance, can't afford to fill up their gas tank, and can't
get any trade-in value for that SUV, they'll blame the Republicans.

As much as the Carter years ushered in a long run of GOP dominance,
the Bush years will do the same for the Democrats. America's
government is broken, and the public knows it's Republican disdain for
government that broke it. Toss in the anti-science, anti-intellectual
themes that Republican rhetoric is based around, plus pandering to
religious fundamentalists, and the conservative movement looks like a
bunch of know-nothings, stuck in the past and with no viable vision
for the future.

Americans want to tackle our dependence on oil, our soaring health
care costs, our lackluster job growth in the face of a global
marketplace for goods and services. Republican whining about gay
marriage and abortion and immigrants taking away lettuce picking jobs
will get laughed out of the room, the American public finally sees the
GOP for the frauds they are.

Bo Raxo