GOP operatives over the weekend told me the mood in the party of the elephant is as bad as they've ever seen. Those old enough to remember the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate say it is even lower than the period following Nixon's resignation.
"We're going down and we're going down hard," a GOP campaign manager said Sunday, "and, frankly, some in our own ranks say we deserve everything that will happen to us."
Yes, they do. The Republicans have been monumental failures since they took control of Congress after the 1994 mid-term elections. They fumbled away every opportunity and proved themselves even more corrupt than the Democratic leadership they replaced.
The Democrats deserved to lose in 1994. They had become complacent in power and dizzy from the lust of greed. The fall of power brokers like Speaker of the House Jim Wright and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski exemplified a party that put politics above the law.
But Republicans, who promised massive reform and elimination of "business and usual" from the Congressional system, too quickly fell under the intoxication and power. House leader Newt Gingrich soon left under an ethical cloud and the growing Jack Abramoff scandal means a still-undetermined number of Republicans will spend at least part of their retirement years in jail.
Pork barrel expanded to record proportions under GOP leadership. So did the power of special interest groups and the abuse of power.
And, of course, the Mark Foley Congressional page scandal, just the latest example of both the arrogance and incompetence of the party that controls Congress.
Finally, we have Bush - George W. Bush - the despot-in-chief, the man who led this nation to a war based on lies and used a trumped-up "war on terrorism" to gut the Constitution and rip away freedoms that used to form the fabric of American culture. For too long, power-drunk GOP congress rubber-stamped the often-insane actions of a power-mad President.
In Washington, karma has a way of coming around and it's about to deliver a haymaker to the Republican Party.
With luck it will be a knockout punch and one that is both long overdue and well-deserved.... Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue
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Why can't I cheer? It isn't because I am certain the Democrats will do absolutely nothing to force the administration to get out of Iraq, turn back the Patriot Act, dismantle the Gitmo gulage, re-regulate the economy, re-fund public education, kill No Child Left Behind, and a dozen other things. That won't happen.
It's something else that I can't quite put my finger on. It has something to do with the idea that first of all the people of this country or at least the voters put these jerks in power, when it was promised to be a very bad idea in the first place. Now that it has finally, some six years too late dawned on enough of them, that yes, it was a bad thing to do and they put them in for bad reasons. The elected jerks might go, but the people who put them in haven't changed.
CG