Watch our dust if that happens.
E.O Dionne is already writing as if Kerry has won. I don't see the knives coming out for the moderates - er the liberals inside the GOP.
Oh, yeah, E.J., friend of the GOP - NOT!
Steve Gunderson, a Wisconsin Republican, speaks of "a coming civil war in the party" spurred by the efforts of conservatives to purge moderates from its ranks.
Heck, I only want to purge the socialists from the party.
What Dionne is saying is that Kerry will lose in a landslide. There will be Civil War among the Democrats. The Party will splinter. One faction will be extreme Marxists and will be called the Moderate Party. The remainder will be a tiny group that admire Zell Miller and will be called the Marginal Party.
I smell fear. The Democrats hope that by endlessly saying how divided Republicans are, they can make it so. That's their only hope, since they themselves have caved completely to their radical wing.
I think that until the Democrats ditch their radical wing completely and move back to the center, the Republicans will be secure, mainly because moderate and liberal Republicans have nowhere else to go. But looking ahead a few years, if the Dems do move right, I would expect to see some Republican defections. Which is ok, because then the entire spectrum will have shifted to the right. It would be nice not to have to be quite so worried about the inevitable eventual Democratic president.
The GOP will be much better when we start to truly understand we cannot, will not and should not attempt to please everybody all the time. We're doing pretty damn well BTW.
We hold the White House, the Senate, the House as well as a majority of Governorships in the country.
A Kerry win, which won't happen, won't change the other majorities we continue to hold.
Asked on issues, the majority of America agrees strongly with the GOP. They just don't want to associate the issues with the GOP. That battle will be waged.
The major issue which will define the difference in the parties and, IMO, coalesce the GOP will be Gay Marriage. That's what Gunderson is probably trying to fight off.
The deal is that each supports the others' pet causes to the extent they do not infringe on their own. Hence, you'll find Jesse Jackson bending over (excuse the image) for the homosexual lobby, but only so far. Same with the unions and the enviro-nuts.
They are small minded, vitriolic mental cases who stand for nothing except the debasement of America and her values. They are a cancer on the body politic.
WHY?!!! WHY?!!!WHY?!!!
And then the purges will start.
Specifically, here in Wisconsin, the Senate Republicans have abandoned any attempt to freeze property taxes "for this year", especially through a state consitutional amendment, even though Pubbies hold a majority in both houses of the legislature and even though a property tax freeze has been a popular issue, because they "want to keep it as an issue at the ballot box." Only problem with that line of Barbara Streissand is, given the way that amendments work in Wisconsin, it won't be before the voters for approval in 2006, when Gov. Jim "Craps" Doyle is up for re-election.
Sorry E.J., it's not going to work this time.
EJ is just projecting his wishful thinking. The real war in the democrat party, but Dionne will never admit that because the liberal media is to always portray the GOP as split and divided and the democrat party as united - both of which the opposite is true.
The writer has it exactly backward--it is not conservatives purging moderates from the ranks. It is neo-cons purging paleos. See David Frum in NR who read many of us out of the ranks of conservatives.