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...The Republican Party's historical hostility to the rights of women and the welfare of immigrants

Is it just me, or is this stuff starting to sound comedic to everyone now?

There was time when I worried that someone might read one of these New Yawk Tawking Heads and believe this kind of stuff. But now I find myself laughing at it. It's like these people have diminished to the point where there is now just a little clique of them in New York and Hollywood, and they talk themselves into believing weirder and weirder things. Like some inbred royal family, they're slowly going nuts.

To hear Quindlan talk, or Moyers over in that other thread, unspeakable horrors are about to be unleashed on the populace by crazed right-wing fanatics. You'd think George W. Bush, who gets booed all the time around here for not being conservative enough, is about to establish the American Taliban. Do they really believe this stuff, or is this part of the denial-and-anger phase of the hosing they took last week?

Whatever it is, they sound more and more like paranoid crazy people every day. And to think, they used to be "mainstream journalism." Now they're just a trickle of liberal looneytoons, singing ever-crazier hymns to an ever-smaller choir.

Is it just me, or is this stuff starting to sound comedic to everyone now?

Oh, you're not alone. Anna's bleating that her "leaders" - surely as a nationally-syndicated columnist she qualifies as well? - have left them without fresh positions and messages and then in justification proceeds to trot out every decades-old cliche that got them into this fix in the first place. I think we can all, not just Republicans, see what the problem is here, Anna.

As for "letting the opponents set the terms of debate," she's equally at fault - how can the opponents do anything but, when your only political stance is "we're the opposite of them, whatever they're for." This isn't just handing the opponents the initiative, it's handing them your entire program.

Understand here that Anna's first two paragraphs dealt not with what she believed in, but that she was a Democrat by birth, upbringing, and environment. Anna, darling, those aren't the best of reasons for any intellectual conviction, and they constitute a lousy way to try to win an election.

That it is it in a nutshell. I have seen it first hand and it is not pretty.

They honestly think they have the upperhand and that the Prez will screw up.

They smirk and say "Lets wait and see," all the while stewing in thier irrelevance.