Time Declares "The End of the [Republican] Revolution"

If you believe the people at Time magazine, it's over.  The goose is cooked.  Stick a fork in it.  The GOP is done, at least for now.

Pending another reinvention and revolution, Time says in its cover story (the picture features the back on an elephant facing the darkness--a poignant image if ever there was one), the GOP is wandering adrift and lost in a deep-seated fundamental betrayal of its ideals and ideology.

And keep in mind that Time magazine is no friend of Democrats.  Joe Klein is the most liberal columnist Time magazine has--and that's not saying much.

The article is brutal, and shows just how far the tide has turned.  Follow me below the fold for a few glimpses.

In fact, the first sentence is the kicker:

Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left.

Amen to that.  The same story, again and again, from George Orwell's Animal Farm to the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dynamite, the message is always the same, and the cycle neverending.  But there IS hope for a progressive revolution: the very ideals of the progressive revolution we envision carry with them innate measures of accountability to those in power.  By our very nature, we will not be content to allow our leaders to betray our principles, at least in theory.

The best paragraphs of the article, however, follow shortly thereafter:

On conservative commentator Laura Ingraham's show, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in history explained why he would not resign despite a sex scandal that has produced a hail of questions about his leadership and the failure to stop one of his members from cyberstalking teenage congressional pages. "If I fold up my tent and leave," Dennis Hastert told her, "then where does that leave us? If the Democrats sweep, then we'd have no ability to fight back and get our message out."

That quiet admission may have been the most damning one yet in the unfolding scandal surrounding Florida Congressman Mark Foley: holding on to power has become not just the means but also the end for the onetime reformers who in 1994 unseated a calcified and corrupted Democratic majority. Washington scandals, it seems, have been following a Moore's law of their own, coming at a faster clip every time there is a shift in control. It took 40 years for the House Democrats to exhaust their goodwill. It may take only 12 years for the Republicans to get there.

Indeed.  For those who say there is no difference between the parties, let me provide a small clue: you can know that one ideology is inherently corrupt, and the other simply corruptable, when it takes only 1/3 as much time to develop radically higher levels of corruption within the ranks.

To win votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

No shit.  The only issue at this point is, what took Time Magazine so long to figure this out?  Did they really have to wait for the Mark Foley scandal to point this out?  This should have been said by elements of the traditional media years ago...

The article goes on to say that being in power changed the Republicans--which, as we all know, is an outright lie.  Power was all they ever sought--power to drown the government in the bathtub, while the super-rich and the mega-corporations made out like bandits.  But fools must be awakened to error of their ways one step at a time, I suppose.

Then, after a lengthy explanation of the Foley scandal, we get this:

All this suggests that the Republican leaders were motivated much more by fear of electoral fallout than concern for the young pages in their care. And if they were worried that the revelation would hurt their chances of holding on to the House, they turned out to be right. Before the scandal broke, they were beginning to believe that the clouds were finally clearing for them. Their fabled get-out-the-vote and fund-raising operations were nearing full stride just as gas prices were dropping and the national debate was refocusing on their home-court issue of terrorism.

It seems likely that the party will instead need to reckon with sex and scandal throughout the final weeks of the election.

Yes, Time Magazine.  It may indeed take a sex scandal to bring down this regime--mostly because you and your brethren failed to report the far more serious crimes being committed in the meantime.  But again, better late than never, I suppose.

Another key paragraph:

G.O.P. leaders are so desperate to find someone else to blame that they have been reduced--with no indication that they see the irony--to blaming a vast left-wing conspiracy. "The people who want to see this thing blow up," Hastert told the Chicago Tribune, "are abc News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros," the liberal financier who has become a bogeyman of the right. Hastert went on to say, without producing any proof, that the revelation was the work of Bill Clinton's operatives. But that line of argument, of course, suggests that Republicans would have preferred to keep Foley's secrets locked away, presumably at the pages' peril. And the Democrats for once are showing the good sense to stay out of the way when the other side is self-destructing. Sighed one of the younger House Republican aides who sits in on key meetings: "Foul play on the Democrats' side? If that is the only card left to play, then we are in serious trouble."

Yes, you are.  Serious.  Fucking.  Trouble.  And it's about fucking time.

The article then goes on to point out how gays within the Republican party are being scapegoated by the religious right, and that there may be a bloodletting of gay people working within the GOP.

And while the Time article closes with a suggestion that the GOP return to the "Gringrich revolution" roots (as if there ever were any such revolution in the first place!), I prefer to close this exposition of the article with this juicy graf:

"The Republican Party of 2006 is a tired, cranky shell of the aggressive, reformist movement that was swept into office in 1994 on a wave of positive change," Frank Luntz, one of the strategists of the G.O.P. takeover, wrote this week in a column for Time.com. "I worked for them. They were friends of mine. These Republicans are not those Republicans."

Actually, they ARE those Republicans, Frank.  But if you need to believe otherwise to vote for a Democrat, so be it.

Either way, the current GOP is looking very miserable as things stand.

The tide has certainly turned and, as I pointed out before, the walls are caving in faster than Karl Rove could ever hope to prop them up.

My only warning would be this: This GOP is a cornered animal, and is just as vicious as ever.  Be wary.  Be watchful.  These people will do literally ANYTHING to keep their hold on power.  And I do mean anything.  Watch their every move, and let's do all we can to ensure a long trip into the wilderness for these crooks and criminals.