the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.
Certainly there is an argument to be made that dead-end partisans qua dead-end partisans who cannot speak to anyone outside their party are a problem, and you can make the case that the holdouts who still think Bush has done a good job are complicit to some degree in all of his errors and crimes. Maybe there is some significant overlap with the so-called “oogedy-boogedy” set, but then the problem with them wouldn’t be their religiosity or their social conservatism or any of the cultural markers that freaked out every pundit east of the Appalachians when Mike Huckabee would start to speak. Instead, the problem is that they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too dependent on reciting the trite slogans they heard on the radio and read in syndicated conservative columns.
Your thoughts?