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07 Mar 2007 11:56 am

A Political Katrina?

Add them up. We witness another horrifying suicide bombing in Iraq, murdering dozens of Shiite pilgrims. There is damning evidence that U.S. attorneys were leaned on by Republicans before the elections to bring cases against some Democrats - and the ones who refused were then fired. The vice-president's closest aide has been found guilty of perjury over whether he and his boss tried to discredit a critic in the summer of 2003 with respect to pre-war WMD intelligence. The guiltier parties - Rove and Armitage and Cheney - are still in power. We now see shameful neglect of injured veterans under the very noses of the defense secretary. On the intellectual front, we have now seen a conservative icon reveling in bigotry in full view of the national media and at the same podium and on the same day as Giuliani and Romney. Any one of these stories individually is damaging. Together, they exert a hurricane-strength storm on the Bush administration and the conservative movement.

More important, these developments re-enforce and amplify the arguments that defeated the Republicans last November. They have no control over a war they started and no way to bring it to an end. The reasons they started it look a lot more dubious now than they did then; the circumstantial evidence for Cheney's willful misleading of the American public before the war is mounting. Their treatment of the troops has been sickening from the start: they sent too few with insufficient body-armor and now give the wounded shamefully bad treatment. They are ruthless operatives who abuse the system for partisan ends (DeLay and Domenici). They are nasty bigots (Coulter) or theocons sympathizing with Islamists (D'Souza). They are perjurers (Libby) or cowards (Rove). Our future fiscal health is far, far worse than it was in 2000. Climate change looks more and more real and they have no serious policy to deal with it.

Now realize that no major Republican candidate has the backing of the base and the elites. There is no incumbent. The eclipse of old-style, limited government, realist, inclusive conservatism by the new pro-torture, left-baiting, homo-hating, debt-building, war-losing apparatchiks of the Rove machine could lead to most moderate Republicans and Independents voting Democrat or staying home next year. Of course, many things can happen before then. I've learned not to make predictions. But this feels to me like an implosion. Part of me wants to help rescue what's left of the right; part of me thinks that the only way to rescue the right is to allow it to continue committing suicide. Only once the GOP wakes up and realizes it has become a nasty rump of Dixie will some see how deep the damage of the Bush years goes.

One thing I suspect, though. Only Hillary can save them now.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

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