Night Falls On An Angry Elephant

I hadn't really stitched together all these threads, although once you read it the whole thing sort of rings a bell you'd noticed was quietly going off in the other room: Republicans are getting darker and more scared these days. Not in terms of their election prospects, which are dumpy enough, but in terms of their world view. Bush sold everyone delicious tax-free lemonade and got elected twice, and we've seen his popularity sink to levels usually reserved for axe murderers and reruns of Night Court. So what's the alternative, lurking in the shadows, waiting for its turn to come again? This article calls it "night conservatism" (as opposed to Bush's drooling, pseudo-optimistic "day conservatism"), but the name doesn't matter as much as the symptoms: anti-immigrant, loudly churchy and moralistic, rabidly anti-government (whereas Bush just sort of thought it should regulate the environment a little less, and didn't mind a domestic spying operation of epic proportions), viciously "patriotic," suspicious of the outside world. . . In short, bereft of ideas, the GOP is devolving into the creature we know as The Reactionary Lynch Mob. Bush's lame attempt, like Reagan's, to convince everyone his government is running great by ignoring reality just isn't cutting any ice any longer. Expect to see a nastier Republican Party, seething with fury, likely out of the majority in Congress in the nearish future; and keep good watch over your children. Because they are coming for all of us.