The Last Days Are Upon Us

This piece from Salon by Gary Kamiya seems to get it about right overall for me, especially the point about how the wing-nuttiest elements (Rush, Coulter, et al) have become mainstream to the conservative movement thereby fatally damaging it with their poison. After all, Cheney is just as nutty, and his approval rating are in the 20s at most. The future is not theirs. Without 9/11 and the resulting fear of the populace and fear mongering of the Republicans, they never would have gone anywhere. The ineptitude of their rule would have been exposed in the first term of Bush as it has now become plain to most finally after 6 years.

...the American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination.


It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.

It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable.