Republicans will lose big in the mid-term elections. You read it here first.
Republicans may think they'll roll back the Democrats this November, but this misunderstanding was caused by inhaling their own fumes. There's very little to support the idea.
In fact the Republican leadership, which for the past year has been busily strapping their Party to one losing proposition after another, has so damaged itself that I'm beginning to believe they're Democratic moles.
To consider only their most recent madness: Why does the GOP leadership think their party can win the November mid-term elections by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Goldman-Sachs & Co., just indicted for civil fraud?
Even Alan Greenspan says lax regulations were a major cause of the Great Recession. And Goldman Sachs, fairly or not, is the poster child for sneaky business during the late boom. So you can't block stronger financial regulations without seeming to defend Goldman.
Yet there's the Republican leadership, swearing to block financial reform like Horatius at the bridge. Democrats won't even have to break a sweat to tattoo Republicans with charges that they're in the pocket of Goldman, against the little guy, and, generally, that they hate America.
But if it was just that, we could almost excuse the Republican leadership for wanting to return to its roots. Yet here you have a party that on the one hand says it expects to roll back the liberal tide in the mid-term elections, while on the other doing so much to besmirch its escutcheon that you have to wonder if it has a death wish.
For instance, it completely undermined its credibility by spreading outrageous lies in the course of losing the health care reform vote. It then insisted it would fight for repeal, but a few days later was forced to admit it really couldn't do that.
Then it did everything it could to alienate millions of unemployed Americans by trying to stop an extension of their unemployment benefits -- as if these people will all be dead by Election Day.
Meanwhile, the Right-Wing media has been doing everything it can to whip up anger and hatred against government at every level, and the Republican Party has been pandering to the Tea Party movement by steadily moving to the Right, hoping thereby to be able to count on those votes come November.
Some of that whipping up is dangerously close to sedition -- incitement to revolt against established government -- even if it is cloaked in calls to defend the people's government from Socialism, and similar fantasies.
The resulting hysteria has intensified since the 2008 election. In that one-year period, the number of Right-Wing militias has mushroomed--according to the Southern Poverty Legal Center, from 42 in 2008, to 127 in 2009.
Most recently, an extremist has flown a plane into an Austin IRS building, a Michigan militia has been rounded up for plotting terrorist attacks on US soil, a member of the Forced Birth Movement was convicted of murdering a doctor who provided safe abortions, and several Right-Wingers have been arrested for threatening the lives of Democratic members of Congress. Yet instead of denouncing these crimes, some Republican lawmakers have actually said they understood the anger that led to them.
Democrats, meanwhile, have treated it all as a law enforcement matter, instead of showing some guts and actually saying something.
They may think this is wise, but it really makes them seem weak and cowed. Over the last 30 years, Republicans haven't shrunk from demanding Democrats denounce this or that, and this is a perfectly legitimate subject for Democrats to do the same. After all, if Republicans can't defend the government and the public peace, what exactly does the party of law and order stand for?
But maybe Democrats won't have to take the offensive. Against the background of a comically inept Republican National Committee comes news that several former Bush staffers, including Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, and former RNC Chairmen Mike Duncan, have recently formed a sort of shadow RNC called American Crossroads. It amounts to a direct challenge to the Committee's authority. Reportedly, they're raising a lot of money.
This can only mean that Messers Rove, et. al. have launched a coup against RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and that the Republican Party is imploding. But if the putsch succeeds, the Republicans will have strapped themselves to the one person everyone blames for their problems -- George W. Bush.
It's a gift. But the Democrats have to open it.