The End of a Revolution

TIME magazine has declared the Republican Revolution that Ronald Reagan started to be mortally wounded, dying, dead.

I think it's a case of "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

It's wishful thinking on the part of the Dems and the lib media.

Karen Tumulty cites "Sex, lies and power games [as] just the latest symptoms of a Republican Party that has strayed from its ideals."


She writes, "It took 40 years for the House Democrats to exhaust their goodwill. It may take only 12 years for the Republicans to get there."

Tumulty seems pretty confident, doesn't she?

The libs are under the impression that the elections in November are just a formality.

They act as if the Democrats have already regained control of the House and the Senate.

THAT HASN'T HAPPENED.

Still, Tumulty gives her analysis of the death of the dominance of the Republican Party.

She writes:

[A]fter controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush's six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals. The exquisite political machinery that aces the elections has begun to betray the platform. To win votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

One of the problems is that after the Republicans got into power, the system began to change them, not just the other way around. Among the first promises the G.O.P. majority broke was the setting of term limits. Their longtime frustrations in the minority didn't necessarily make them any better at reaching across the aisle either. Compromise, that most central of congressional checks and balances, has been largely replaced by a kind of calculated cussedness that has left the G.O.P. isolated and exposed in times of crisis.

...The current crisis arrived with a sex scandal that has muddied one of the G.O.P.'s few remaining patches of moral high ground: its defense of family values and personal accountability.

Read the rest if you want.

Tumulty goes on to regurgitate the same talking points that Dems have been repeating since the Foley October surprise hit the fan. Her article reads like it came right from DNC headquarters, from Dean's lips to the people's ears.

..."The Republican Party of 2006 is a tired, cranky shell of the aggressive, reformist movement that was swept into office in 1994 on a wave of positive change," Frank Luntz, one of the strategists of the G.O.P. takeover, wrote this week in a column for TIME.com "I worked for them. They were friends of mine. These Republicans are not those Republicans."

And the current Democrats share little in common with Dems like JFK and Harry Truman.

They have become so extreme that they are unrecognizable as Dems of old. Those Dems are long gone.

Tumulty really enjoys what she perceives to be the Republican Party adrift.

And then there is TIME's glorious poll.

The results boil down to this:

1. People disapprove of Bush.

2. People disapprove of Congress.

3. People want Dems to take over control of the House.

4. Overwhelmingly, people believe that the Foley scandal was handled improperly and that there was a cover-up.

Given the extent of the negativity for Hastert that TIME claims exists, I think it's surprising that nearly as many people want him to remain as speaker as those favoring his resignation.

• Yes 39% • No 38% • Don't know 23%

Does this signal the end of a revolution?

Not necessarily.

TIME doesn't get that the Revolution is much bigger than one person or a group of people. It's a philosophy.

A philosophy doesn't die because of a sex scandal or a president with low approval ratings.

The conservative movement is alive and kicking. This isn't the end.

It can be seen as a beginning. Conservatives are in search of representatives of their philosophy.


The Revolution Is NOT Dead--Long Live the Revolution!