I see that Frank Rich's latest column, "The Banality of Bush White House Evil", is being featured today on lots of "liberal" blogs. What I haven't seen is it compared to and contrasted with this:
In GOP base, a 'rebellion brewing'
A quick tour through the week’s headlines suggests the Republican Party is beginning to come to terms with the last election and that consensus is emerging among GOP elites that the party needs to move away from discordant social issues.
snip
But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.
There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies – as always – through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense.
The nutbags are "Clinton era angry" at having lost the WH and presumable the SCOTUS. They can no longer install their own activist judges to force their morality on all of us.
And they could care less if the next President tortures, as long as he hates gays, abortion, taxes, and "furreners" with the same passion they do. I dare say they have no problem waging war against Islam, in general, in the 21st century crusades. (Since I'd personally like to see radical monotheism extinguished in this century, even this decade, I should add a disclaimer: by "PEACEFUL consent of an enlightened society".)
These very same nutbags, BTW, are arming themselves. Heavily. Which is their right, but it's worth noting.
From Rich:
...there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus "intelligence" from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.
Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as "partisan."
The message of the wingnuts is clear. "ANYTHING is justifiable, as long as we get our way."
What remains to be seen is whether or not the GOP continues to give them lip service, or publicly and forcibly kicks them to the curb.
For the answer to that, I look to the GOP's response to the steady release of information about the darkest period of my adult life.