Republicans Lament:

“O, if only we’d known he was Evil!”

This from the WaPo:

WP: GOP factions point fingers at each other
As party purges begin, top members in the recrimination mode
By Michael Grunwald
The Washington Post
Updated: 8:03 a.m. CT Nov 9, 2006

WASHINGTON - After minutes upon minutes of soul-searching, Republicans are now in recrimination mode. And the GOP's various factions all agree: This wouldn't have happened if the party had listened to us.

In the aftermath of the historic GOP losses Tuesday night, moderate Republicans quickly concluded that the party needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans declared that it should be more conservative. Main Street is angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP congressional leadership.

The party purges formally began yesterday, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) agreed to step down before they were pushed. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) had already decided to leave Congress, but GOP insiders said Tuesday's debacle should eliminate him from presidential contention in 2008.

By day's end, Republican fingers had pointed at every conceivable Republican scapegoat: ex-representative Mark Foley of Florida and his scandal-plagued colleagues, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, presidential adviser Karl Rove, even Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Of course, everyone agrees that Iraq is a huge problem as well, although no one seems to think that getting rid of Rumsfeld will solve it.

"We ought to just mend our wounds, bury our dead, learn from our mistakes and move on," said GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers. "But first we're going to have go through this. Look, bad policy and bad politics makes for bad elections."
Lost its way?

The common theme of the Recriminatathon is that the party lost its way after seizing control of Congress in 1994, focusing on power and perks instead of principles. But behind all the maneuvering, posturing and backstabbing lingered a serious debate over the party's future, and what those principles should be. It's a familiar argument between confrontation and compromise: appealing to base voters on the right or independents in the middle.

The moderate Republican Main Street Partnership fired its first salvo on election night, unleashing a news release titled "Far Right Solely Responsible for Democratic Gains." Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, the partnership's director, complained that GOP leaders had rejected popular causes such as the minimum wage, embryonic stem cell research and lobbying reforms while ignoring health-care issues that did not involve Terri Schiavo. The result, she said, was that moderate suburban voters saw Republicans as extremists.

"This election isn't a repudiation of the GOP," Chamberlain said. "It's a repudiation of a handful of zealots, and a reminder that you can't build a majority party without securing the middle of the American electorate."

That wasn't the conclusion the right drew from Tuesday's losses.
...

Point of agreement

With the benefit of hindsight, most Republicans seemed to agree that their congressional leaders should have been more aggressive about ousting members engulfed in scandals.

…
Many of the tainted Republicans -- including Robert W. Ney (Ohio), Randy "Duke" Cunningham (Calif.) and former House majority leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) -- are already out of Congress, and the party lost several "scandal seats" Tuesday. But conservatives such as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) believe Republicans need to change the pork-barrel culture that encouraged the use of public dollars for personal and political gain. Congressional "earmarks" have exploded on the GOP's watch, up by 700 percent since 1998, Coburn said, while domestic spending is up nearly 50 percent since 2001.
…

OK, first, Bwahahahaha!

There’s blood in the water and every drop of it deserved, so grab an anchor and helpfully toss it to the nearest Republican you see at the deep end of the pool.

Then grab another.

But second, while Democrats may be famous for their fractiousness, Republicans are famous for their fealty to hierarchy.

You wait your turn to run for Leadership roles, follow Reagan’s 11th commandment, and obey your President without question even when he’s marching you off a cliff, because loyalty and conformity are the Cardinal Republican Virtues.

And if you question the need for unquestioning acquiescence? Well that must mean you’re one of them Hollyweird Liberals.

This perfect, circular reasoning is hardwired into their political DNA, so despite all the chin music, if they had it all to do over again who among them was actually going to draw down and go after DeLay?

Answer: Nobody.

Because while it was all going down, anyone with a fucking pulse and one good eye could see the plain truth of things. DeLay became nothing but a stinking corpse hanging around the Party’s neck and everyone knew it, and yet the GOP DNA compelled them to cheat and change the rules and bury their heads ever deeper in a bucket of willful ignorance.

And once the indictment came down and the DeLay dumpster fire was finally burning too hot and wild for them to tolerate any longer, where did their consciences -- now suddenly liberated from beneath the DeLay boot-heel -- lead them?

To replace the Hammer with John Fucking Boehner.

Seriously, DeLay was their Leadership, and the average Republican would rather eat his own ass until he disappears in a fart of Ouroborean self-negation than ever challenge his Leadership. It is GOP equilibrium . Their natural state, and Tom Delay didn’t get the nickname “Hammer” from his great love of “Dracula” and “The Curse of Frankenstein” (Too obscure?) or uncanny resemblance to a small bone in the middle ear.

Republicans are Followers. And they elect demagogues that are, in turn, Followers of whoever they find above them on the political food chain. And when a Follower learns that his Leadership Caste has their snouts buried chin-deep in corruption or their reputations buried chest-deep in cover-ups of colleague’s dicks buried balls-deep in underage boys, they do what drones always do; play Protect the Queen.

What corruption?

What snout?

What pages?

What meth?

Lies, I tell you! Lies!

And when the cover-up fails, they fall back on the Drudge/Limbaugh, “Blame the victim defense."

The oldest, slimiest cop-out in history:

“For the Pages and Tom of Finland did tempt me and I did eat of the Apple.”

Jesus, what a bunch of pussies.

So depending on who, how many, and how badly people get hurt, the GOP’s reflexively sleazy response to metastasized corruption within their own Leadership Caste will always be a formula for either tragedy or comedy.

But it’ll certainly never be a recipe for genuine reform.