Rudy's fading fast

Too bad.

It would have been great fun to see the Democratic presidential nominee do battle with Rudy Giuliani in the general election campaign.

It also would have been entertaining to see how the right-wingers in the Republican Party cope with the spectacle of having a thrice-married, pro-choice, pro-gay rights guy as their standard-bearer.

But it's not to be. Rudy is sinking like a stone and will be out of the race before Valentine's Day.

Meanwhile, let's all hope that Mike Huckabee wins the GOP nomination. That, too, would be big fun.

The Huckabee Fault Line

As I mentioned here the other day, some prominent conservative pundits are alarmed at Mike Huckabee's sudden move to the front of the Republican presidential pack. This pack of notable right-wing commentators continues to grow in size and vehemence.

The upshot of this trend is that the Republican coalition faces a clear and present danger of falling apart. For decades now, the party's foreign-policy conservatives, corporate conservatives and libertarian-types have been willing to play patty-cake with the more rabid specimens among the social and religious conservatives, just to keep them in the tent -- so long as none of their wackier legislative schemes became national policy. But the Huckabee surge has gained sufficient momentum that it now requires a stern blowback from the GOP's comparative sophisticates.

This creates a political fault line that could take years to heal. It's not likely that Huckabee will get the nomination, and his defeat might well prompt his theocratic supporters to wax bitter against the other Republicans who actively opposed him. Folks on the Religious Right might finally realize that they've been played for suckers. And if Huckabee somehow wins the nomination, the party's elite will abandon him. Either way, the GOP could become badly splintered.

UPDATE: Arianna Huffington offers this assessment of the situation.

UPDATE II: Cynthia Tucker has this.

This is a waste of time and effort

Some well-meaning folks are trying to organize a presidential debate on matters of science.

How naive of them. Do they honestly expect that Republican candidates would be willing to talk about science? Come on. Even the comparatively enlightened among the GOP hopefuls are barely distinguishable from flat-earthers.

The Republican Party, thanks to the Bush administration, has cast itself as the most anti-science crowd this side of the people you see on the street muttering to themselves about the how the space program is a fraud.

GOP party of business?

A piece in the Wall Street Journal, no less, suggests that the Republican Party is losing its lock on the business vote.

Writes Jackie Calmes:

Some business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don't share. In manufacturing sectors such as the auto industry, some Republicans want direct government help with soaring health-care costs, which Republicans in Washington have been reluctant to provide. And some business people want more government action on global warming, arguing that a bolder plan is not only inevitable, but could spur new industries.

Going the way of the Whigs?

Let's hope so.

Remnants of GOP wax nostalgic

The few remaining members of the Republican Party are pining for the good old days of Ronald Reagan and the even gooder and older days of a world without the United Nations.

Bad year ahead for GOP

The 2008 election season starts in earnest next week with the passing of Labor Day, and the year poses grim prospects for the Republican Party.

Yeah, Larry Craig's announcement today that he'll resign from the Senate means that his scandal soon will be off the front pages, but the GOP's problems still loom large.

Joe Sudbay surveys the situation here.

"Hey, save me a hit on that bong!"

He looks kind of stoned, doesn't he?

Gosh! Who'da believed it? It turns out that Fred Thompson, Hollywood darling of the Republican Party and former trial lawyer, has a record of arguing against the government's authority to regulate drug paraphernalia or to search a boat packed with 14 tons of marijuana.

No kidding. It's right here in the Washington Post.

Wait a minute! I thought the Republicans hated Hollywood celebrities and trial lawyers! And this Thompson guy took $1.5 million in campaign contributions from lawyers when he was in the Senate.

What's going on here? The front-runners for the Republican nomination are Fred Thompson, a pro-doper trial lawyer from Hollywood, and Rudy Giuliani, a cross-dressing pro-choicer who's been married three times (including once to his cousin)?

Has everybody in the GOP been smoking something?

UPDATE: Now we have word that Thompson's fundraising efforts are lagging badly and that he took in only $3 million last month, which is chump change in presidential politics. A lousy 3 million! Yeah, you can buy a lot of really good weed with that kind of money, but it ain't gonna land you no Republican nomination. You dig?

GOP -- God's Own Party

Here's a very funny video about Republican sex scandals. (Be sure to stay with it through the audio track at the end, where Neal Horsley, a gay basher from the Christian right, actually admits to having had sex with a mule.)

Your Republican Party today

In a recent wide-ranging analysis of political polls, Susan Page of USA Today wrote: "The Republican Party now has a net negative rating of 9 percentage points: 42% viewed it favorably, 51% unfavorably. The Democratic Party has a net positive rating of 13 points, 55%-38%."

This is a reversal of the situation of only a few years ago, and it's a commentary on the damage George W. Bush has done to his party.

Even the Republican label can be a negative in the current climate. As pollster Scott Rasmussen puts it: "The Republican brand is a drag right now on their party's candidates."

Columnist Paul Krugman of The New York Times has an interesting take this morning on the GOP's bleak fortunes and on how none of the party's major presidential candidates seems likely to stray far from Bush's disastrous course.

American Hezbollah

Hezbollah is an Arabic word standing for "party of God," and it's the name of an Islamic political and paramilitary organization based in Lebanon.

Hezbollah also is the Arabic word for what Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen thinks of the Republican Party.

Van Hollen told a gathering in Lake Geneva today that the Republican Party is "a party of God, we’re a party of faith, we’re a party that will do the right thing and represent the people."

Such theocratic rhetoric brings to mind George W. Bush's messianic complex and his image among worshipful admirers as a messenger of God. It also helps explain why W's administration has hired more than 150 zealous graduates of Pat Robertson's clown college, Regent University.

Such rhetoric also comports with the opinions of Bishop Thomas Doran of the Catholic Diocese of Rockford, who sees the Democrats as the party of "abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation," as he so gently put it in a column last summer.

One wonders if America's "party of God" might eventually mimic its Islamic namesake with a Christian form of Jihadism.

It's that bad, huh?

Your nose would be out of joint, too, if your presidency was the most unpopular in a generation and your party's prospects for success in next year's elections were sinking like a rock.

Newsweek has the numbers here.

Barring a political miracle, congressional Republicans and other erstwhile GOP loyalists soon will be jumping overboard. George W. Bush is such poison that his name was mentioned only once among the party's 10 presidential candidates in their debate the other night.

And as we noted here a few days ago, even the eminent conservative William F. Buckley says there are "grounds for wondering whether the Republican Party will survive" what Bush has done to it.