I think

I think this one deserves a star; we'll see if it does...

The movement, and not the man

As much as I would enjoy seeing him in the dock, and eventually in prison, the above compromise would be worth it just to preserve the republic.

That's Gerald Ford-style talk, there. The republic has been poisoned by the Bush administration and the GOP at large, the damage has already been done, both in terms of the unconstitutional expansion of executive power, and in the more overt and above-board economic and political policies that are in place.

Until those things are reversed, no successor, however they appear on the scene, is going to be able (or, more frighteningly, willing) to undo the harm. People keep thinking that the Bushies are the source of the problem -- but GW himself has been guided by some very old hands at government, people who go all the way back to the Nixon administration. And they, themselves, are products of a political approach that hearkens back to the McCarthy years, way back in the early 1950s!

Is Bush an aberration, or the full and logical flowering of what the GOP has been steadily working on since the Barry Goldwater defeat of 1964?

Seems to me so long as people focus exclusively on Bush (or even just Dick Cheney), it lets them overlook the institutional structures that have created an anti-democratic culture in the GOP.

You take away the man (or the men, if you count Cheney in the mix), the problem remains: the approach -- the Unitary Executive Theory of power, the subordinate style of a GOP Congress, the acquiescent reactionary Judiciary -- these are all the consequences of a particular approach to governance the GOP favors, for specific political ends.

The Republicans who are speaking out against the Bush League are still beneficiaries of that same political approach, are still creatures of this movement, even as they engage in damage control to try to distance themselves from Bush.

If they abandoned their party in protest (either to become independents or Democrats), I would think they were more sincerely opposed to what's gone on; but they haven't -- they're still Republicans, and that's significant.

They are still part of the system that led to GW Bush. Bush was not an aberration -- he was the logical, inevitable expression of GOP politics from 1964 onward.

Cold warriors, indeed. Unfortunately, it appears that the cold war they were waging was against American democracy.

-- Slackie Onassis