The GOP Retreat

"As the President took off for Asia in November to deliver more sermons on the virtues of democracy, small-d democratic dissent was at last finding its voice back home. For years George W. Bush's White House and party enforcers like the now-indicted Tom DeLay have ruled over Republicans with an iron fist. The troops in Congress slavishly accepted Bush's every whim, even when conservatives gagged on ideological contradictions like his fabulous budget deficits. Moderates were meek, silenced by the threat of punishment if they dared stray. Hosannas! The zeitgeist appears to be changing. The lockstep politics engineered by Karl Rove has visibly weakened. Suddenly the GOP majority begins to resemble the Democrats of old, when they held power and were always fighting among themselves. In the House the GOP rank and file choked on their leadership's preposterous proposal for $54 billion in budget cuts, which whacked Medicaid, student loans and other down-home assistance while again cutting taxes for the rich. In the Senate GOP moderates also defected, joining Democrats to block Bush's tax cuts. Undoing the savage inequalities of the Bush era will require a titanic fight, but the new-found courage of GOP moderates hints that significant changes are possible before Bush leaves town. This good news has one obvious source: the plummeting share price of the President's stock. After their recent election losses and with Bush's poll ratings hitting new lows, Republican politicians are wondering whether their incumbencies can withstand sustained Democratic assault in 2006. Why take chances by identifying with this deeply wounded leader"?

A weakened Republican Party is a good sign that the country will begin to recover from not only the Republican assault on the U.S. Treasury but from government that does not act in secret and one that after 5 dreadful years of decline, will finally begin to regain the respect of the rest of the world.