Happy Days resurrected?

This is all that remains for an exhausted Republican Party as suggested by Jon Taplin while writing for Talking Points Memo. Not only has the GOP lost contact with much of its erstwhile popular base, as Taplin points out, but the Party is finding itself forced to depend more and more on the crackpot faction (the Limbaugh- and Palin-Republicans) within the residue. Gone, of course, are the old liberal Republicans; they were forced to the margins or pushed out of the Party altogether by the New Right. Ironically, these Republicans happily find their home in the Democratic Leadership Council, the Clinton-wing of the GOP's electoral competitor.

In any case, the self-styled "Party of Ideas," now composed mostly of plutocrats and imperialists, Kulturkampfers and mountebanks, can only communicate with the American public by offering a pitiful mélange comprising red baiting smears and kitschy odes to 'real mericans.' This Republicanism is neither right nor left. It is, rather, dumb to the world. And therein sits the danger it poses, namely, its instinctive authoritarianism.