Courtesy of Josh Marshall today, Charlie the Poll Guy pleads for a little mercy:
Only the most partisan of Democrats or cold-hearted of people would fail to have some compassion or sympathy towards a party for which virtually everything has gone wrong. Someone recently likened it to watching a wounded dog kicked.
Well, perhaps. And far be it for me to chortle at the thought of cruelty to animals. On the other hand, if that same dog has spent the last 15 years pissing in your flower beds, crapping on your front lawn, biting your kids on their way to school each morning, and keeping your family awake every night with compulsive barking jags . . .
Put it this way: these malignant sons of bitches have spent the last 15 years trying to refashion our Constitutional form of government, with its open balloting and an independent judiciary, into a single-party dominant, PRI-style syndicate in which all three branches of government exist for the overarching purpose of defending and strengthening the party itself. It is a kinder, gentler form of Sovietism, with a generous dollop of Mobutu-level kleptocracy thrown in for their own enrichment. Insofar as they have been successful at their task, they have only managed to accomplish it through a curriculum of serial lawbreaking, which largely continues to go unpunished today, and through the constant bullying and intimidation of those who dare to differ with them, be they foreign or domestic. If you're lucky enough to live here, you only have to worry about them spying on you. If you live overseas, they'll invade your country, kick your ass, and occupy your land to spread the cause of freedom. For real.
Like the PRI in its, er, last throes, the post-Reagan Republican Party resembles an elaborately ritualized extortion racket as much as it resembles an advocacy-based political organization at this point, and it frankly deserves to be treated as such. Whether we bury it next week, or its sundry members slowly asphyxsiate on their own avarice, the point in bringing this rabid dog to heel is a simple matter of restoring order in the neighborhood, of re-birthing a more civil and lawful society. Compassion and sympathy play no part in it: to paraphrase Brad DeLong, burn it down, plow it under, and sow the furrows with salt.
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