Absolutely not. The “political expediency” part will require the new Republican leadership to put out a lot of lip service for a new bag full of ideas which the party will use and swap and discard as convenient, but none of these new ideas will have any relation to their actual ideology, they are just talk-talk to fool their voting base of low-information voters and spiteful bigoted creeps.

You can accuse the Republicans of a lot of bad behavior but you can not accuse these guys of flip-flopping on their basic political goal. The Reagan-Republican ideology was “tax cuts for millionaires” and the Bush-Republican ideology was “tax cuts for millionaires” and the McCain-Republican ideology is “tax cuts for millionaires” and I guarantee you that whoever ends up in charge of that bunch in the years to come will inevitably uphold the Whoever-Republican ideology which will be “tax cuts for millionaires.”

Doc Memory-

Sure, but Carmela clearly did feel guilty, even if Tony was a psychopath. Anyway, I’m not trying to draw an exact analogy, just pointing to one little facet.

LP: er, except one of the points of that episode was that it was one of Carmela’s fleeting moments of clarity and non-self-delusion about Tony’s nature: he really was likely to kill her if he decided he’d been wronged (without ever considering his own affairs to be germane), and she was entirely justified in her fear of him.

Of course, the metaphor works that way too, since nativist groups organized with a “stab in the back” narrative are quite authentically dangerous. (Key word here being organized: so far I don’t think we’ve seen much actual organizing. Yet.)

“Barack’s father was from where? Kenya?” a seventy-one-year-old woman named Karla Cominsky suddenly asked. “Would that be any part of the world that was part of slavery?”
Gwinn explained that Obama had grown up mainly in Hawaii.

“My great-great-grandfather and grandmother came here from Morgan County,” Cominsky continued. “And guess who they brought with them? A little slave girl named Dinah. She was buried in the family plot. They felt she was one of the family.”

A campaign intern from Ohio University, in the nearby town of Athens, explained, “Most slaves came from western Africa, where the ships could just take them and go. Kenya’s from the eastern part.”

There was an awkward silence: the point of the woman’s story had not been immediately clear. Afterward, it occurred to me that this was how people in towns like Glouster were accustoming themselves to the thought of a black President.

Patrick himself feared that Obama’s race would threaten his own security and well-being. He said that it would be only natural for a black President to avenge the historical wrongs that his people had suffered at the hands of whites. “I really don’t want an African-American as President,” he said. “I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_packer?currentPage=1

Word to all your momses.

Right now I’m rolling around naked on a bed strewn with million dollar bills tossing the paper in the air with reckless abandon wondering when the hookers are going to get here with my powder. Metaphorically speaking.

But then, we at the ‘Tute know how to get our schadenfraude-on bitchez…

Anyone rememebr the Sopranos episode where Carmela is sleeping with the douchy guidance counselor and priest tells her it’s a terrible sin? She goes home, looks thoughtfully at a picture of Tony and AJ … and then goes and gets a gun and puts it under her pillow. It was a perfect little illustration of a basic human tendency, which is to tranfsom feelings of guilt toward someone into fear of that person.

Or like in that little Brecht play, where the caravan master lost in the desert tells his servant to give him the last of the water, and then kills the servant when he offers it because he thought he was reaching for a knife. The court — in the play — finds the master innocent because it would only have been rational for the servant to have wanted to kill him.

Same deal with the Right — they’re afraid of revenge because on some level they know they’ve got it coming.

Or, they could go wingnuttier. I won’t worry about it. Hope is cheap, but joy in others’ suffering PAYS YOU! In these tough economic times, the choice is clear, my friends.

I’m not betting on it. Just holding out hope, which is cheaper.