The disaster that is the current Republican party

It is common knowledge that as of the Republican Presidential Primary, the movement conservatives could not get the evangelical conservatives to get on board with either Mitt Romney or with John McCain. Both were conservatives, but neither was acceptable to the social conservatives. The excitement when Sarah Palin was invited to join the McCain ticket was purely among the social conservatives. The fact that she was and remains a wigged out fundamentalist who wants to set America up with a literal reading of the Bible as the fundamental law, overriding the Constitution when necessary, certainly turned off the rest of the conservatives. And that's all INSIDE the Republican party. The Independents are tending very much towards the Democrats.

So the Republican Congressional leaders are trying to mollify the radical conservative base just to keep their jobs. The result is that the Republican continue to lose the weaker seats. It's going to keep going. The head of the RNCC, John Cornyn, has said that the Senate Republicans will not keep the current 40 seats after the 2010 election.

Texas Senator Hutchinson is expected to resign her seat this fall to run for Texas Governor. Here seat will be competitive for the first time in nearly two decades. Arlene Specter has been forced out of the Republican Party by a strong movement conservative, Toomey, who was going to run against him in the Republican Primary in 2010, and although Specter could win the general election, he would have lost the Republican primary.

Now we get Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman who had been considering running for President in 2012 who has resigned as Governor to take the job as Ambassador to China for Democratic President Obama. He is a highly competent and experienced conservative who could have attracted Independents and even some conservative Democrats if he had run for President as a Republican. For him to abandon that shot at the Presidency means he has given up on the radical conservative Republican Party.

There's more, of course. But that should be enough to demonstrate that the National Republican Party is shrinking and still headed downward. It is not going to recover before the next election, and probably not the 2012 election. After that, if the Republican base will allow new more moderate leadership to take over, then the Republicans might begin to recover. But that change in the attitudes of the base is unlikely anytime soon.

America just may begin to recover from the crazies who have been running so much of the federal government since Reagan was elected. Maybe. But it's going to be a slow project even now.

Conservatives are inherently short-sighted and cheap.

Remember when, back in February, three Republican "centrists" pulled the $870 million from the Economic Stimulus bill because "It didn't belong there?"

Typical conservative thinking. It wasn't happening right then and the rather ignorant trio didn't understand it, so don't prepare for it. It looks a bit different now, doesn't it?

One thing government does that private enterprise cannot afford to do is to essentially stockpile individuals with in-depth training and expertise in anticipation of a foreseen but not yet current need. That is the exact reason why back in the 15th century is became clear to governments that a trained, long-term professional army would almost always defeat mercenaries who were called up only during an emergency. How long does it take to train a special forces soldier, for instance?

Xe (renamed from Blackwater) doesn't do it. They wait until the government has selected and trained the soldiers, then they go hire them when they have a contract and let them go after.

The CDC is another government function that is set up in anticipation of a major life-threatening set of threats that we hope is not current, but have to be ready for when it does occur. That's a major reason why modern industrial nations suffer less from pandemics than do third-world and developing nations.

And yes, it can be overdone. You can't be ready for every eventuality. So there is a balance, but the trio were too conservative with money and foresight. Disease and epidemic is almost as easy to predict as someones death (a certainty.) It pays to be ready.

Gee. Who could have known ....?

Condi's stock phrase could make an excellent title for the history of the idiotic conservative policies of the Bush administration and their almost universally disastrous results.