Nov. 2008 - RIP, GOP..... Nov. 2012 - RIP, GOP. Yes or no?
It seemed a done deal back then, but they came oozing back like so much radon gas and continued to permeate the political sphere with toxicity. Has the combination of the candidate clown car, Pig Boy's latest hoof in mouth episode, and a (slowly) improving economy pulled the plug at last on the freak show?
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It is seriously Taliban level thinking with the birth control issue, and their equating it with religion that is treading dangerous territory.
That "values voter" bullshit may have flown under Bush but now we're onto them. The last thing we want is a Christian Taliban takeover of our government.
I was scared shitless when after W's election the Falwell's and Robertson's were saying how W was elected by god - imagine how much worse it'll be under Santorum or Gingrich. 
Newt Gingrich supporters listen to his stump speech at a campaign event in South Carolina.
Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining to stop permanent nightfall is dwindling away.
The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that “freedom” is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.
In the cold calculus of game theory, the expected response to this state of affairs would be to accommodate yourself to the growing strength of the opposing coalition—to persuade pockets of voters on the Democratic margins they might be better served by Republicans. Yet the psychology of decline does not always operate in a straightforward, rational way. A strategy of managing slow decay is unpleasant, and history is replete with instances of leaders who persuaded themselves of the opposite of the obvious conclusion. Rather than adjust themselves to their slowly weakening position, they chose instead to stage a decisive confrontation. If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner.
At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that has driven Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they have concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost. ...Of course, both parties make use of end-times rhetoric, especially in election season. What’s novel about the current spate of Republican millennialism is that it’s not a mere rhetorical device to rally the faithful, nor even simply an expression of free-floating terror, but the premise of an electoral strategy.
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/
would the GOP be where they are now? Would they have done so well in 2010 without both of these things? My reading is that that the TP helped revitalize the GOP and helped them sweep the 2010 midterms but how long with that help them? They have become a slowly rotting corpse of a party IMHO since about 2006. As the demographics continue to shift and the fringe in their party continue to alienate key groups, I don't know how they can maintain their electoral viability. They will continue to remain competitive for awhile because of money, as well as their concerted efforts to disenfranchise voters they don't like, but that only works as long as they hold on to power, which is IMHO tenuous at best in most places outside of the south.
