The GOP - On The Road To The Little Big Horn

There is a rotting corpse in the Republican well. It's juices are leeching into the water this election year and poisoning the party's candidates all over the country even in the conservative heartlands. The decomposing carcass is the political remains of George W. Bush, titular leader of the Republican Party and Dead President Walking of the United States.

If the polls and the results of special Congressional elections are anything to go by the Republican Party are the Seventh Cavalry all saddled up and about to head out for the Little Big Horn of the November ballot. The electorate are the Lakota, Oglala and Hunkpappa Sioux now gathered about their campfires swapping tales of how they'll trap and overwhelm the Longknives and slay their intrepid leader, the impulsive egotistical Yellow Hair.

It may well come to pass. By the Fall the electoral Badlands will surely be strewn with the stripped and mutilated bodies of Republican candidates, victims of the wrath of a people long abused by the Great White Father in the East and his many Congressional minions. They promised peace and prosperity, the people cry. They gave us a vicious yet farcical war with no end in sight. And a tottering economy burdened by a national debt only a raving psychotic would have dreamed possible a few short years before. They preach virtue and restraint yet wallow in a steaming slurry of fornication, sodomy and financial corruption undreamed of since a landslide of fire and brimstone swept the ruling regime from office in Gomorrah all those millennia ago.

Yes, like the Plains Indians of Custer's day, the electorate are in an ugly mood. They ain't gonna take it anymore. The knives are honed, the arrows fletched, the spears gleaming in the moonlight. The morose Republicans, shifting uneasily in their saddles, trot inexorably on under a blazing sun, all but leaderless, with nothing left but the courage of the doomed and the ploys of the desperate. Every so often along the trail a smouldering cabin and the unburied bodies of the savaged homesteaders provide a grim prologue to their own fate.

They tell themselves fables to embolden their fainting hearts. The price of oil may tumble. An economic boom may fall from out the clear blue sky come October. Crippling mortgages may melt away in the July sunshine. Bin Laden may slip into the Vatican to be baptised by the holy Pope's hands. Iraqis may turn into Swiss and resolve their differences through gruff guttural arbitration and endless plebiscites. Their various Democratic opponents may be found with a pleasing multitude of dead girls and live boys. The autumn rains may wash the people's memories clean and purge their souls of vengeful thoughts producing a compliant electorate of simple-minded amnesiacs just in time to avoid a November bloodbath.

Only by such absurdities can the Seventh Cavalry of the GOP manage to keep themselves sane through the endless months that stretch ahead before they're declared officially DOA.

But what then, sang Plato's ghost, what then? - as the poet Yeats might say. It is well to remember that though the Sioux warriors won a stonking tactical victory at the Little Big Horn, a victory that shall be forever memorialized in the annals of military conflict, their essential strategic position remained hopeless. Crazy Horse and Young Man Afraid Of His Horses were brave and skillful fighters but their people eventually had to surrender. Sitting Bull, the legendary Hunkpappa chieftain, died in a petty quarrel on the reservation years after his momentous triumph.

So it is with the electorate. They may wreak a terrible and well-deserved revenge on the Republicans but it will be but a phantom triumph, a mere wraith that like King Hamlet's ghost must flee the coming dawn. As those that survive of the Great and the Good of the GOP preside over the obsequies of their fallen comrades, the victorious Democrats will flood onto the floor of Congress, cram the halls of the Government and throng the Federal Agencies, as thick as locusts, as deadly as gamma rays.

They will smother the nation with their programs and policy initiatives, gigantically wasteful of treasure and human resources and productive of nothing but even more political correctness and social and economic stagnation. They will carpet the rest of the world with their pieties and protocols, while the enemies of America will smile and smile and still be villains.

Identity politics, the oxygen of the Democratic party and the mortal bane of such a diverse nation as the US, will flourish more virulently with even more venomous results to the civic order and the body politic. The rehabilitation of the Supreme Court, in its present form the greatest threat to the democratic process ever tolerated by a nation of free citizens, will be forestalled by the appointment of "progressive" justices eager to legislate in the teeth of the people's will and commited to the perversion of the Constitution through the blind exercise of partisan zeal.

True, the GOP will retrench and after a journey through the wilderness for four or eight years will again be able to plausibly present themselves as worthy of decent people's support but in the meantime the country will be bucketing down the broad, smooth road to perdition beloved of the demons that have for so long possessed the soul of the Democratic Party.

So it is not for their past crimes and misdemeanors that the present shower of Republicans should be damned to hell but for the devastating future to which they have all but condemned us.