Man, the Democratic ascendancy feels good. As Jonathan Schwarz said, “It's so nice to have the sane evil people back running a few things. Oh sane evil people, I will never take you for granted again.”

But seriously, it’s entertaining to watch the Republican party self-destructing. Republicans – Democrats too for that matter – have always been far too diverse to be reasonably expected to coalesce into a single party. The reason for this is simple – there are more than two ideas for a single issue. I know, I know … I just blew your mind. But for 12 years the GOP has been fighting to hold together a loose coalition of Libertarians, religio-fascists, neoconservative hawks, and others alongside the more centrist social / fiscal conservative majority of their voting base. Without this majority to hold them together, they are literally flying apart at the seams. Even Limbaugh has officially turned on them:

Bush has seen this before, and this is how you get out of town in two years with an approval rating that is above the thirties and maybe into the fifties or the sixties. Stem cells are another thing. The whole point here is: "We're going to do everything we can to make everybody happy. We're going to do what we can to make everybody happy." Russert said, after pointing out that the Bush 41 guys are not going to be running the war: Robert Gates as the new secretary of defense, and James Baker running this commission here, looking into what we do about Iraq. Russert's point was we're going to have hardheaded pragmatism now. The ideologues are out. No more ideology in the war on Iraq -- and of course that's not new, ladies and gentlemen.

There hasn't been any ideology in the Republican Party, any conservatism, for at least two to maybe four years. You could argue Bush was more of an ideologue in the presidential campaign of '04, but in looking at what happened yesterday, it wasn't conservatism that lost. Conservatism won when it ran as a Democrat. It won in a number of places. Republicanism lost. RINO Republicans, country club blue-blood Republicans, this nonpartisan Republican identity, that's what went down in flames.

Fact is, I agree with him to an extent (administer electric shock thereapy now please), Conservatism did not lose in this election. The modern Republican Party is no more Conservative that the Soviet Union was Communist. Both were an authoritarian collection of nutjobs who perverted the means of their own philosophy in order to justify some phantom and elusive ends. I feel sorry for all the conservatives who saw their ideology slowly twisted and distorted into something wicked and hateful throughout this administration’s open-fanged power-grab.