MODERATE GOPers ABANDONING SINKING SHIP
"Swift Boaters" continue to attack Hillary's sex, her aggressiveness, her supposed lack of sexuality. They ridicule Obama's middle name and talk about his minister, while still, somehow, characterizing him as a non-Christian. They're the loud mouths who want to talk through the movie you just spent eight bucks to see. But these silly ad hominem attacks haven't masked the fact that continuing to support the war and apologizing for the fiasco that has been the last eight years is having a tremendous impact on the folks in "THE MIDDLE". The middle is not just the class. It isn't dependent on one's income. It's all of us who have been caught in the raging cultural, political, and ideological noise and want the shit to just stop. For example, a newspaper syndicate's computer analysis has found that hundreds of people who gave at least $200 to Bush's 2004 campaign have donated to Obama. Among them are Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the granddaughter of the late GOP president Dwight Eisenhower; Connie Ballmer, the wife of Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer; and Tom Fanning, the chief operating officer of the Southern Company. Is this just the "Big Dogs" hedging their bets, a Limbaugh-like conspiracy to put up a strawman, or is the country's political DNA going through a permutation? I have friends who fall into the category that is spoken about in this story. They're not the Microsoft Execs, but they make up the bulwark of the Republican Party. They're culturally liberal and economically conservative. They work their asses off. They party just as hard, maybe not always legally. They may or may not go to church and consider your decisions about your God to be your business. I've always wondered how they could continue to make excuses for folks with whom they really share little. Judging from my recent conversations with them, at least some of them have stopped. Some of them supported McCain because he was the most progressive, some Hillary and some Obama and that could be the real Bush legacy; that the blowhards will be silenced long enough so we can get the real picture. Pass the popcorn, please. (TRUTHOUT)

t r u t h o u t | The Fall of Conservatism

BEING RIGHT
"The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.
(TRUTHOUT)