Eric, I especially enjoyed your "really nuts" comment, well done!

Your example about Mondale leaves one to wonder why only a mere 8 years later the Democrat won!
I think the answer is H. Ross Perot. W/o this viable third party candidate Clinton was a likely loser.

I see it here in Kentucky every day. The wingnut freakazoids are taking this unequivocal rejection as a defining moment for "ril murkins."

They are literally hunkering down with weapons, waiting for the n****r hordes to come rampaging over the horizon.

By the 2012 Iowa caucuses, Palin will be out of the race because she's too liberal.

The folks who are left to pick up the pieces are often the most extreme elements, and are in fact the least fit to actually clean things up. The best examples of this are probably the UK Labour Party after they were beaten by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the Conservative Party after Tony Blair finally ousted them in 1997, and over here the Democrats when they nominated Walter Mondale in 1984.

Interesting analogies, though I'm not sure your domestic example works. Mondale was hardly an extreme candidate, but he was ill-suited for the television age and was running against a popular incumbent in a year when the economy was going strong. Four years later, Dukakis was a poor candidate for a variety of reasons, but he was anything but an extremist ("this election is not about ideology, it's about competence" -- a line that will live in infamy).

The closest U.S. parallels are Goldwater in '64 and McGovern in '72 and in both cases, the party on the losing end of the landslide won four years later, albeit by nominating more centrist candidates. Hopefully, these versions of history won't repeat themselves, and instead the wingnuts will control a shrinking, increasingly irrelevant GOP for a decade or longer, rather than just for a four-year cycle.

THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS FOR SARAH PALIN '12!!

The Reagan Repubs created a Frankenstein monster by bringing in the loony Evangelicals. Now, as in every Frankenstein movie, the monster is determined to kill the monster-maker. They've been steadily taking over. Now after this lost election, which they think was lost because of the moderates - they want the party all to themselves. And they actually think that if they get it they stand a chance of winning and taking over the country.

In the last couple of years I thought the best thing that could happen to their party would be Giugliani or the 2000 McCain getting the nomination and having the wackos walk out for good. Even if they lost the election they'd potentially be viable again and be able to rebuild.

But they blew it. McCain had his chance - but by picking Palin he sealed the deal for the Christian Right to confirm their death grip on the entire party. If Obama proves to be successful - and popular - the Republican Party as we know it is doomed. MICHAEL A - you suggested a new party may emerge. I hadn't thought about that before but I think you could be right. There has to be a place for conservatives who aren't religious nuts. Maybe they can call themselves the Whigs.

Wait, Wait.

I am seeing a lot of people calling the Republican party reactionary, or empty, no ideas, bankrupt, wilderness.

But Amageddon T Thunderbird has the greatest one line of the thread.
"The concentration of wealth is a relentless force."

Let's get this straight. The Republican Party is one thing. The Republican Officials, elected party members, operatives...are CORPORATE. They are not reactionaries or out of ideas. They are RELENTLESS.
They still operate all the levers of power, they just aren't fooling the populace at this time. They will again. We have all been burned in this country, time after time, by three-piece-suit types. And we always give them back their fiefdoms. Relentless. The Great Depression, caused by the 3Piece Gang, was enough to have us quaking in our boots for generations. But we forgot and were brainwashed and history was scrubbed and we watched with our drugged eyes, the same story unfold yet again.

They get 40 years in power, we get 4-8 in this country....and they usally destroy about 1/2 of our term. In other countries with longer histories, they get it for 200 years and the prols get it for 2. Relentless.

In a few places, a more agreeable detente has been reached, Social Democracy, when helmed by reasonable and responsible people.

So I would like to disabuse all of us from using any of the trite, old, nostalgic tags we used to hang on the Republicans. Sober, responsible, conservative, tight-fisted, bootstraps, protectionist, free-marketers....FOOEY!
They are pure Corporatists, at least their leaders are. They are not dead, and they are relentless.

I have a friend who became conservative due to bad experiences with state regulations and regulators. After watching a charismatic televangelist in the 80s, he morphed from a get-government-off-my-back conservative to a full Rushdoony-loony dominionist who believes in creationism and thinks we were given a bunch of propaganda in our 1970s high school science classes. He believes that the earth is only 6,000 years ago and that the geologic features that have been dated by scientists as much older than 6,000 years were put there by God to fool us and keep us humble.
He thought Palin was a great choice for McCain's VP. His political opinions are echoes of Hugh Hewitt, who he recommended for me to listen to. He's done voice-over work for Dennis Prager's videos.
He's rapture ready whenever Jesus comes back to save the world.
He represents the future of the GOP.

Remember the Whigs?

Neither do I... they were extinct long before any of us was born. But they went through throes of self-destruction in some ways similar to what the Republicans have done, particularly their dependance on southern srtates for political power.

Republicans are reaching third-party status in record fashion. Now that the no-bid, book-cooking neocon CEO's who hijacked the party of Lincoln and turned it into the party of Bush are through, the GOP looks like an elephant graveyard.

And now that the misguided fundies are following their new Pharisees into political perdition, what remains of the GOP looks more like a dead moose than an elephant skeleton.

Like I have said before, if you want to have even a small concept of what happened to the Republican Party, think about George "Macaca" Allen, Bill "Catgut" Frist, Rick "Dog Love" Santorum, Bop "Fore-play" Ney, Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, Duke "The Skipper" Cunningham, Tom "Hot Tub" Delay, John "take my wife" Doolittle (Coleman's next title), thd list just goes on and on.

How long will it take the R's to descend from third-party fringe status to whig-party extinction? That all depends on where the rift between the fundies and the corporate factions splits the party. If they do split in 2012 (Bull Mooose party redux) we may see the Republicans become a regional party, making their last stand in state legislatures like Oklahoma, Idaho, Alabama, and sadly, Kansas.

And even there, if they don't start protecting their constituents instead of corporate interests, they will fade away, like dust in the wind.

The problem here is Bush was neither .... Bush was an unintelligent puppet purposely set into position by the powers of Big Business. In actuality he was never legally voted in. Once the courts gave it him ... the last was a gift from Diebold. As for his followers ... there really wasn't any, they were automatically voting "rubber stamp method" for thePARTY.
Anything to keep the PARTY in power. Very, very sad picture of human behavior.