They do have nice suits.

I'm a Liberal. This is well known. But I have always respected the conservative movement.

First, I am also a Libra, which if you believe any of that stuff means I'm keen to see both sides of everything. I believe that if you're someone who loves this country and are interested in developing policies to help it, then we have more in common than not. And I can respect a well-thought-out line of reasoning even if I still disagree with it in the end because I believe in different goals. (The fact that you and I are interested in discussing "the role of government in the modern age and the meaning of its social contract with its citizens" has already set us apart from the masses, who are more interested in who's running for American Idol than American President.)

Second, I once worked for the Republican Party, as an open Democrat. Some of them were indeed crazy. But I worked for two men and one woman who were kind, smart, decent, and conservative, and they enjoyed talking to me. (Again, we had more in common simply because we wanted to talk about it.) They patiently explained their point of view without slandering the left, and I learned a lot. I came to really respect the point of view of fiscal conservatives. I kept my own beliefs about the nature of the relationship between government and its people, but I have no trouble seeing the other side.

Third, my high school friend's dad was a conservative state senator in Florida, and he went to our church. I know that a lot of people have a pretty low opinion of politicians, and many on my side would dock points for him being on the right, but he was a nice and honest man, and this formed many of my feelings about politicians at a young age.

All of this is to say, after 8 years of "my President" (I think everyone has one, the first one they felt passionate about) and with a pretty bland candidate in Gore, I was willing to let the other side have a shot for a while. I confess I never liked Bush. He reminded me of men I knew, men I knew to stay away from. In fact, he reminded me a lot of a man who came up to me at closing time at the bar I worked-- drunk, vomit on his shirt, knees under his frat-boy cargo shorts skinned and freely bleeding-- who hit on me. Ick. So yes, Bush has always made me queasy.

But the country seemed to be humming along so well, I didn't think anything too bad could happen. And Clinton had championed some fiscally conservative causes, like Welfare Reform and NAFTA, so the parties didn't seem all that different. I thought we'd see a continuing paring down of government services, which can be painful but not necessarily bad. (Like I said, I can see why they would want smaller government, I can see how they could logically justify and execute it, even though I respectfully disagree on many points.)

I knew that they wanted to "bring the grownups back into the White House". I knew that Clinton's administration was seen as an overgrown dorm party. Keep in mind, this was the 1990s, when all over the business community, a radical "youth movement" was changing the face of the workplace. Dress codes went from suits to jeans, foozball tables went into break rooms, and bean bag chairs went into amorphous "team work areas". At the same time, this young band of pols moved into the White House with their backpacks instead of briefcases (an icon of which was on Josh's shoulder through all 8 years of The West Wing), meetings over open pizza boxes in the Oval Office, and a First Lady who dared to actually get involved in policy. The Old Guard, the "suits", were incensed. It didn't help that at the end of a long investigation there was found to be sex too. And so one of the promises of the Bush II Administration was to bring back the suits, literally and figuratively. Surely all of this casual behavior wasn't good for the country, they thought. I think it drove them crazy that despite all of this, the Clinton Administration was actually effective. So they promised, and I don't blame people for wanting this after the scandal, to "restore dignity", or "bring the grownups back". And I was interested to see what the "grownups" would do with it.

I knew they valued secrecy, but with the Freedom of Information Act, I didn't think they could hide that much from us.

I knew that they were oil men, I just thought these energy men would want to be in on the ground floor of the next phase of energy development.

I knew they had co-opted (or were allowing themselves to be co-opted by) the extreme religious right (ERR), but I thought honestly that the joke would be on the ERR (which it's turning out to be).

I knew there were neocons sharpening their knives in think tanks, but I didn't think they'd get the chance to remake the world they way they wanted. Think tanks are not real life, and it's often easier to imagine how you would do something in politics than to actually do it, when you have opposing ideas pressing back against you, and a planet of real nations to deal with.

I knew they were hawks, but I thought that since we had developed and cherished the Powell Doctrine, if we were forced into a war it would be swift and with a clear mission and exit strategy. And they installed Powell himself as the Secretary of State, so I thought that would keep us in check.

And I knew that they desperately wanted to go back into Iraq. For 8 years they listened to their base complain that the one failing of the Bush I years was that they "didn't finish the job" in Iraq by taking out Hussein. (Remember, I worked for them in the first few Clinton years, and I listened to them complain about this.) I knew that they wanted to "right" that "wrong", but I didn't really think they'd get the chance. I mean, the only way they could justify going back was if Hussein attacked someone else (for which he didn't have the capability) or, you know, something crazy like Arabs attacking the US. Oops.

What I'm trying to say is that I was willing to give them a shot, to see what their policies would do. I was even willing to see them get the Congress too-- for decades there had been gridlock blamed on having an Executive of one party and a Legislature of another, what would happen if they got it all and could really show us what kind of country their policies, unhindered, would bring us? What if they could remake the country for the better? That's all I want for my beloved country.

So while part of me, the part that cringed while Clinton slipped the noose around his own neck for his lynching, the part of me that wants to throw rotten tomatoes at the gerry-mandering hack Tom DeLay, is happy to be dancing on the grave of the GOP, there is a much bigger part of me that weeps for the destruction of our country and the collapse of the promise of a new vision.

Sydney Blumenthal has a new article in Salon ("The GOP Begins to Implode") in which he delineates all the factions that are splintering apart, and how the immigration issue is adding to the quake. The GOP is finding out what it means to have a big tent-- all the circus animals eventually start to eat each other. Here are some of his salient points:

• The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community.

• The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate.

• The evangelical religious right is paralyzed while the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as a mobilizing force behind the mass demonstrations of millions of Hispanic immigrants.

• Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been discredited, a virulent form of isolationist nationalism, always lurking beneath the surface, has filled the vacuum.

• Fear of the Other is being displaced onto the traditional nativist target: immigrants.

The "grownups" have been terrible stewards of this country. It turns out that the alternative to being young and idealistic is being old and corrupt. They have lied, leaked, evaded, spied on us, and put dangerously under-qualified cronies in critical positions in the government. They have very nice suits, but they won't roll up their sleeves. In this culture of lawlessness, which included the "K Street Project" (forcing all lobbying firms to hire only Republicans), some of them took bribes in cash and goods.

They insisted that conservation was against the national interest (QUE???) and that drilling in Alaska and "buying" our own "gas station" in Iraq would solve our oil problems-- until it didn't, and now they are singing a false note in trying to take back everything they've ever said without sounding like liars.

They even lied to the ERR, making such hay out of the "threat" of gay marriage (rumor has it, this election cycle it will be the spectre of "gay adoption" that looms), taking their "free milk" of votes and walking away without buying the cow. (Ironic, isn't it, since abstinence is their sole sex ed, that they didn't see that one coming?)

Turns out that neoconservativism regarding domestic issues is actually for big government and domestic spending. (Well, duh, it has to financially support its militaristic foreign policy somehow.) I think this was a shock to many fiscal conservatives that didn't know some of their best friends were working to cross purposes. George Will still hasn't gotten that look of shock off his face. Wikipedia in its definition says, neocons "sympathized with a non-traditional foreign policy agenda that was less deferential to traditional conceptions of diplomacy and international law and less inclined to compromise principles even if that meant unilateral action." Turns out, that means pissing everyone off. I would go farther to say that it specifically involved remaking the entire Middle East into "people we could deal with"-- without noticing that the people who lived there didn't want to be remade and would virulently hate us for meddling in the wrong places while not meddling enough in the Palestian/Israeli conflict, making them even more impossible to deal with. (Now even the more rational states can't be seen with us for fear of attracting that hate.)

Making Colin Powell the Secretary of State, it turns out, was an effort to marginalize him. Under a plan in which one is "less deferential to traditional concepts of diplomacy and international law", the Secretary of State is a joke. The real power in a neocon administration is the Secretary of Defense, in which position they installed the neo-est, hawkest member of their cabal, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is one of those smarmy, arrogant people that make you feel like they are the only ones with the answers, and you're an idiot. (Not just the kind who think you are an idiot, but the kind that really makes you feel like you must be.) And when he's working in the vacuum of not being in power, I'm sure he convinced everyone (and apparently still has the President convinced) that he really did have the answers and they were idiots (because this kind of guy is really persuasive). But reality has borne out that he's just a blowhard. His arrogant, dismissive speaking has devolved into defensive whining, which oddly matches the President's defensive whining ("This is haa-ard!") Cheney has a similar intimidating veneer-- he's the quintessential stoic father, the leader of the "grownups", who makes you feel like he's the adult who understands better than you do but, it turns out, he's just feeling his way through life like anyone else.

Lastly, it's surprising to learn that the hawks are terrible at war! It's like having a group on the school fundraising committee insist on a dance-off with the rival school-- but it turns out they can't dance. We all assumed, including the right, that these men (and women, Ms. Rice) who were planning for years to go back into Iraq, who were planning for years to remake the Middle East without "traditional diplomacy" and with "unilateral [military] action" were good military strategists. It turns out the good military strategists (the best kind being the kind that try to keep us out of military action, and then only with a clear mission and exit strategy) were in the State Department being ignored. So while it's possible that the neocon vision of remaking the Middle East might (and I stress might) have worked with good military planning, we will never know because they bungled it from start to finish.

I should point out that I am referring only to the civilian military planners. The military strategists within the military are quite good at their jobs and have done an amazing job on the day-to-day planning (the small picture) while being hobbled by civilian idiots on major planning (the big picture).

You might notice that I haven't mentioned the bungling of the Katrina disaster. While this is the most blatant example of incompetence on the most basic governmental level (we might argue about health care or public education, but this is the kind of thing we all expect a government to handle for us), and it stems directly from failures in the Administration-- namely cronyism and the dismantling of Clinton's shiny revamped FEMA into a shell of its former glory, just in time for the worst disaster in 50 years or more)-- I never dreamed this could happen. The point of this essay is to say, "I was willing to give them a shot, but it turns out their ideas and the execution of those ideas were really, really bad." But I never in my life gave one thought to an organization like FEMA as a political football, or even a topic of reasoned debate. I thought that at least, our government would protect and serve in the time of a natural disaster. Turns out I was wrong.

I was wrong about a lot of things. I was a young adult not that much younger than most of the Clinton Administration. While the pizza boxes in the Oval Office didn't bother me, the sex scandal did. While I wanted another Democrat administration, I was willing to let the "grownups" back in, because if the "kids" could do this well, maybe the "grownups" could do even better. I was wrong. We all were.

One thing you can say about them, though, they do have very nice suits.