A Daily Dish reader wrote, and Andrew Sullivan printed one of the most perfect summations of the 2009 Republican Party that I've read anywhere. I don't know who the reader is (Sullivan doesn't credit her/him) but it's priceless, and augmented by a must-see photo of GOP squirming during President Obama's speech.
The College Republicans
This is the party of Colson and Segretti, Atwater and Rove, Kristol and Norquist. It is the party of Joe Wilson and the odious Patrick McHenry, the latter a bad caricature of a South Park or Simpsons character. Just look at them, with the "What bill?" signs around their necks, waving the copies of their "bill" in the President's face as he patiently explained to them why they are so very full of shit.
The modern GOP cut its teeth with the shennanigans of Nixon's Dirty Tricksters. College Republican leader Karl Rove not only admired their work, he patterned the next 35 years of GOP tactics on their example.
Juvenile, manipulative, impossibly smarmy, hateful - or at least more than willing to use the weapon of other people's hate - and, above all, relentlessly cynical. To these (mostly) men, politics is not the "art of the possible", not a means for peaceably grappling with the most difficult and complex issues of the day, or for attempting to improve the lives of people you will never meet. It is nothing but a game, one where the object is not just to win but to destroy your enemies with a weird mix of angry slander and junior high insults - and to have a good chuckle while admiring your handiwork.
Perfect. Sums up every outrageous tactics they've used over the past 40 years, and the slow, steady extermination of any integrity or sense of morality that has left the GOP where it is today. The Brooks Brothers riot in Florida 2000, the attacks on Clinton throughout his presidency, the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, the morphing of Max Cleland's face into Osama bin Laden to install draft-dodging Chickenhawk Saxby Chambliss as a Senator in Georgia, the Willie Horton ads, GHWB's Pledge of Allegiance distraction, the list goes on and on....
A must read.... here's the link again.