Bruce Bartlett had predicted before the presidential election in
Ron Suskind's famous New York Times Magazine article that the GOP would find itself in a fight with itself.
In Republican Civil War I wrote that Bartlett had got the time frame wrong because he had predicted it would begin the day after the election.
The right wing was too busy gloating. But he was right about everything else.
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
Now take a look at this over at Hullabaloo.
Civil war? More like they're fighting desperately to climb on to the lifeboats in a desperate attempt to pull away from this sinking administration and the failed policies of conservatives.
Because they know that this administration is the iceberg that is going to sink them.
They sailed off with Captain George W. Lord at the helm, helped him pilot the course and ignored the warnings that the left tried to shout from the lookout.
Now they don't want to go down with Bush's sinking poll numbers. And they don't care if they leave the rest of America, particularly the middle class and lower income residents in steerage, to drown for their conservative sins
Take a look at Digby's post again at who they describe as "liberals" who are to blame for this disaster.
That's why I wrote in Driving a stake through the heart of a monster that we cannot let conservatives escape the blame of the Bush administration, that the Republicans steered us on this doomed voyage. On that occasion it was Bill Kristol trying to distance himself from Bush.
Now you see conservative emailers doing the same with Kristol.
We cannot let them slip away like the rats they are and lay the blame at the feet of just a handful of their leaders.
What I wrote of Kristol holds true for them too.
Kristol is like the conspirator in a murder case: "Sure I drove Bush to the house, gave him the gun, advised him what to do, but I'm not responsible for the crime."
The same is true of every Republican, conservative and neo-conservative that ever supported Bush.
They've got blood on their hands, and no amount of trying to wash the taint of Bush away is going to cleanse them of their shared guilt.
Bush gave them what they wanted and if they don't like it, they should renounce their party and their ideology and seek forgiveness and to undo the damage they have done to their country and the world.
It's great fun to watch conservatives desperate and out for blood with each other, but if we let them off the sinking ship of the Bush administration, they'll resurface in 2008 to take the helm once more like drunken sailors with no sense of responsibility or remorse.
That's why at every opportunity either in supermarket lines or Sunday school chats or letters to the editor, we must reinforce that it is not just George W. Bush and his crew of scalawags that are to blame, but the conservative policies they endorsed and touted.
Only by steering to the left can we get the ship of state back on a safe course.