AFTER HITLER AND MUSSOLINI DIED, THE FAR RIGHT FELL ON HARD TIMES... BUT IT TOOK OVER THE GOP & CAME ROARING BACK... AND COULD AGAIN

You have to drive the silver stake through Dracula's heart, chop off the serpent's head... otherwise it comes back. Tomorrow's NY Times warns that although the Right is down, it may not be out, at least not permanently. And I'm certain they're quite correct. Without a serious denazification program-- starting with impeachment and trials for all the criminals in the Bush Regime and the Republican Culture of Corruption-- the American public will just convince itself that this has all been politics-- albeit grubby politics-- as usual. The Bushites have been very very good at discrediting democracy and government.

The Times story is simplistic, naive and just plain silly. "With the death on Tuesday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, and the announcement on Thursday that Paul D. Wolfowitz would resign from the presidency of the World Bank, two major figures in the modern conservative movement exited the political stage. To many, this is the latest evidence that the conservative movement, which has dominated politics during the last quarter century, is finished."

Blah! Where's the silver stake? And Cheney? The Bush family? Mitch McConnell? James Dobson? Eric Cantor? Michele Bachmann? Nothing; instead it's a story about the career paths of these two nefarious, dishonest right-wing characters. Until 9/11 "the ideas espoused by Mr. Falwell and Mr. Wolfowitz, though both were valued on the right, did not mesh; they were unconnected, spokes in the large conservative wheel...

But after 9/11, neoconservatives and evangelicals found common cause in their shared belief in American exceptionalism and in the idea that the country’s values could be exported abroad. Mr. Bush was receptive to the synthesis, and it became the ideological centerpiece of the war on terror, with its stated mission to combat the “axis of evil” in a global “war on terror.”

Today, of course, this vision, has been widely repudiated, if not altogether discredited. The public has grown skeptical, or maybe just tired, of the hard-edged and often polarizing politics. And this change coincides with broad-based skepticism of the Bush presidency itself-- as witnessed by Mr. Bush’s and his party’s perilously low approval ratings. The G.O.P.’s embrace of the conservative movement is beginning, some say, to resemble a death grip.

You don't often hear ex-presidents bad-rapping other presidents, current or former. But today Jimmy Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, voiced what more and more Americans have come to accept, namely that the Bush Regime "is 'the worst in history' in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's 'quite disturbing' faith-based initiative funding.

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."

It may have been politically expedient for Nancy Pelosi to take impeachment off the table-- perhaps the only thing she could do-- but, for the sake of America's soul, and for our future, it-- impeachment-- is essential. No American president has ever had to face up to his crimes before-- but no American president has ever committed crimes on a scale approaching George W. Bush. Even the right-wing loons are turning on each other in violent vicious despair. Until Ma and Pa Kettle are forced to look it full-on in the face, it will continue to thrive, even if, for a while, in dark places, like after Hitler and Mussloni.