Week of Jan. 7, 2008

If the nation stays on its current vector for much longer — say, another ten months or so — we’re going to be reading ignoring a lot of stories about the end of the modern Republican coalition. And eventually, some unknown number of years after that, historians will have their say about the rise and fall of whatever label they ultimately afix to the agglomeration of fundamentalists, imperialists, nativists, racists, Norquists, and sundry dead-end kids who currently make up the GOP voting bloc.* There will, I suspect, be many books devoted to the subject.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?