Paul Krugman gets it right.
Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.
Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.
{snip}
But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.
This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.
He's got it perfect. If Obama wins today, the Republican party with the help of FOX and talk radio will be the party of Screaming Zombies that will make the Clinton years look like a walk in the beach.
And as Digby tells us:
And it's obviously a long way from them believing that Americans are tired of conservatism. They will keep fighting.
Now, the villagers are already saying this is a victory for the "center-right" and are becoming apoplectic at the idea that the dirty hippies are coming to town to trash the place, so there will be very strong resistance to anything that doesn't look like centrism and bipartisanship. With the villagers' track record I would hope that a new administration armed with a mandate for change would be smart enough to ignore them.
