Abandon Ship

Andrew Sullivan is being a bit hyperbolic in his assessment of the Fox News takeover of the Republican National Committee, but he is not inaccurate. Now that Fox has Sarah Palin, O'Reilly, Beck, and Hannity, plus frequent guests like Dick and Liz Cheney, along with dutiful "journalists" like Brit Hume and Chris Wallace, Fox has the entire GOP base following him. What they do now that they have consolidated their power is to present their nihilistic vision of American government in an effort to derail it in its entirety. What they plan to replace it with is very close to what Andrew describes:

This new political-media conglomerate endorses a supreme executive unrestrained in his or her conduct of the war against Islam (for that is the real import of the Giuliani complaint), and empowered to seize anyone anywhere and torture them in the name of national security. It is also critically connected to the settlement movement in the West Bank - for Palin's vision of more and more Jewish population expanding outwards in that region is part of the plan for the End-Times. Hence its belief in waging war on Iran.

If there is anyone left in America who calls himself a Republican but doesn't buy into this wacko vision of tea-bagger proto-fascism wrapped up in evangelical Christianism, now would be the time to abandon ship and start that third party. I have maintained all along that the Republican Party would experience a profound schism, and the chips have nearly fallen into place. With Republican gains in the House and Senate in 2010, they will become emboldened to push even further to the right, led by a woman who envisions herself as anointed by God to be the next Esther who has the power of the airwaves to brainwash the faithful and prepare them for the war that is to come in 2012. Anyone who thinks she's done with politics doesn't understand her pathology. She craves, craves, craves power.