"Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem."

[Riot]

The contemporary Republican party was born in 1964, not coincidentally the same year the Johnson administration decided that black people could have some rights. It's the party of Bill Buckley's racism, and of Pat Buchanan's, as well as Steve King's, of Carl McIntire's religious mania and Pat Robertson's, as well as Rick Santorum's. It's the party which wrapped every little adventurist foreign excursion from Korea to Iraq II in patriotic fervor, and which found it necessary to rewrite the history of every last one (excepting, maybe, the Glorious Liberation of Grenada); Nixon's traitor hunt of 1946 was little different than Andrew Sullivan's in 2001, and, no, he's one of yours. No one with eyes and ears could possibly have missed this, apart, somehow, from the DLC and today's tiny island leper colony of sadder-but-wiser centrists.

I certainly agree with that. I was bred, born and raised as a northern businessman Republican, and that's exactly what internal struggles in the party have always been about.

But Bill Buckley, in spite of his obvious racism, squashed the evangelical wing and wrapped the party in the cloak of wealth, intellectualism and elitism, successfully keeping Republican power in the hands of the grandees.

They lost that power in the 2010 election, and now they are fighting to regain it from the crazies that won't vote their financial interests: Santorum against chosen robot Romney - to get ownership of Congress back.

The Democratic party has moved to be what centrist Republicans used to be - see Obama (and the electoral support he received, and continues to receive, from centrist Republicans for whom the party has moved far right, out from under them).

We have very few true liberals in our Congress nowadays. This country desperately needs a very progressive party to help drag the entire country back left, into the 21st century. We have the moderate centrist party - the Dems; and the right wing party, the Republicans, and a third party splitoff with two wings that have surprising power nowadays, the evangelicals and ultra conservatives who want to eliminate government entirely.