Moderation

In the recent turbulent history of the GOP, there have emerged several competing threads. One of these was advocated a few weeks ago when an anonymous senator told the Politico, "I don’t think we [the GOP] have learned much from the election in terms of what people want to see.” The anonymous senator further said that the Republicans needed someone who could “speak from the center” and wanted it known that “Sarah Palin is not the voice of [the Republican] party.”

From the objective point of view of someone observing the events, this analysis seems quite accurate. And as a Florida-bred boy, I was very surprised to learn that these anonymous words came out of Senator Mel Martinez's mouth. Of course, Martinez, known from Pensacola to Key West as a staunch Bush footsoldier and a very right-leaning conservative, only expressed this yearning for moderation and *gasp* rationality after he'd announced he will not seek reelection in 2010. So the sane wing of the GOP has gained one convert, if a bit late. Luckily, Erick Erickson, managing editor at RedState, a far-right blog, provides us with the opposite perspective:

A Different Bush

The funniest thing about wise Mr. Erickson's perspective is that it holds to the conventional wisdom of the Bush years without acknowledging any flaws with itself. Well, maybe this, in and of itself, is not quite so amusing. Seemingly, this view holds Iraq as a success, Katrina as an innocent stumble, and our tattered global image, merely a byproduct of the liberal international media. This is not only a dangerous or ignorant view. It is a sinister one. Because for people with any rationality, any decency, it is impossible, deplorable to overlook what has happened in this country over the past eight years.

But, despite the sobering influence that writers like Erickson have had in the past, and by mere virtue of this article's laughable intent, I award Erick Erickson, managing editor at RedState, the:

Sean Hilarity

Sean Hilarity has been blessing the airwaves of American punditry since 1989, where he had his first radio talk show at UC Santa Barbara. He co-hosts a show on (of all places) FoxXx N3wz called Hilarity and Colmes which regularly features Sean spewing misleading rhetoric, patriotic overkill, and irrationality which Alan Colmes counters by consistently being Sean Hilarity's bitch. (Edit: We posit that, while Alan Colmes left the show recently, he remains Sean Hilarity's bitch in private life.)

For thinking for a second that the dangerous path we've been going down is the right one, for claiming that this is not the time for moderation and reconciliation (not to mention, solidarity in the face of economic hardships), and, perhaps worst of all, for not accepting that Sarah Palin, for the love of God, will not be the figurehead for a new, reinvigorated Republican party, but merely the embattled leader of an embattled opposition, mired by their prejudices and divisions; for all these reasons, Erick Erickson embodies so much of what Sean Hilarity's all about. And furthermore...wait, who won in November? Barack Obama. So hopefully, for the time being, people like Erick Erickson won't matter much at all.