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Soviet spies. Ho Chi Minh's socialist paradise did turn into a prison camp. Welfare does indeed have a dangerous tendency to encourage dependency. The nanny state can get ridiculous about eliminating risk. And environmental regulations are often used as a weapon against legitimate businesses in ranching, mining, and logging.

The right has been right about so many things. And the fight against abortion is certainly a righteous cause, although I personally believe that a woman should have dominion over her own body (in fact, I can imagine a right-winger horrified by the idea that the state would extend its regulatory reach into the flesh of an individual citizen). I'm less sympathetic to the gun nuts, but the right to bear arms is in the Constitution; it's not like they don't have some basic justification.

That said, the Republican party must die.

For me, the tipping point was when John McCain said the stimulus "can only be described as generational theft." This phrase, it appears, was introduced by the nutty blogger Michelle Malkin in a column on Jan. 7 and subsequently championed by Republican leaders like Tom Coburn ("This bill is a generational theft bill") and John Boehner ("This is not 'stimulus' — it's generational theft").

So now all taxes are socialism and any kind of deficit spending is generational theft? This is just crazy talk.

But we're used to crazy talk from fringy Republicans. Either they're trying to convince us that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs or they're insisting that 99 percent of the world's scientists are wrong about global warming — and that they have a Professor of Dentistry at Oral Roberts University who can prove it. That you can pay down the deficit by cutting taxes. That the God of Love who embraced lepers and prostitutes is really the God of Gay-Bashing. It's almost hilarious the things these guys come up with.

And now they want us to take their economic ideas seriously. This is a time when the overwhelming majority of economists and politicians all over the world agree that we need stimulus programs to soften the landing — after the Bush administration started nationalizing the banking and mortgage industries, no less. Yet they continue to push another fringe theory that we're supposed to gamble on in exchange for our jobs and savings and children's future. And once again, they're using carefully crafted propaganda phrases like "right to life" and "death tax" to inflame and confuse the public.

But John McCain was supposed to be the sane one, the centrist who denounced the "agents of intolerance" and carried on unholy flirtations with reporters and Democrats. Sure, he pandered to the base with Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, but he was fighting a tough race. It was politics. He was in it to win.

Now McCain is using Michelle Malkin as a speechwriter. He has embraced the fringy kookiness that, over the last two decades, has become part of the DNA of the Republican party. Ominously, he warned that the stimulus was "the greatest transfer of not only spending but authority and responsibility to government" in history, raising the absurd specter of some kind of dictatorial state in what should be a rational discussion about how to save the freakin' economy. This now makes it impossible for me to take the man seriously — even when he's making a valid point, like warning against the danger of "buy American" laws. Instead of making himself useful to the nation by remembering that that "center-right" contains the word "center," McCain has made his choice. He's a Palinite now.

The future is clear, and it will be ugly. As the economy continues to stumble, the Republicans will attack President Obama every step of the way. If he offers them largest tax cut in history, which it seems he may have, they'll sneer at it and demand more. Faced with major problems, they'll focus on minor line items. They'll do everything they can to undercut the confidence essential to a recovery while attacking the patriotism of their opponents. And if a Republican actually tries to influence legislation — to govern — instead of picking up his toys and going home in a pout, they will denounce him as "RePUBLICan Enemy Number One," as Human Events slugged Sen. Arlen Specter after he voted for the stimulus. The headline was "Tar and Feathers Time," which really does say it all: The Republicans are witch-hunting again. They're on a crusade for purity. We know how this ends.

For all of these reasons, the time for bipartisanship really is over, as far as I'm concerned. Obama should keep making efforts because it's the right thing to do, because good ideas can still come from poisoned minds, and because it's politically effective to see him act so decent and dignified while his opponents squeal and bleat like such bumptious swine (see below).

But beyond that, the Katrina Party must be crushed. For the good of the country, for the good of the Republicans themselves, it must die to be born again. And, really, these politicians shouldn't come back until they come up with at least one new idea about how to govern, because hearkening back to the grand old days of small government and lone cowpokes just ain't gonna to cut it anymore.

Thirteen days later, Dick Cheney's interview with Politico still astonishes me. Warning of the "high probability" that terrorists would attack the United States, Cheney suggested that the Obama administration was "turning the other cheek" — as if the continued Predator attacks inside Pakistan were some kind of pansy liberal scheme to love up Al Qaeda. After a transition that George W. Bush conducted with real dignity and class, at a time when President Obama was eagerly reaching out to Republicans, Cheney managed to stink up the room.

But my favorite moment came when Politico asked Cheney whether he and Bush should have done more to help the economy. "I don't think anybody actually foresaw something of this size and dimension occurring," the former vice president responded.

Hmm. Sounds familiar. "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center," as Condoleezza Rice said shortly before the 9/11 Commission found that presidential briefing paper titled "Bin Laden Determined To Attack In U.S."

Somehow it seems like we're only counting the days until another memo is unearthed: "Bankers Determined to Destroy Global Economy."

But Cheney is too formidable to represent his party in its present debased condition. Here is the true face of the modern Republican party:

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That's a congressman named Tom Price. He's from Georgia. The video above shows him standing outside Nancy Pelosi's door warning of "shady deals going on behind closed doors," as if there was an alternate universe where bills were written under the C-Span cameras in the House chamber. But it's really the medium that's the message — the shaky hand-held camera that can't even stay focused on Price's bloodless Ned-Flanders-meets-the-Church-Lady face, which keeps wandering toward the edge of the frame as if tugged away by its own infinite weightlessness.

Watched it all the way through? Now ask yourself these two questions: Would you trust this man with the global economy? Would you trust him with an eighth-grade science classroom?

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson.

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