It looks like the years of the Republican Ascendancy are perhaps ending. And they are ending as anyone with sense could have predicted -- with mounds of corpses abroad and a destroyed economy at home. And now certain scenes from these dark years flicker past in my mind's eye, a tumult of images: "monstrous familiar images," as they say. Here's the first of them:

This is of course the "Brooks Brothers Riot," from the Florida recount debacle, when vicious young GOP geekapparatchiks from DC were flown down to disrupt by violence the operations of an election board. For all its nerdiness, this was indeed an instance of actual, real-life fascism -- systematized extra-legal violence used to attain political ends and the ordinary processes of democratic government be damned. Oddly enough a certain "scholar" of fascism in American political neglected to include an account of this episode in his comprehensive tome, though, you know, by any rational standard these Brooks Brothers suit-shirts are brown.

Charmingly, the WaPo tells us that these nasty little shits like to brag about their participation in this nasty little affair on their resumes. That alone tells you everything you need to know about the 21st century GOP --not only its ugliness, but its spectacular incompetence. It is no surprise that people with brazen contempt for democratic government don't have the slightest clue how to run one. Brooks Brothers riots, blood on the floor:

Certain consequences are inevitably inscribed in the logic of certain origins.