Conservatives for a Bush-free America?

Well, given how much I read their stuff, you guys should get used to me stealing stuff from Pandagon. Anyway, they have a story about various conservative pundits, George Will and others, that have begun to openly criticize Bush's policies. Most of these guys, a year or two ago, would have stretched logic and facts to sometime preposterous, some times flat out fabrication, levels in order to justify some crazy idea of gaff by administration officials.

Needless to say, this sort of breakdown in the machinery of the Republican Press' version of Robosaurus couldn't come at a worse time for El Presidente. This leads me to a couple of questions of my own. Salon has an article about this mechanism and its history, but here's the basic rundown: Thirty years ago the Republicans decided to invest in the future. They founded a bunch of think tanks and unified thier party in a way that allowed them to some crushing victories both politically and culturally in the nineties and through today (see: at one point a significant portion of Americans believed that not only had we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but thought that Saddam used them against US troops during combat).

The Democrats, alternatively, have spent the last decade, at least, fragmented. The best example is the 2000 election where you had the economically concervative Clintonian wing backing Gore and the Dave Mathews/Drum Circle wing backing Nader. Conversely, this year as heated as the Democratic primary got, the rhetoric nearly always came down to who would beat Bush the best.

What I can only hope is that what we're experiencing now is a swing back to the left. Being the party in power requires a very careful balancing of interests to keep a coalition majority in place to keep you in office and it looks like Bush's coalition might be crumbling.

What really brought this to the fore in my mind was John McCain's appearance on the Daily Show tonight. Granted, he's never been afraid of going against the party grain, but he did NOT sound like a man trying to get people to vote for Bush this fall. Given some of the rumors being thrown around on the internet, could we see a coalition of Democrats AND Republicans forming to oust Bush? Is there, as has been hinted at, a possibility of a Kerry/McCain ticket this fall?

Bush is one tricky sonofabitch when it comes to elections and I don't think we've seen anywhere near his best stuff yet this year, but the tide seems to be turning, and the rip tide might just tow Bush and Co. out to sea with it, never to be seen again...