The media buzz over Democratic leadership seats has obscured a real long term civil war brewing inside the Republican edifice.
The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate....Forty-three months later ... Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."
The article chronicles a laundry list of former allies splitting with the White House, culminating on a Capital Hill rebellion that brought disgraced Senator Trent Lott back to leadership in a fractured Senate vote.
And this isn't the only place where the GOP is fracturing. Andrew Sullivan, himself an early refugee of Bush's 2000 supporters, highlighted a split inside the right wing's legal group - the Federalist Society. The base is angry over the selection of Mel Martinez to run the RNC. And everyone is blaming everybody else for the 2006 tidal wave that swept away Republicans from sea to shining sea:
In the aftermath of the historic GOP losses Tuesday night, moderate Republicans quickly concluded that the party needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans declared that it should be more conservative. Main Street is angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP congressional leadership.A brief Democratic leadership battle might have distracted from the GOP's civil war, but the fault lines of the intra-party fighting are now deep and growing - reaching into every part of the Republican superstructure. Time will tell who will prevail and whether the disunity will doom the GOP heading into 2008.