Like 2002-03?

One of the reasons I respect Powell is that he is one of the precious few Republicans who can admit when he's wrong, as he was about selling the war. He recognizes that moment as a blight on his career.

I probably would have voted for him had he run even against Gore in 2000. I wanted him to run in 2008. That would have been something.

Chances are, though, after this that he will no longer have a place in the pathetic right-wing fundamentalist husk that is all that's left of the Republican party.

In September 2005, Powell was asked about the speech during an interview with Barbara Walters and responded that it was a "blot" on his record. He went on to say, "It will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It's painful now."

How did I know they would say that...

Wow.....he was talking 7 minutes and always brought up new points and didnt pause or so....very impressive.

Wow.....he was talking 7 minutes and always brought up new points and didnt pause or so....very impressive.

Matthews: Why don't you go by what he said? Why do you have to attribute motives to people who don't say those things?

That right there sums up what Buchanan and Limbaugh do. Let's be sure to alienate everyone that came from the Bush years that people still respect because they actually see something wrong with how we have been running the country.

It's why come November, they'll be sitting atop the shattered remnants of the Republican party, left only with the crazy white racist Christianist morons.

Moderate Republicans have had an impressive pedigree, reaching back to the party's founding by anti-slavery activists in the 1850s. Teddy Roosevelt clashed so strongly with the Party's old guard that he split off and founded his own Bull Moose movement. Henry Cabot Lodge, paterfamilias of a great New England aristocratic dynasty, didn't slide along with party leadership in the 1920s when he saw the oil industry reaching its hands into the White House; he helped crack open the Teapot Dome scandal and nearly brought down his own party. Arthur Vandenberg broke with Republican isolationists, helping the United States engage internationally after World War II and pass the Marshall Plan. A whole team of Republican moderates helped push through the great civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and was indispensable in creating Medicare in 1965. In fact, on perhaps the three most critical American issues of the 20th century, conservative Republicans were dead wrong. They opposed the New Deal, preached isolation in World War II, and tried to block civil rights and racial integration. It took moderates to pull the party toward reason.

The moderates began to lose influence when Barry Goldwater trounced Nelson Rockefeller at the 1964 convention. Still, until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, moderates often had their hands on the steering wheel. Through the 1960s, a group of moderate Republicans known as the Ripon Society served as the party's liberal conscience, pushing Keynesian economics and urging racial reconciliation. The group survives today, but only in tatters. While the Federalist Society chooses our judiciary, the Ripon Society hasn't updated its Web page in six months.

Back then, the moderates had influence. Even Richard Nixon, never one to call himself a middle-of-the-roader, hired Daniel Patrick Moynihan as his domestic policy adviser and governed mostly from the center---setting wage and price controls, and supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and the creation of the EPA. But with Reagan's election, the Republicans took a hard right. Moderates, who always have come mostly from the Northeast and Midwest, were put in the back seat---and sometimes the trunk. The shift has been compounded by the gradual movement of population and economic power toward the more conservative Sunbelt; the growing political influence of evangelical Christians, who are essentially absent in New England; and the increasing partisanship of Congress, which has isolated moderates on both sides of the aisle.

But, more important, the moderates have almost no influence over the GOP's overall direction. The core problem is that the moderate Republicans are either not strongly enough moderate, like McCain, or just not strong enough to change the party's agenda. The current leadership is so far to the right that the only way to deal with them is to have them lose so that more moderate voices can take over.

I am not surprised with Buchanan he is a known racist and ant-semite.

Like 2002-03?

That was AS important as his endorsement of Obama. Can you imagine if any major party supporters openly and outwardly said that they would refuse to vote for a Christian? Or a Jew? And yet these McCain supporters go around disparaging Muslims like there's nothing to it and the media never addresses it.

To be fair, however, there were those who DID attack Mormons when Mitt Romney was running, although as many of those were supporters of other Republican candidates in the primaries as Democrats.

And God forbid a Scientologist ever run for high public office.

No one can be shocked about this. It was a foregone conclusion.

Was it? Why so?

Was it? Why so?