Guillotine! Guillotine!

The Madame DeFarge of the GOP illiterati, Ann Coulter has been taking names, and now she's going to kick some asses:

After showing nearly superhuman restraint throughout this campaign, which was lost the night McCain won the California primary, I am now liberated to announce that all I care about is hunting down and punishing every Republican who voted for McCain in the primaries. I have a list and am prepared to produce the names of every person who told me he was voting for McCain to the proper authorities.

We'll start with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Then we shall march through the states of New Hampshire and South Carolina -- states that must never, ever be allowed to hold early Republican primaries again.

If cooler (saner?) heads don't prevail, the GOP may undergo a Cultural Revolution that will have Mao's ghost nodding his approval. Newt Gingrich has spent the past 7 or 8 months positioning himself as the guy who will have the ideas and the strategy to bring the GOP back once again. Ann and BillO seem to like Palin for that job -- or for the job of fronting the party. It would be good for the country if some grown ups took charge in the GOP and presented the country with an opposition party that had different ideas about governance rather than a strategy for winning elections. I was no fan of Goldwater, Reagan, or Bill Buckley, by they actually had a coherent set of ideas about governance -- I disagreed with many of them and objected to many of the policies they advocated, but they often (not always) made a case that wasn't just name-calling and cynicism. That said, part of me wouldn't mind if Coulter and the gang finished the job of discrediting the cultural right once and for all. I think that would make it easier to have a serious discussion about what role the nation is willing to see the federal government play in the economy and about whether we truly are engaged in a world-historical struggle (and, if we are, who the enemy actually is).

But for that to happen, we'll need to turn down the volume on rantings like Coulter's, as is apparent in that same column:

For now, we have a new president-elect. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, we owe it to the Democrats to show their president the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that they have shown our recent Republican president.

Starting tomorrow, if not sooner.