Blumenthal in Salon

In a rewarding, typically Blumenthalian piece ("Shipwrecked: Bush has so thoroughly destroyed the Republican establishment that no one, not even his dad, can rescue him now") Sydney Blumenthal gives us reason for hope. Maybe.

The elements of the Republican establishment that Bush brought into his first administration as a sort of symbolic tribute were gone by his second. By their nature, these people are discreet, measured and private. It is not their impulse to voice disagreement in public. Their sweeping and emotional jeremiads against what Bush has wrought are extraordinary not only in their substance but in having been made at all. Those expressing their disquiet about Bush are more than simply losers in bureaucratic struggles for primacy of place. Once representative of the heart and soul of the Grand Old Party, they are historical castaways. They stand for another Republican Party that has been supplanted by Bush's version.