Hercules himself would need luck to succeed in cleaning out the Augean Stables that Bush has left behind for the next president.

Barack is good, but he ain’t Hercules. And sorry, Oliver, Hercules would kick Superman’s ass anytime, anywhere.

Oh, wouldn’t that be sweet?

I’d love to see the debates.

Luck has nothing to do with it, as Barack has continually proven.

Expect to hear that a lot, and also a lot of wishful thinking that the Dems will screw everything up the first two years, and it’ll be 1994 all over again.
And without any obligation to defend their own party, since they’re no longer in power, expect wingnuttery and conspiracy theories to bloom like a thousand points of lameness.

They’ll be back, with Palin – she’ll have learned her lines better by 2012 and all the blunders of the last six weeks will have been forgotten. The “party of ideas” will once again rally around a partisan pit-bull with nothing between her ears but a pretty smile and the instincts of a piranha.

Unless Barack is extremely lucky in his first term he’ll have quite a fight on his hands for re-election.

So maybe a third party? The Palin/Huckabee crowd taking over the reigns of the Republican party, and the “intellectual”/Goldwater type conservatives (Brooks, Will, Buckley Jr., etc.) starting the “Freedom Party” or something like that?

Look for them to learn all the wrong lessons and nominate Sarah Palin in 2012.

Btw, for the resident wingnuts who like to tout the low Congressional approval ratings every time we bring up the fact that they support the worst and most unpopular president of all time: If your point is to show that people hate Dems in Congress even more, as opposed to both parties, then wouldn’t that mean that voters will be sending the Dems packing in November as opposed to punishing them with nearly a filibuster proof majority?

No. This is a party with plenty of members – I’m not going to put a percentage on it, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush – that believe they own patriotism. They will claim they were unfairly blamed for the economic crisis, they will claim that the Democrats increased their numbers with blue dogs by acting like conservatives, and they will claim that their batch of conservative candidates were not conservative enough or did not push the agenda well enough. The relevant mantra here is ‘conservatism wins whenever it’s tried.’

In short, the usual suspects (Rush, et. al.) will argue just about anything that makes them feel better about getting electorally punched in the mouth, allowing them to continue to lie about owning patriotism.