RTFA: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks…

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all – men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission – because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission – by telling members of that class to go away.

I can hardly believe I’m reading David Brooks here. And yet, there it is. He’s really saying these words.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a registered Republican… I shit you not. I even donated to McCain! …long before he was the Republican nominee, but all the same, I did it.

I’ve disagreed with Brooks for what seems like years by this point, but this column is something else.

…it seems like it’s about time that a few Republicans wake up to the fact that there’s been a malignant tumor eating through the core of the GOP… or maybe it’s more like a parasite that has overgrown its host. Is there any difference? They’re just metaphors: look at the composition of the constituency and compose your own literary allusion.

I mean, it’s not like all Republicans are dumb, but the party has been fooled. …and now, the party is overrun with fools. Slobbering, hateful, racist, classist fools. Anti-intellectual, bigoted, close-minded dupes. There’s this cynical sophistication that characterizes “arguing down” to the the “liberal” perspective.

But the dumbass part of arguing against “liberalism” is the essence of arguing against liberal ideals, which happen to etymologically derive from the same root as “liberty.” Arguing against liberty is like begging to be put into shackles, and that’s exactly what is in store unless Republicans shape up. …and guess what? The United States is founded on liberal ideals, created by liberal scholars of the Enlightenment. The Constitution isn’t a “conservative” document – these words don’t even have meaning! The document is what it is; it means what the words that it’s composed of mean.

Here’s a newsflash: McCain isn’t the man, and Bush has done nothing but shit all over the Republican party. In fact, Bush is the complete undoing of the Republican party, and the best part is that W made Republicans bend over backwards for it. …rather, bend over forwards and take it with a smug smile for 8 long, bloody, stained years. Palin is a sick joke. And let’s not mince words here: it’s just a joke to put Palin in line for the presidency, but it would serve the current “Republicans” right to confront that potential reality.

Obama isn’t the answer, either, but by comparison, he comes out as a towering intellectual and political powerhouse. Obama is running circles around McCain, leading by a 10-point margin, and forcing the Republican hordes to demean themselves day after day, in a frenzied attempt to claw together a plurality before 30 days are up.

These days, the real Republicans tend to call themselves Libertarians… or, wait for it: Democrats. I don’t know where the current crop of “Republican” voters have come from, but you can bet the O’Reillys, Hannitys, and Coulters of the world attracted this train wreck by spouting an endless stream of hatred, literally at the top of their lungs. Limbaugh, Savage, and Liddy. These goons (and yes: Liddy is nothing more than a Watergate felon and a goon) have been put on a pedestal like they’re the new enlightenment.

Well guess what: the Democrats won’t save the United States, and neither will the “Republicans.” At the risk of oversimplifying, the Neocons have taken control, consolidated power, and established a new form of government that will take years to unravel, if that’s at all possibly by this point. Really, it’s time for Republicans to take some responsibility for the destiny of this country, instead of abdicating from the job due to the goading of some petty talking heads.

Wake up! You can’t blame this on some group of Americans called “Democrats.” YOU are to blame for the part you’ve played. Get real, and stop “Partying.” It’s Old, but it’s not Grand. It’s just a stinking corpse by this point. Zing!