Quote - There's a simple operative principle in such cases:  Follow The Money.

Quote - No need to dig for deep, dark motives held by a hidden right-wing cabal.

Xeno, sometimes you are right. As Greider points out, there has been nothing hidden about it. As I said, simply look at their history and their policies. Even Lee Atwater, former RNC chairman and Karl Rove mentor, apologized on his death-bed for some of what he had hoisted upon modern American politics, and confessed that Reagan and the right-wing movement was about not much more but grabbing all you could get while the getting was good:

"My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul."

That many Democrats have gradually fallen ill over the last couple of decades due to the same disease doesn't score you very many points in my playbook.