|
The best historical comparison I can think of for yesterday and everything leading up to it is simple: Stalingrad.
Up until that battle, it looked like the Wermacht was effectively unbeatable. The Third Reich had never lost against any nation her army was employed fully against. When Hitler ordered the execution of Operation Blue, it appeared that the war was lost, no one thought that Stalin's troops could hold Stalingrad, and with its fall the Caucus oil fields were open for Nazi conquest, denying the Soviets much needed supplies and supply lines as well as threatening the Allied-controlled Middle East.
Von Paulus' 6th Army smashed into the city, with the aura of glory and victory all around them, intent on total domination of the city. But soon they bogged down. For six months they slogged it out, fighting house to house, block by block, to sieze a city turned into a ruin. After six months the city was theirs, but at the cost of encirclement, isolation, and soon surrender to Marshal Zhukov's forces.
Like the Soviets, at the beginning of this year, all seemed lost. The Republicans ruled Congress with an iron fist. Bush was crowned king by the media. The Democratic Party was declared by her own voices in the punditry dead. Yet the fight had only just begun.
In moving to implement their agenda, they began to see that their true victory was unattainable. First there was the total flub of Social Security, then the impasse and fizzle that was the nuclear option, Terry Schiavo, the Downing Street Minutes, Cindy Sheehan, Tom DeLay, Hurricane Katrina, Bill Frist, the total incompetence of the Bush government coming to light, the Libby indictment, Mier's withdrawl from consideration for the SC, and to cap it off Reid's invocation of Rule 21. Now the unstoppable GOP machine has been bested on the field that they were supposed to dominate in less than one year. In one day after five long years of continuous defeats, the tide has finally turned.
When the histories are written of these times, they will say that January 2005 was the Right Wing's high watermark, and that, thanks to their own failures and the efforts of those opposing them, it was also the furthest they would ever get, and they only could go downhill from there.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
