Bear with me on this one, folks. I realize the title borders on apostasy.

Via Katherine over at Obsidian Wings (to whom I seem to be linking a lot these days) comes a really fantastic post over at Pandagon. I concur with Katherine--read it all.

The thrust of Ezra Klein's post is essentially that the Republicans have set themselves up for failure in a big way by pretending to be progressives. They're attempting to have it both ways: they portray themselves as conservatives to their traditional base, while buying swing votes with programs like Medicare and NCLB that appear to appeal to progressive or even liberal values.

Ezra's money quote comes in these last two paragraphs here:

So you know Bush isn’t a very good liberal and you know he isn’t a very good Republican. In fact, he’s a bad Republican pretending to be a liberal for the cameras. So what does that mean? Well, since he has the full support of his party on all his initiatives it means that the Republicans have ceded the ground on virtually every important issue that the US Government deals with. Let that sink in for a moment. Republicans are getting elected by promising to protect the environment, strengthen entitlement programs, conduct humanitarian interventions, back Democratic security initiatives, and support public schools. They are getting elected by pretending to be Democrats, albeit Democrats who wear cowboy boots. They have nothing left.

Sure, they can drag their feet and do bad jobs of making liberal bills, but they have lost all the arguments. Once a Democrat gets into the Presidency the public is not only used to, but thinks there’s a bipartisan consensus on, environmental protection, entitlement programs, and pretty much everything else liberals want to do. That clears the way for an exceedingly powerful and unexpectedly sweeping progressive agenda once a Democrat gets into office. And Republican intransigence on these issues could very well lead to an electoral route, as the public punishes Congressional Republicans for blocking the nationally agreed upon agenda. The election strategy the Republicans are using is leaving them a hollowed out shell, supporting the other side’s agenda and losing on all the guns they stick to (the public doesn’t support tax cuts that bust the budget, drilling in Alaska, or unilateralism abroad; remember, tolerance is different than support). So mourn our forests, stamp your foot at pollution, but don’t fret too much – the Republicans are sitting atop a house of cards and the wind is beginning to blow.