Probably not:

In the normal course of politics, after a party has its clock cleaned as badly as Republicans did in 2008, the losers go off to recover — off to the desert — while the winners go on to govern. For the defeated, regaining the political momentum can take years.

Normally, we should be in the early stages of that process. Instead, it appears that Republicans are about to retake one, and perhaps both, houses of Congress. The normal cycle of defeat and renewal has been speeded up considerably.

Why? Because Democrats have been screwing up faster than Republicans can recover. The GOP might not be fully ready to govern, but voters are increasingly convinced that Democrats don’t deserve to. The Democrats’ willful defiance of the public’s wishes on Obamacare, on federal spending, and on other government-expanding initiatives has changed voters’ priorities. In the urgency of the moment, throwing Democrats out is more important than determining whether Republicans are fully ready to take control.

Yup. At least we can hope that they’ll stop digging. It would be disastrous to allow the current reign of Democrat insanity to continue.

[Update a while later]

The tea started brewing under Bush:

If the Democrats had properly understood the Tea Party movement, and if they had seen the water coming to a low boil during the Bush administration, they might have avoided their present fate. There are two steps to their misunderstanding of the Tea Party. First, the Bush administration was wrongly viewed as thoroughly and quintessentially conservative. Second, the public’s eventual rejection of the Bush administration was viewed as a repudiation of conservatism and a fundamental political realignment of the electorate (perhaps even the basis of a permanent Democratic majority in “America the liberal”). The important point is this: many who now comprise the Tea Party were not Bush die-hards, but disapproved or largely disapproved of the Bush administration’s big-government tendencies. Of course small-government conservatives and independents, when Obama took those tendencies and magnified them threefold, went from frustration to outrage.

To take the first point, President Bush was alternately viewed as a scheming arch-conservative or else a congenial dunce manipulated by scheming arch-conservatives. In his famed “Case for Bush Hatred” in 2003, Jonathan Chait (in spite of the fact that Bush had increased government spending in his first three years at a rate unseen since Lyndon B. Johnson) wrote that “Bush would like to roll back the federal government’s spending to something resembling its pre-New Deal state.” James Traub concurred in the New York Times magazine, writing that “today’s Republican party is arguably the most extreme — the furthest from the center — of any governing majority in the nation’s history.” Examples could be added, but anyone who remembers the Bush administration will surely recall that he was painted as conservatism’s avatar.

The point is not exactly that President Bush was not a conservative, but that his administration precipitated a crisis of conservative identity within the Republican coalition. While Bush could identify with conservatives culturally from Kennebunk to Crawford, and while his judicial appointments and stances on ethical issues gave conservatives reason to support him, he took an activist view of government in the foreign sphere, leveraging the American military to transform the world order in pursuit of democracy, and in the domestic sphere, leveraging the American government to transform the social order in pursuit of conservative virtues.

When Governor Bush articulated his vision for “compassionate conservatism” at a speech to the Manhattan Institute in 1999, he rejected the typical Republican “disdain for government,” and sided with Benjamin Franklin, arguing that “the general opinion of the goodness of government” is foundational to America. The government must concern itself with the “human problems that persist in the shadow of affluence,” and conservative ideals should be utilized in the interest of “greater justice, less suffering, more opportunity.” Bush even criticized the Republican-controlled Congress for “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.”

It’s ironic that the Democrats were done in by their Bush derangement.

Mississippi Democrat Gene Taylor says that he voted for the other guy:

Reporter Maria Recio told The Hill that when Taylor was asked if he voted for the Democratic nominee in 2008, he said, “I did not vote for Obama. I voted for Sen. McCain. Better the devil you know.”

Like other conservative Democrats, the 11-term congressman has spoken out against party leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) during his reelection campaign and has argued the leadership has been too liberal.

And of course, he was saying that in 2008, and campaigning for McCain, right?

Oh, wait…

You believe him, don’t you? Me, neither. “D” stands for “Desperation.”

Scalia takes Kagan to a shooting range.

…and they’re drunk on power:

They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.

…This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order.

Let’s hope so. Get them sobered up and ship them off to Fascists Anonymous for a twelve-step program.

Frank J. explains why the Dems are going to lose at least one house of Congress:

…the Democrats will counter that the Republicans also suck. And while this is true, it’s not really going to help them. As I pointed out before, both a dog incessantly barking and a zombie apocalypse are things that everyone would agree suck. Yet no one during a zombie apocalypse, while hiding out in a boarded up mall, would turn to the other survivors and say, “We don’t want to kill all the zombies; then we’d have to go back to being woken up at night by that annoying dog next door.” But this is the best argument the Democrats can come up with. “Remember how awful the Republicans and Bush were? You hated them. You don’t want to go back to that.” Yes, why would people want to go back to when 6% unemployment was considered high?

People do remember how much the Republicans suck, and they know where it tops out … and that is nowhere near as bad as the Democrats are today. Like with the barking dog, it’s annoying, but you know it’s not going to cause the collapse of civilization as we know it. Not so with the zombie apocalypse; who knows how bad that could get if left to continue? Same with the Democrats and Obama; people have never dealt with anything this horrible their entire lives, and they aren’t that curious to see how much worse it can be.

They really have nothing on which to campaign at this point.