Actually Clinton appears to have been an improvement on every one of these issues, so your demonisation of the Democrats is unfair. You may argue Dean would be different but indications are he would be more conservative not less. You might not like this next statement but Dean/Clark would be more true to traditional Republicanism than Bush/Cheney and that's a sad reflection on the Republican Party. People are becoming democrats to get around the current leadership to apply Republican values. Some people are even talking Dean/McCain.

Exactly my point though. All the issues you raise are seconded by the Reform Party (I don't have a good name to call them, the ones that basically left the party and includes some like thinking ones still there) and the libertarians.

All these points you raise are not official Republican policy, never have been really. You have the two extremes of the party that have split away and align themselves (with you) against what the Republican Party has become. You might even throw Gingrich in there with the reformers. So you roughly have the theorists (libertarians and Gingrich) and the pragmatists (McCain, Buchanan even Poppy bush) who usually thrashed out a compromise policy between themselves that stood for Repbulican Policy.

Now instead you have policies that are no longer between these two extremes. That's why I don't call them Republicans any more. At least with the extremes you see a well thought out ideology and you know usually the result will be somewhere in between. I can respect that because it comes from reasoning.

In the same way I can respect Democratic idealism tempered by realism, there's a balance there too.

The libertarians have lost their anchor in the party and thus a lot of their need to be realistic. The reformers have split away and lost their idealism and descended (like with Buchanan) into too much politicial incorrectness to form another party. If they got together with the libertarians they might pull it off though. I could easily imagine a British like Social Democrats rising up.

Nonetheless the problems of the Republicans aren't helped by demonising the left. They are in government and they have to explain why they no longer follow conservative policy. Guns, god, and gays is not enough to have an ideology.