I find myself pretty much in agreement with you, Frank. That's the moderate place to be.

I also find myself wishing that this moderation...

The resignation of Nixon was arguably most necessary but unarguably harmful to our national persona.

...had been in evidence last decade when the Republicans went after Clinton and railroaded his impeachment. I'm not saying that to pick a partisan fight, only to observe that the dynamics of political feuding pretty much guarantees an attempt to impeach Bush after the next election. "gutted and lame duck" is right on the mark, and with things headed in what I think is a better direction, I find myself thinking more about exercizing restraint so as to not push things too far to an opposite extreme, and not feeding the feud. We need to dampen the oscillations, not amplify them.

The more often we use unconventional means to remove a leader, the closer we are to the day when one of them chooses to defy that removal.

Good insight. A related concern that I have is about possible institutional resistance from the highly-organized NeoRepublican machine if it chooses to protect Bush. In plainer terms, we might face something like a coup d'etat, no doubt bloodless and distinctly parliamentarian and scrupulously quasi-legal and with modern happy-face PR, but definitely something you don't like to see happen in a healthy democracy.

To me Bush is a symbol as the leader of the NeoRepublicans, but I don't forget that they have a firm grip on Congress and wield immense power in their own right.

This term "NeoRepublican" I've started to use comes from thinking about how a time of change like this might represent an opportunity for the moderate center to reassert itself. Maybe as the pendulum comes whizzing by we can deflect its course, lower its apogee, and start trying to dampen the oscillations. I see a genuine difference between these new Neos and the Classic Republicans I've known all my life, and I see signs that the Classics are losing patience with the Neos. The next generation of moderate Republicans, I suspect, will come from the traditionalists who start to oppose the radicals.

So I admit that I'm using terms like "Neo" to drive a wedge between the radicals and moderates. I figure that since reaching out is a positive thing, no reason I should try to hide my tactic. I'm not trying to trick you guys, I'm trying to appeal to your better natures.

"Join the center" would make a good bumper sticker, or maybe "the center willhold". We don't need yet another third party, but I think a reform movement that's independent of the parties could force them both to mend their ways. If we stand together at the center and tell the radicals to bugger off, the country'd end up a whole lot better off.

That's my opinion these days. I'm kind of making it up as I go as the situation evolves, but I declare that my basic intentions are to try to use this opportunity to make things genuinely better.