<T. B. - "Republicans are a lot less likely to line up behind their guy without question than Democrats are,"

That's a well-known scientific fact. Beyond question. All the data support that. Only Democrats vote a party line. Freshman Poly Sci stuff.



Okay, okay, maybe I don't have the hard statistics, but one only needs to watch the dynamics of debate inside the two parties in Washington to draw this conclusion. Hard line conservatives, moderate conservatives, and liberal conservatives are constantly jumping all over each other in the House, if not so much in the Senate. When one of the Democratic leaders or the DNC says something, though, pretty soon almost every Democratic representative or talking head in Washington is repeating it, complete with exact phrasings and word usage. Remember "gravitas?"

A microcosm of this spectrum of Republican behavior is showing up on the Limbaugh show, where conservative callers have been lambasting him from both directions, some of them yelling at him for daring to criticize Bush in our current crisis situation, others yelling at him for supporting Bush, who in their opinion is obviously just a Democrat in disguise.

I think it goes without saying that I don't let Rush Limbaugh tell me how it is in a lot of political matters, much less in science (cripes, the man is still skeptical about evolution!) I like listening to him because he gets a lot of conservative viewpoints out there that would never see the light of day if I had to wait to read it in the New York Times.

In any case, the point I was trying to make is that there are a lot more conservatives criticizing Bush on his policies than, for example, there were liberals criticizing Clinton (as a known liberal critic of Clinton, Bowser is part of a small elite). There are, of course, some standouts in the Democratic Party in Washington. Zell Miller is one. But they are few and far between. Then again, I guess if one did not believe in the rule of the collective, one wouldn't be a Democratic politician in the first place. ;)