The real enemies - as the Radical Republicans see it

Sidney Blumenthal does a weekly column for the British Guardian, which is also carried online by Salon.

This week's installment is Ludendorff, not Lincoln: Bush's White House is dismissive of history, yet increasingly desperate to rewrite it 11/17/05. Salon version: Bush's betrayal of history: Defiant of rising political blowback on Iraq, Bush blasts his truth-telling critics as traitors to the cause 11/17/05.

It has some pungent comments about the current administration.

But the most notable thing in it for me was this unusually frank comment from Newt Gingrich, showing who the hard-right Republicans think their real enemies in the "global war on terror" are:

The former Republican speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, always notable for his visions, has compared George Bush in his travails to Abraham Lincoln before Gettysburg. Gingrich, who has recently written a series of counterfactual novels depicting a southern triumph in the civil war, communicated his latest flight of fancy to a longtime former diplomat. "We are at war," insisted Gingrich. "With whom?" he was asked. "The Democrats," he apparently replied without hesitation. For Gingrich, ever the Republican guru, history is a plaything of the partisan present.

It's not as though we didn't already know that. But it's still refreshing to see one of them actually admit it so openly.

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