Steve Benen reports in the Washington Monthly that the social conservative wing of the Republican party is initiating "Operation Leper" to identify and cast out those so-called Republicans whose loyalty to Governor Sarah Palin in the recent presidential election was not absolute.
Benen reports that Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, has predicted that, after the election, there would be a "bloodbath." Nuzzo explained, "A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"
Brooks, Frum, and Noonan are all bright people, but to put it bluntly, they are not Einsteins. We attend to people like this not because they have earth shattering insight, but because they sit astride a mountain of power. The Republican party is that mountain.
The question is: where do these influencers and their sponsors go if they are lepers, or "dead people" in the Republican party?
