Right. Do the Republicans have a future? Can they ever come back?

Of course they can. In 1980, after two election cycles, Republicans took control of the Senate -- having held just 40 seats four years before. In the 1994 congressional elections, the Democrats lost big time, prompting political cognoscenti in the academy and the press to predict the end of the donkey party.

These days the donkeys swamp the elephants. And the legislative and executive branches are so lopsidedly leftist there may be no way to stop the Democrats from taking the nation over the banana-republic cliff.

Right now, for instance, the Obama administration is contemplating criminalizing past actions of the Bush administration on such things as waterboarding three al-Qaidists to get them to disclose imminent attacks against America. That's our version of the firing squads one tin-pot junta employs when it throws out the preceding one.

Sounds like on the Specter thing you're going macro, postal, ballistic.

Hardly.

In the early part of Obama's political career in Chicago, he prevailed electorally several times when his opponents -- or his strongest opponents -- were removed from the ballot for various reasons: luck, last-minute revelations, and the likely diligence of his operatives -- some of whom remain in his retinue.

Now, evidently having tasked Joe Biden for the job, this most liberal administration ever has turned perhaps the Republicans' most liberal senator -- putting the Democrats on the cusp of unstoppability regarding whatever they want to do. And in the November 2010 elections, Democratic margins may increase.

So, no checks?

No checks on the enslavement of the citizenry to the government -- whatever the cause, whoever's to blame. Not good. And not healthy -- particularly not healthy for this beloved country once called, before the phrase was discarded as archaic, "the land of the free."