Sunday's Saddest Statement

Republican columnist and old White man Robert Novak on "Meet the Press" yesterday:

"Republicans are very pessimistic about 2008. When you talk to them off the record, they don't see how they can win this thing. And then they think for a minute, and only the Democratic Party, with everything in their favor, would say that, 'OK, this is the year either to have a woman or an African-American to break precedent, to do things the country has never done before.' And it gives the Republicans hope."

So, Republicans (other than Elizabeth Dole, presumably) take hope when a woman and a half-Black man run for President in the Democratic Party and take the early lead. I guess that's the same hope Republicans took when Susan B. Anthony marched to give women the right to vote. When Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus. When Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and said that he had a dream. When, time and time again, bold people asked Americans to open their minds and "to do things the country has never done before."

The party of Lincoln, slipping backwards into the past. How very sad.