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This NYT Robin Toner analysis of the GOP's troubles brings out something I've been running up against recently. The lack of oversight provided by the Republican-led Congress to protect their party allies in the White House, the Pentagon, etc. is the worst enemy of not only the country's national interests, but of their party. It allows the sheer excessiveness of the excesses, the corruption, the improper, the incompetence, the cronyism, the abuse, to go unchecked until it blows up into full-scale catastrophe. All Katrinas and Abu Ghraibs. As Rutgers political science professor Ross Baker tells Toner, "What you're stuck with is oversight as a product of scandal, a product of catastrophe...It requires a blunder of major proportions, a calamity that is poorly addressed, before you get oversight." As in the case of DeLay and quite possibly Frist and certainly Abramoff and possibly Rove, these are cases that are headed to the courts, with juries of ordinary citizens, who are much less likely to be swayed by Karl Rovean Swift Boat Vet type tactics. The dereliction of duty of this Congress, the lack of effective oversight provided by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence committees, the Senate Armed Services committee, obviously the House Ethics committee, the Homeland Security committee, etc. will come to be a strategic mistake for the GOP. They tried to protect their own, and they ended up letting disaster after disaster blow up in spectacular pyrotechnics that exposed the underlying corrosion, debasement and corruption of the conservative movement and the GOP, described so well by Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard.