After Plamegate culminates, who would the GOP want as prez?

[jmowreader]

There are four Republican Parties in the United States. You knew that, right?

One Republican Party is full of religiously insane people with a death wish. These people just can't wait to get into heaven. They also hate women's rights, abortion, people not being required to go to church...

One Republican Party is full of people who hate paying taxes so much, they'd vote for Benito Mussolini if he ran on a tax-cut platform.

These two groups got together and elected Bush, and look what happened: local and state tax rates were adjusted to compensate for reduced federal spending with result that their total tax bill is now higher than it was under Clinton, women don't have to wear the special Subservient Republican Woman costume (chador below the neckline, Jan Crouch above it), abortion is STILL legal, churches are STILL not allowed to march people in at gunpoint...oh, and two thousand of our troops have died in Iraq so far, but that's okay, they all went to heaven.

The third Republican Party is full of "three for me, one-half for you" businessmen like the Waltons. Sam Walton's evil spawn knows that if an American worker costs $12 per hour and a Chinese worker costs $2, they will make more money by telling their suppliers, "close your factories and move production to Vietnam." This party is actually a subset of the no-tax GOP, but I define them as a separate party because most of the no-tax GOP doesn't run corporations and all of the three-for-me GOP does.

The fourth Republican Party feels like it's been left out of the party. This is the classical GOP. They believe in smooth, steady growth. They believe in reasonable taxation and some are still shocked by JFK's brash tax cut, where he chopped the top rate twenty percent in one fell swoop WITHOUT cutting any spending! (This is the cut the Norquist-led tax hatred brigade uses to claim the Democratic Party has flip-flopped on tax cutting. What Norquist leaves out is that the top marginal rate in 1960 was 90 percent--set that high during World War II and not lowered after the war ended--and JFK lowered it to 70 percent. And you know something else? The absolute best, most innovative time there ever was to be an American businessman was between 1946 and 1965.)

Now that the first three Republican Parties have shot themselves in the feet, it's time for the fourth party to make a resurgence. They'll be looking for a strong, steady leader. They'll be looking for a strong, pro-sustainable-growth cabinet. And they'll be looking for economic policies that discourage imports and globalization.

Your assignment for today: If you were a fourth-party heavy and the other fourth-party members elevated you to their leader, who would you want to be president?