Following this excellent column at the Daily Beast, Bruce Bartlett, a veteran Republican whose credentials are established by his work for Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and Goerge HW Bush, emails Steve Benen to make a very useful point:
I think this is absolutely correct. The GOP needs a period in the wilderness to contemplate and learn from its mistakes, just as the Tories needed time out of office to renew their own ideas and rehabilitate their reputation.I believe that political parties should do penance for their mistakes and just losing power is not enough. Part of that involves understanding why those mistakes were made and how to prevent them from happening again. Republicans, however, have done no penance. They just pretend that they did nothing wrong. But until they do penance they don’t deserve any credibility and should be ignored until they do. That’s what my attacks on Bush are all about. I want Republicans to admit they were wrong about him, accept blame for his mistakes, and take some meaningful action to keep them from happening again.
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