The irony of the GOP-sponsored voter I.D. laws to address phony, non-existent "voter fraud" is that the GOP completely ignores the ballot box frauds of 2000 (Florida, which allowed G.W. Bush to take the White House--with a little help from the extreme right-wing judicial activists on the Supreme Court) and of 2004 (the state of Ohio which had some districts reporting voter results for Bush five times that actual registered voters)--all occurring under Republican state attorneys-general.

In the final analysis, we must simply acknowledge the sad truth of the GOP: it is not just the diminishing of white Protestant voters that is reducing the GOP to permanent minority-party status. It is the utter lack of reasonable, sane, sensible public officials as candidates for public office in the GOP. What the GOP now offers are rabid, irrational ideologues serving gerrymandered voting districts who have no sane, sensible, rational policy proposals to address the serious problems that face our nation--much of those problems having been caused by the GOP in the first place.

What is the solution for the GOP? There is none, really. It is the last bastion of a dying, evangelical, Protestant, religious extremism that has interfered in American politics like wing-nut gadflys since the New Deal but only gaining influence and a guarded "respectability" with the rise of Ronald Reagan and his insincere pandering to what is now regarded as the GOP's "base".

It is irrelevant that this "base" now controls The House. Its control is temporary.

Such ideology as currently expounded by the Republican Party adherents cannot be sustained if the GOP wishes to be a majority party that wins elections based on the quality of its candidates' characters and/or the policy proposals that would address all Americans' concerns for our country and its future.

Short of a coup d'etat or a second civil war--which the current GOP's leadership and rank-and-file have insidiously courted as "alternatives" to the election of Democratic Party candidates to the White House and Congress--the GOP will slowly whither away.

What must be guarded against is that in the GOP's death throws that it does not do more harm than it has already done to our democratic-republican form of government or our national institutions.