The Republicans won the last election

Yes, the Republican Party--more specifically, its patrons--won the last election, despite the Democratic Party gaining a majority in the House and Senate, and being likely to win the presidency in 2008.

The bottom line: Bonnie and Clyde didn't need to take possession of the banks they robbed permanently. They just needed a few minutes of possession.

Similarly, the Republicans only needed control of all three branches of government for six years. In this time they were able to enact laws, appoint Suprem Court justices, and set policies in place that, taken collectively, serve to enrichen America's wealthiest 1% enormously--mainly extracted from America's hollowed-out middle class. And, given the relative youth and hard-right tilt of the Supreme Court majority and the unlikelihood of the Democrats getting 60 votes in the Senate, the GOP will be able to keep the economic playing field tipped strongly in favor of that 1% for decades. Supporting player in this charade: the electoral college system, which gives rural Republican voters more than one vote per man and gives urban Democratic voters less than one vote per man.

The issues dear to the hearts of the social conservatives who prop up Republican power mean nothing to most of that 1%. What matters to the 1% is money and the power to guarantee future revenue streams for themselves and their families. Abortion, homosexual marriage, patriotism, evolution, stem cell research, church and state...these things are meaningful to the ruling 1% in the same way that a matador's red cape matters to the matador: the cape distracts the bull while the matador readies the sword.

The GOP's patrons could have made the theft more subtle and perhaps stayed in power longer. But if you grant that money and power are all that matter, they made the right decision. So to speak.

Meanwhile those patrons have already succeeded in co-opting the Democratic Congress, as practically every new law enacted attests. And if the reformers do gain power within the Democrats, it will take them decades to undo what the GOP wrought in six short years--and by then the public will have forgotten why they voted the rascals out in the first place, and the endless war on government regulation, taxation of the rich and suchlike will give the patrons' puppets another term or two to pull off the next big heist.