Remember all those sweet post-election promises of bipartisanship?

Barack Obama has certainly led the way. He could have filled his Cabinet with "aggressive progressives," but instead chose moderates like Treasury Secretary Tom Geithner and kept Republican Robert Gates in the most powerful job of all, Secretary of Defense.

Obama could also have demanded passage of a "share the wealth" stimulus bill, but instead reached out to Republicans with business-friendly tax cuts.

So Obama has done his share. What about the Republicans?

A good place for Republicans to start would be by telling Norm Coleman to drop his futile lawsuits and by agreeing to seat Al Franken immediately if he doesn't.

Isn't bipartisanship a two-way street?

Susie Madrak offers A Modest Proposal courtesy of a comment on the Pentagon Post:

Newt Gingrich has a radical idea:

We need to be honest about the level of failure for the past eight years and why Republican government didn’t succeed. Otherwise, we’ll get back in power again and do the same things again.

Duh.

If Republicans want to be honest about the past eight years, they need to admit:

In 1984, the Democratic VP was a charismatic young woman who made history, turned out huge audiences, and fired up the party base. Unfortunately she had some controversies during the campaign which ended up costing her party a point or two.

When her party lost, did the Corporate Media annoint Geraldine Ferraro as the savior of her party, worthy of endless TV coverage? Absolutely not. She was immediately made into a non-person. She lost a subsequent campaign for U.S. Senate and faded into obscurity as an occasional guest on FOX News.

So why is Sarah Palin being treated as a conquering heroine?

Obviously she has nothing intelligent to say about the nation's problems, which are overwhelming. If she did, she would have said them on the campaign trail.

She doesn't even look great because she had to give back her fabulous Neiman-Marcus clothes.

One day after the election, Speaker Pelosi offered an olive branch to the tiny Republican minority:

"A country must be governed from the middle," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday. "You have to bring people together to reach consensus on solutions that are sustainable and acceptable to the American people."

So how did House Minority Leader John Boehner reply? With his middle finger:

Harris & VandeHei did a good job of describing the massive shift in power from conservatives to Obama, which is nothing short of a revolution.

The rout of the Republican Party, and the accompanying gains by Democrats in Congress, mean that Barack Obama will assume office with vastly more influence in the nation’s capital than most of his recent predecessors have wielded.

The only exceptions suggest the magnitude of the moment. Power flowed in unprecedented ways to George W. Bush in the year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It flowed likewise to Lyndon B. Johnson after his landslide in 1964.

This county map shows how the GOP is shrinking compared to 2004. The only growth areas are eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma. (The red dots on the Gulf probably reflect poor Democrats driven out by hurricanes, rather than actual Republican gains.) The heart of the Confederacy - Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, along with most of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi - is actually turning blue.

One of Ben Smith's readers found a map that roughly overlaps the red-leaning counties.

The reader comments:

Last night, Laura Ingraham told FOX:

If McCain loses, if Republicans lose seats across the board, this is a rejection of Republicans who don't follow traditional conservative principles. It's not a rejection of conservatism, or Reagan, or small government.

... I think Republicans are going to have to do some soul-searching, but not on conservative principles -- on how they governed.

Dave Neiwert replies:

how they governed was precisely according to conservative principles!

The Big Shitpile is a direct product of conservative principles enacted in governance -- namely, the Panglossian belief that deregulation of business, and the financial sector, was an unrelievedly good thing.

Republicans are finally acknowledging they will lose big on November 4. But what will they do next?

Republicans always play the "blame game" first. The most obvious blame falls on Sarah Palin, since every poll (and every newspaper endorsement) shows swing voters were completely turned off by her. But Palin didn't choose herself - McCain chose her. So once the polls close, Republicans will unanimously proclaim McCain a uniquely miserable candidate, ranking with Mike Dukakis in political tone-deafness.

But Republicans know their problems run far deeper than McCain. They know George Bush's economic and foreign policies were a a disaster in every single way. And it's not because Bush betrayed conservatism, it's because he embraced it 1000%.

So what will be the foundation of the Republican revival? It's impossible to imagine.

The Pentagon Post gave Bush's former speechwriter David Frum prime op-ed real estate to warn against the possibility of Democratic crony capitalism:

"The government now owns a big stake in the nation's banking system. Trillions of dollars are now under direct government control. It's not wise to put that money under one-party control. It's just too tempting. You need a second set of eyes on that cash. You need oversight and accountability. Otherwise, you're going to wake up two years from now and find out that a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House have been funneling a ton of that money to their friends and allies. It'll be a big scandal -- but it will be too late. The money will be gone.”