Why Can't We Say It? Republicans are the Problem

Here's a good piece from the Wapo.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

I've been pushing this idea for a while, and I remind my readers of two things I've been saying:

1. The Republican party has clearly moved far to the Right on many many issues over the past 15 years, from Climate Change to Taxes to Immigration to Abortion/contraception, etc.  The Democratic party, by contrast, has not moved further Left on any issue except gay rights, and even there it's been very slow.  I've challenged conservative correspondents and the many thousands of readers of this blog to disprove this point, and nobody has even tried.
2. The article I linked to above talks about the filibuster use and how the media should be reminding the public what a huge change in governing this has brought about thanks to unprecedented Republican use of it.  Here I repeat my prediction that if the GOP gains the presidency and the Sentate, and the Democrats start to use the filibuster in the same way the Republicans have for the past three years, the Republicans are just going to end the filibuster entirely and change the rules.  This will be met with much gnashing of teeth by pundits, but it's what Democrats should have done in 2009.  If Democrats somehow hold on to the Senate and presidency, the filibuster needs to be ended, but unfortunately liberals are too lily-livered to do it.