Tossing a Snowe Ball

Jane Hamsher in FDL

Olympia Snowe in the New York Times:

Regrettably, we failed to learn the lessons of Jim Jeffords’s defection in 2001. To the contrary, we overreached in interpreting the results of the presidential election of 2004 as a mandate for the party. This resulted in the disastrous elections of 2006 and 2008, which combined for a total loss of 51 Republicans in the House and 13 in the Senate — with a corresponding shift of the Congressional majority and the White House to the Democrats.

Shorter Olympia Snowe: the Republican Party has now boiled down to a hard crust of extremist freaks, and now that they've run Lincoln Chaffee and Arlen Specter out of the party, they'll be coming after me.