I don't mean to slime the slime molds by comparing them to the GOP. It's nothing personal, you see. It's just a mathematical thing. There are actually two different types of slime molds, plasmodial slime molds and celluclar ones. It's the cellular ones I'm referring to here. The live most of their lives as individual unicellular organisms, but they assemble themselves into a cluster that acts as a single organism, in response to a chemical secretion.
It's that transition--from one form to another, much like the phase transitions from solid to liquid or liquid to gas--that's what slime molds have in common with the GOP. Only instead of the chemical secretion bringing them all together into one super-organism, it's the other way around: they're secreting chemicals like there's no tomorrow, and flying off in all directions at once. It's almost as if they were a slime mold living backwards through time.
As the Democratic Party is not only growing in size, and growing more coherent in its policy, but also attracting increasing support from independents and Republicans, the exact opposite is happening to the GOP. It's not just a matter of religious conservatives vs. "free market" types, much less conservatives vs. moderates (both of them!) It's much worse than that. Like a disintegrating slime mold, they are falling apart into separate lumps--the Sarah Palin lump, the (rather tiny) not-Joe-the-not-Plumber lump, the always-reincarnating Newt Gingrich lump, the (possibly now extinct) Bobby Jindal lump, the (utterly hilarious) Michael Steele lump, and of course, the Rush Limbaugh ubber-lump.
STATE BLOGS
I don't mean to slime the slime molds by comparing them to the GOP. It's nothing personal, you see. It's just a mathematical thing. There are actually two different types of slime molds, plasmodial slime molds and celluclar ones. It's the cellular ones I'm referring to here. The live most of their lives as individual unicellular organisms, but they assemble themselves into a cluster that acts as a single organism, in response to a chemical secretion.
