Brad Bannon, a pollster, penned an Op-Ed for The Hill that's solid gold. The crux of the piece: if the GOP doesn't mind its history lessons, it could face some dire consequences.

An ethics scandal here and a botched presidential policy overhaul there. Does anyone else see any parallels to the time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Democrats reigned supreme in Congress but lost their majority in an electoral disaster in 1994?

Well fast forward to 2005 when the issues that bedeviled Democrats in the past are coming back to bite Republicans. The great philosopher George Santanya once wrote, 'Those who forget history are condemned to relive it." Republicans should either start remembering their history lessons or prepare themselves to live through hellish losses in the midterm congressional elections in 2006.

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All of this suggests that if gasoline prices go much higher, Bush will start giving televised White House speeches wearing cardigan sweaters like Jimmy Carter did back in the 1970s.

The Carter-cardigan reference is right on the money.

More seriously, the Republicans indeed look like the Democrats in the early 1990s: they're corrupt, they're overstepping their bounds, and most importantly, they act like they have a divine mandate that will never run out. As the Democrats found out in 1994, though, no mandate is forever, and once a party begins to forsake the will of the American people, defeat isn't far away.