Is it time yet to start hoping? Let's ask the ever-optimistic Mark Morford:

"Look closer: It's been over four years now that the GOP has had it all locked down tight, the stranglehold to end all strangleholds, owned Congress and stacked the courts and shut down the media and demonized all voices of dissent and ran the president the way a pimp runs a prostitution ring. No light escaped. They had masterminded one of the most brutal and mean-spirited and thoroughly effective subjugations of the American idea in 100 years, and it looked as though their power and reach knew no limits. It was astounding: No matter what atrocity or torture or war or violent abuse of nature, they would simply gloat and the media would cower and the people would merely look on, beaten and glazed and tired, and accept it as dark manna. But now something has shifted. The iron grip is slipping, sooner and more quickly than any of the right's political architects predicted, surely sooner than Rove had strategized, far sooner than the 20-year master plan the GOP had in place. What happened? Simple: The horrible policies, the lies and the lies on top of the lies (if "we do not torture" doesn't beat "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" as the impeachable BS of the century, we are lost) became just too much. The center could not hold. The atrocities are now paying their moral dividends. The GOP is now reaping what it has sown. Which is another way of saying: The system works. After all, you cannot keep pumping junk food into the body and expect it to stay upright and functional. You cannot force so many toxins into the planet and not expect it to break out in rashes and pimples and heat waves and violent storms. Eventually, the body recoils. The spirit shudders and throws off. The disease runs its course and, barring any permanent scars and mental derangement, the fever breaks. Look, I shall not argue that this hope, this light is coming from millions of people finally waking up to the progressive truth. I shall not be so foolish as to suggest that a grand anti-war pro-sex pro-intelligence happily spiritual but deeply nonreligious enlightenment is taking place. I am not so naive, and as I said, there are three treacherous years left. The reality is less pretty than that. But there is a hint of a whisper of a possibility of a deeper change, of the pendulum swinging back, finally, to humanity and love and something resembling progress, which is more than we've had in five years, and certainly more than many of us expected, given the alleged strength of the GOP choke hold. So thank you, George, for bringing such delicious sips of renewed hope. Thank you for reminding us all, through such a litany of painful and nauseating policies and lies, that the universe still repays such abuse with well-deserved slaps upside your aw-shucks head. You give us hope. Because as you and your administration careen and implode and sputter and stutter and fail, well, the world is only the better for it."