Book excerpt: Republican Gomorrah - Blumenthal's remarkable, muckraking debut - is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal, and crime from the heart of the movement that runs the Republican Party. Blumenthal describes with no-holds-barred detail the people and the beliefs that establishment Republicans - like John McCain - have to kowtow to if they have any hope of running for president, and how moderates have been systematically purged from party ranks. He shows why the unqualified Sarah Palin was the party's only logical choice and how her most fanatical supporters will be setting the strategy for the Republican assault on the Obama administration. Blumenthal warns that the Christian right will quietly exploit the widespread financial misery caused by the economic meltdown while mainstream media pundits churn out faddish and unfounded tales of the movement's death. More than just an expos, Republican Gomorrah reveals that many of the movement's leading figures are united by more than political campaigns; they are bound together by a shared sensibility rooted in private trauma. Their lives have been stained by crisis and scandal - depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, addiction to drugs and pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. For the most zealous foot soldiers of the right, the crusade to cleanse the land of sin was in fact a quest to purify their souls.