You so crazy

So much has been made by the salivating talking heads over the disaster awaiting the Democrats in the event of a brokered Democratic convention this August as to downplay the out-and-out cannibal mutiny underway in the Republican Party.

After eight years spent defending the negligent jerks currently holding the executive branch hostage, the strategy the right is deploying against Sen. John McCain is baffling on its face -- to say nothing else, he is the Republicans' only prayer to hold on to the White House in November. But the idea that in doing so conservatives are standing on consistent principle is retarded. There's just no other word for it.

They have spent the last seven years telling their audience and the country that the only issues that mattered were the Iraq war and staying "on offense" on terrorism, all others be damned. Limbaugh and Hannity and Levin and all the rest have told us with straight faces that a Republican president is the only thing protecting us from certain doom and that the Democrats would establish a tax credit to reimburse al-Qaeda for their dynamite expenses.

That's why they stuck with Bush when he signed the $400 billion $1 trillion Medicare prescription drug bill. That's why they hung with him when he let Ted Kennedy write No Child Left Behind. He signed McCain/Feingold and was a proponent of last year's failed immigration reform bill, both bits of legislation currently being used to flog McCain's wrinkly bottom. Bush had to be re-elected. The stakes were just too high, they said.

Now, in a year when all signs point to a Democratic takeover of the White House and gains in both houses of Congress, as the war in which the United States is mired has made the sitting president slightly less popular than crotch fungus, McCain, who hit all the right notes on the issue that conservatives claimed was their top priority yet somehow retained the approval of many anti-war Democrats and independents, is being lambasted as an apostate.

If the rhetoric of the last few weeks proves anything about today's Republican Party it is that they are not the party of national security or robust foreign policy or the family. They are the party of upward redistribution of wealth. Never mind that McCain has done everything but get "The Surge Is Working" tattooed on his forehead. He voted against the Almighty Tax Cuts™.

In recent days Limbaugh has fielded several calls sympathetic to the idea of sitting out the 2008 election, or even casting their ballot for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, presumably assenting to unleash the twin furies of Muslim extremism and socialized medicine upon the United States in order to teach the electorate a needed lesson. The comic phrase "You need to suffer through a Carter to get a Reagan" comes up rather often.

It's not as though McCain is a country-club Rockefeller Republican. He's more or less a federalist in the Goldwater mold -- he supports bans on abortion and gay marriage on the state level but has voted against amendments to the U.S. Constitution to those ends.

But the conservative club in the Party doesn't feel like they own him, which is surprising, considering his recent reversal on the Bush tax cuts, and his mending of fences with the Reverends Robertson and Falwell.

On the other hand, Mitt Romney, who was affirmatively pro-choice just five years ago and presided as governor over the first and only state in the Union to amend its Constitution to allow gay marriage, signaled early on his status as bidding-doing property of the Limbaugh/Club For Growth/Focus on the Family axis, and was embraced into the fold.

McCain gets no such truck with conservatives for his record or his outreach efforts, because as President, he would probably make up his own mind on most matters and not defer to the power brokers on the right.

So despite having kissed butt and making an impassioned convention speech in 2004 after Bush took a Texas-size shit all over him in the 2000 primary, despite having been a Vietnamese pincushion for five years to defend his nation, which he obviously loves, all this doesn't even elevate him slightly above Bush in the eyes of movement conservatives.

The upshot is that the Democrats can have as nasty a primary as is necessary to produce a nominee, because the opposition has completely lost its way.