If the apparent primary victory of Alaska's morbidly anti-government, Palin-backed Joe Miller will help push the backer herself into the presidential primaries of 2012, then call me a Miller Man.
We have all wondered what spectacularly bedlamite act of political ruin would finally rein the GOP back into this cosmos, and let there be no doubt that "Palin for President" -- my God, I get giddy just typing those words -- is it.
I long for it, ache for it, find myself neurotically wishing to fast-forward through the potential crisis of this fall and all the dreadful government deadlock of 2011 so that we can finally have some fun: watching that ursine fabrication of such bloated ego and vacuous mind skyrocket through Iowa and South Carolina -- and with luck (ours, not theirs), Republican primary voters ushering her all the way to the nomination.
I once held insurmountable doubts about this gleeful specter of a Palin nomination, but hardcore GOPers' avid determination to hit absolute rock bottom has since surmounted them. There is, after all, hope, and no longer just the long-shot kind. This week, Palin-backed Joe Miller's success adds to that hope and I hope there's still more to come.
For sure, a Palin candidacy would represent loads of unwholesome fun for the entire nation -- a neon-blinking confirmation of GOP primary politics, in all its insularity, going wretchedly nuts. And a Palin nomination? Ah, there's the ticket -- back to sanity, in time, that is.
As mentioned, absolute rock bottom: that's the political geography in which the GOP would find itself in the wake of a Palin calamity, from which it would then have to pull itself up, and out.
There'd be so little of the party remaining -- what group, other than angry, aging, wolf-hunting fundamentalist white guys would she leave unalienated? -- it would then be far easier for sober GOP strategists to redefine, reconstitute and reassemble the party, perhaps on the honorable grounds of a Burkean conservatism.
This is serious stuff, not just another opportunity to take easy potshots at Palin. We're all -- nearly all, anyway -- experts at that already. This is, rather, about rescuing the two-party system and what should be the intelligent differences it offers.