P.M. Carpenter

For Huntsman, a new low

This is pathetic. Just pathetic. More evidence that no low is too unthinkably low when it comes to "getting right" with 2012's increasingly isolated pseudoconservatives.

According to RealClearPolitics' Erin McPike, "the two living Republicans" the congenitally moderate Jon Huntsman says he "most admires" are -- ready ? -- Paul Ryan and Mike Huckabee. One, an exuberant vendor of fiscal fallacies and other intensely unpleasant ideological mumbo-jumbo; the other, a bottom-feeding exploiter of hayseed ignorance and religious bigotry. And those are the positive profiles.

Mr. Ambassador, by selling your soul now you're only creating your own demons for 2016; they'll come back to haunt you at the most inopportune time -- that is, when the GOP has rendered the likes of Ryan-Huckabee scurrility to the flaky, untouchable margins of third-party Tea Partyism. I simply cannot see how the GOP survives its imminent thrashing in any other way: a massive, ideological cleansing is in the cards, just as surely as the GOP will lose the House next year, as well as all hopes for the Senate and White House. By 2016 even the patina of 'RyanCare' and contractual Fox propaganda will carry a political toxicity of near lethal dosage. A fresh, uncontaminated, authentic conservatism will be in demand, from which you, Mr. Ambassador, are presently removing yourself.

Doubtless I go too far, but I do so only to emphasize the rather inescapable logic of the GOP's coming moderation. For now, the party is trapped in a concentrically tightening ideology of self-righteous suicide, but at some pragamtic point it's bound to rediscover the liberating grandeur of just plain self-survival.

As a rather comic aside, here's irrefutable evidence that at any rate Mr. Huntsman hasn't yet the knack for appealing to the right's primary base of the infinitely slackjawed. "You cannot extrapolate our current spending levels on current assumptions that underlie Medicare and Social Security," says Huntsman, "and expect to be in a good place for future generations."

Dear Jon, you lost them on the third word.

That's about right

I love it and ask myself, How did I miss it? This, from Eugene Robinson, on Michele Bachmann's impending announcement:

[I]s it a good idea to launch a campaign of conquest in a place called Waterloo?

One more time

As I wrote on May 12 (and earlier, too, but I was too lazy to locate and link to it):

[T]his nation's most towering manifestations of socialism -- Social Security and Medicare -- are by now splendid examples of, in reality, conservatism writ large.

And finally, a conservative gets it. Michael Gerson:

Conservatives should understand that much of the opposition to Medicare reform is conservative, at least in form. It is rooted in a fear of change and a resentment of meddling officials.... In a choice between the status quo and major change, a center-right country generally will choose the status quo.

Gerson got little else right in his Medicare-muddling column today, but the above are lessons in political philosophy that progressive Democrats need to learn well.

Helping Mitt Romney

If Mitt Romney had simply declined to enter the presidential race, then he, like Mitch Daniels, would have been a sure winner. Thus his entry into the race is puzzling. As things stand, though, what with the confounding challenge of an actual campaign and all, Romney tells the "Today" show:

I probably do give myself better than 50-50 odds, but it's up to the American people. And I'll tell them what I believe, and if that works, great.

There is of course a long, ignoble line of epic losers, such as Alf Landon or Barry Goldwater or Walter Mondale, who gave themselves "better than 50-50 odds" of unseating the presidential incumbent, because one doesn't campaign on the slogan, "We're doomed."

Is Romney? Probably, although the usual disclaimers of prematurity, yada yada, apply. Yet sure enough, just in time to help him out come ... progressive activists. 

There is in national politics a most delicate balancing margin called the independent vote. Those left of center will never vote for a center-right candidate and those right of center will never vote for a center-left candidate, hence battling in the outer trenches is pointless. Elections are fought and won in the middle. This much is common knowledge to all who follow not just politics but reality -- and wandering from this imposing axiom is an exceedingly dangerous game, as Karl Rove learned in his near-miss of wholesale base-reliance of 2004.

It is an unfortunate but inescapable fact that independent voters are a squirrelly bunch; they almost make one long for an electorate of comprehensive ideological cohesiveness, both left and right and evenly divided, so that the battle lines could be unmistakably drawn and electoral conquests would always reduce to a mere matter of turnout. But that, as we know, is not the case; we are left with a diaphonously conservative and cussedly independent middle, which nevertheless can swing slightly center-left, although one never knows.

Because these marginally conservative independents are unpredictable yet still persuadable, electable Democratic presidential candidates generally do the politically intelligent thing, which is to say, these politicos don't rile the 10-20-percent middle with talk that falls exclusively on the left. In other words, they don't do what the active progressive base pleads for them to do every bloody election year: Go bold! The politicos, you see, prefer winning.

So back to my original point ... These activists, such as Paul Krugman, have decided that now, such as yesterday, is an absolutely peachy time to start advocating, oh, maybe horrendously costly "W.P.A.-type programs" on behalf of the presidential ticket and Democratic cause. You know, because independents aren't at all fretting or palsied over the conservative-invented "debt crisis."  

Now, would a W.P.A.-type program be smart economics? No doubt. And is this the most inexpressibly boneheaded time to politically push one? No doubt. It feeds directly into Mitt Romney's odds.

Progressive activists may want to stay focused instead. I doubt it, but as with squirrelly independents, one can never know for sure. At any rate, victory lies in a relentless assault on Republicans' determined demolition of the body politic's traditional safety nets -- because that's where the angrily motivated votes are. 

On the road with Sarah Palin

The Palin Misery Tour continues, and for sheer incoherence, personal pique and GOP exasperation it just can't be beat, with the possible exception of Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign.

This, according to "reports," is what the embodiment of America's glory had to say yesterday, to no one in particular, since Palin's press and publicity tour operation won't speak to the press:

This isn’t a campaign bus. This is a bus to be able to express to America how much we appreciate our foundation and to invite more people to be interested in all that is good about America and to remind ourselves we don’t need to fundamentally transform America, we need to restore what’s good about America.

Are we clear? What, I ask you, could be clearer? A diesel-guzzling heap of steel has enabled itself to "appreciate our foundation" -- right there, for instance; now that's the kind of patriotic clarity that is all too lacking in American civics -- and to remind us to restore the existing good. Got that?

Regrettably, Fox News may not. Greta Van Susteren, who's trying her best to physically tail this self-absorbed travail, conceded the following to Politico, with what I can only imagine was rather extraordinary embarrassment: "We were told to check their website for any information they are releasing. [T]hey don’t want the media following them, and that includes us."

Meanwhile, Karl Rove is fitting himself to be tied:

I bet you a dime to a dollar her visits to those [Northeast] areas are not proceeded by courtesy phone calls to the local Republican Party chairman and request they generate volunteers. She will announce her schedule and show up.

Bingo, Karl. Per Politico: "The lack of a heads-up has irked many GOP leaders in the states Palin plans to visit."

If there are any politics here, they may relate to a formal Tea Party creation down the road, certainly by 2016, perhaps by the intervening midterms. For what we're watching now is the customary kind of sharp thinking and precise planning that precede the creation of foreordained calamities of the third-party breed.

Krugman's groveling

I gather Comrade Krugman has been compelled by progressive activism's Piety and Purity Patrol to publicly confess his accumulated transgressions of political reality-recognition. He ends his initial show trial of a column today in a fitting outburst of self-critical despair:  

In pointing out that we could be doing much more about unemployment, I recognize, of course, the political obstacles to actually pursuing any of the policies that might work. In the United States, in particular, any effort to tackle unemployment will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition. Yet that’s not a reason to stop talking about the issue. In fact, looking back at my own writings over the past year or so, it’s clear that I too have sinned: political realism is all very well, but I have said far too little about what we really should be doing to deal with our most important problem.

As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do. And those of us who know better should be doing all we can to break that vicious circle.

Dear members of the ideological court, ladies of piety, gentlemen of purity, allow me, if you will, to be brutally but counteroffensively blunt here, in Comrade Krugman's defense.

His intentions were pure, during his recent and rather extended lapse of political realism. He meant no harm. He had only come to accept -- because of immovable reactionary forces -- that braying in each and every column about what should be done to reduce unemployment, when it was so thunderingly conspicuous to anyone paying any attention whatsoever that nothing would be done since it can't be done (see hyphenated clause) was all rather pointless.  

You see, ladies and gentlemen of the Progressive Purity Court, it had dawned on the Nobel mind of Brother Paul that he was beginning to sound like one of those most pitiable political beasts known to thinking man: No, it wasn't that he was sounding like a cable-TV progressive activist, although in that there would have been tragedy enough; no, it was much worse than that; yea, he was beginning to read like a progressive blogger, always belching and bloviating that we should do this and we should do that, while never pausing, not even for a singularly sobering breath, to acknowledge that that's not merely improbable, my friends, but unfuckingbelievably impossible. Conclusion: So what's the point?

Aye, you see, what occurred to Brother Paul, if I may speak on further behalf of my enormously chastened client, is that progressives must stop blathering about what should be done and they must start explaining instead how they can achieve a political launching point from which certain progressive things can be done. And that, of course, means toning down the progressively pious evangelism and cranking up the pragmatic trench-warfare of political reality.

Ah, I see from your aghast faces that my defense of Comrade Krugman's brief immersion in such reality isn't likely to carry the day. I know, I know, reality isn't much fun: it harbors few opportunities for transcendent self-righteousness and absolutely none for hallucinatory utopianism. My apologies.

Brother Paul, you're on your own. Go back to groveling.

The wrong 'debate'

As I watched an agonizing minute or two of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday morning on "Meet the Press," my eyes glazed within seconds and within seconds more my brain slipped into a fog of inattentive paralysis. I heard little of anything McConnell had to say, because he was there to say precisely nothing, and his host, David Gregory, was content, relative to journalistic competence, to engage his guest's nothingness. (All last week we suffered through his NBC colleagues' compliments about his "masterful" job of working Newt Gingrich over, when in reality all Gregory did was to ask a question that Gingrich singularly botched.)

Their conversation had something to do with those dreadful deficits and that tediously expensive Medicare. I do remember that much. But it was that which caused my forgivable lapse into aforementioned glazes and fogs, for Gregory had failed to open the "interview" with the only pertinent question that any conscientious host would ever think to open with.

Host: Sen. McConnell, your party doesn't give a woodchuck's ass about deficits -- the ones your party mostly created, by the way -- except as a pretense to undermine and ultimately destroy this nation's federal safety nets. So it's about time someone here in Washington's journalism community asked the following questions, even though the audience already knows the answers -- in fact, that's rather the point today, to just nail down an understood basic or two. So Senator, I put it to you straightforwardly: Why persist in blathering about the horror of the debt, when in fact you love it, since it's your best excuse to fulfill your ideological dreams of a survival-of-the-fittest America? This so-called debt "debate," Senator, is actually all about your ideology -- not debt, or deficits, or Medicare, or anything other than the fulfillment of your ideology. Right?

McConnell: Why, Sir, I find your tone objectionable. We care very much about these hideous ...

Host: Stop it. Stop it right there, Senator. Cut the horseshit and confirm the obvious. Then we can move on. Or perhaps you'd like some background first? A bit of retrospective about Reagan's exploding deficits and the last Bush's hurling of our national debt into the stratosphere and Dick Cheney's brief lecture about meaningless deficits? You and yours sat and said nothing. But now with a Democrat in the White House you've a chance to pounce ideologically on your own debt, and from its "horrors" further create your nightmare of an ideological right-wing America.

McConnell: Why, Sir, that's a distortion of ...

Host: Hold it, Senator. That was merely the record. I know it. You know it. The audience knows it. And we're not going to sit here and discuss once again how you wish to save Medicare by destroying it, all because of these wretched deficits. You love both: both the destruction and wretchedness. Isn't that the whole point of your nihilistic ideology? Your side of the debate isn't about deficits, Senator, and it isn't about Medicare. It's fundamentally about the realization of your ideology. I'm not really asking, Senator. Because we both know the answer. I only want you to confirm what the audience already knows, or at any rate should know.

McConnell: Why, Sir, I again object. We care very much about ...

Host: Cut his mic. Get this idiot off the set ... Next we welcome to our political roundtable, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. Now, my first, indeed my only question to you, Mr. Castellanos, is ...

From the NY Times, the complete and exhilarating coverage of a bike ride

This just in.

At the Rolling Thunder rally today Sarah Palin wore "a black Harley-Davidson helmet"! She "visibly enjoy[ed] herself"! Ms. Palin "was joined by her husband, Todd, who was wearing a matching helmet"! Also attending were "her daughters, Bristol and Piper"!

Ms. Palin "was unable to move because there were so many members of the press snapping photos. Organizers eventually brought in police, also on motorcycles, to clear a path"!

A path having been cleared, Ms. Palin rode "just a few feet." She then "got off the bike to sign autographs and talk with the crowd"!

Earlier there were "rumors ... that she was on her way, and that she would ride a motorcycle with the Rolling Thunder bikers"!

And guess what? "That’s exactly what she did"!

Later today, she will not speak at the rally.

Stay tuned for more non-news of this charmless nincompoop who's not running for office but occasionally makes a lucrative fool of herself on Fox Newsiness.

Sarah Palin's Grand Distraction

The political press has finally noticed that Sarah Palin's "mystery tour" has never been a mystery to those who first recalled her most fundamental personality: raging paranoia and a pathological hypersensitivity to scrutiny and legitimate criticism.

What's she doing? Where's she going? Is this the beginning? Is this it? -- is it really it? -- the grand blast-off to her much rumored, much anticipated presidential campaign? Oh, how exciting. Oh, how unorthodox. Oh, how Sarah!

Such has been the buzz.

Now before I go any farther I wish to remind you that there's one convention of commentary that I rarely tolerate: that of the "I told you so" variety. And I have this morning plied my mental creativity to think of another way of saying this, but there just isn't one that still conveys the essence of, quite simply, quite emphatically: I told you so.

Last Thursday I wrote:

[N]ow come flurries of anticipation, if not exactly expectations, however low, about a Palin presidential run after all. What a stunner that Palin's political stirrings just happen to coincide with the release of a former staffer's expose -- Blind Allegiance -- portraying the Harpy Queen as warm as a viper, as devout as Jimmy Swaggart, and nearly as functionally stupid as Sen. James Inhofe (politics' gold standard of stupidity, never to be out-valued).

Once the book is no longer a political sensation and literary cause celebre, Palin's stirrings will subside.

Today, observes Politico:

[I]n the days leading up to the bus tour, Palin’s team was focused on something completely different.

Frank Bailey, a former aide, finally got his tell-all published on Tuesday after unsuccessfully shopping it for more than a year. And though the many damaging anecdotes about Palin had already been reported months ago after a leaked manuscript reached the press, Palin’s staff made discrediting him their top priority.... [emphasis mine, see above]

And Bailey’s book? It’s barely cracked the top 100 on Amazon.

To any other politician -- strike that, entertainer -- not crawling with violent neuroses and severe personality disorders, another expose from a former staffer would be just another expose from a former staffer. A blip, a minor ruckus, a bit of gossipy distraction to be ignored. But for Sarah Palin, nothing short of a five-alarm counteroffensive, rolling thunder and Memorial Day fireworks could suffice.

She's a deeply disturbed woman. True, for now she is ill in an entertaining way, but this will soon deteriorate to a kind of William Jennings Bryan pitiability -- a raving, Scopes-trial kind of lunacy which even her followers will look on with sorrow and sympathy.

Cantor's hamster

One can't help but wonder how that little hamster whirling that little wheel in Eric Cantor's little head tolerates all the resulting, homespun humbug. Even hamsters know better, not to mention that anyone who's passed so much as Econ 101 is a veritable Joseph Stiglitz compared to Cantor.

He calls it Republicans' "Cut and Grow" strategy, which is to say, the way to crawl out of an economic hole is to stop crawling and start digging; which is to say further, one must never allow government to create demand in a demandless economy -- that which has dug the hole.

This rather peculiar macroeconomic atavism hasn't been heard from much since early last century, although the Brits are trying it again with gallopingly devastating results. So let's do give it a go here, don't you think?

Just to muddle things further, Cantor let loose in his party's weekend address that "this administration’s regulators have gone on an ideological offensive against businesses that is costing our country billions of dollars and countless jobs."

Can someone explain why an administration that wishes to be reelected would also wish to create economic victims through an "ideological offensive"? This explanatory task, however, will no doubt become immensely complicated upon recalling that this administration is among the most pragmatic, least ideological administrations in American political history.

As for those regulations that have been reimposed on our noble business community, one may also wish to recall the preceding absence of regulations which cost our country trillions, not billions.

That poor hamster.

The Pseudoconservatively Unreasonable

I see this morning that the NY Times' Joe Nocera has joined the commentariat's primal misunderstanding of the Medicare counteroffensive. He bumps from tree to tree, seeing this one and seeing that one and sizing up yet another, yet somehow he comprehends not that he is in a large political Schwarzwald.

He's mired in the personalities and particulars of the Medicare reform debate, but that's not what the Medicare reform debate is about, which I'll get to momentarily. 

To review, very briefly, Nocera writes that he met with Paul Ryan and he listened to Paul Ryan's Jack Kempian fiscal doctrine and his defense of -- recently his offense for -- Medicare reform. No need to review those particulars; we're oversaturated with Ryan's overexposure. Nocera concludes: "I was not won over," since the plan "would undoubtedly shift the cost burden over time from the government to seniors themselves," and Ryan's Big Idea (oh, Lord, spare us, we've yet another Big Idea Man) about " 'empowering' health care consumers" as a way to control costs was something Nocera found merely "absurd."

With that as background, now we come to Nocera's incomprehension of the deepest, most fundamental political motivations behind the Medicare counteroffensive. Reflects Nocera:

Yet I found myself disheartened as I read about the Democrats’ gleeful reaction to the victory in New York. They had a strategy now: bash the Republicans into submission over the Ryan plan. In the Senate, the Democratic leadership forced a vote over Ryan’s budget purely to force Republicans to cast a vote "against" Medicare. Clearly, the Democrats are going to make hay over the very idea that Republicans were trying to mess with Medicare, the most sacrosanct federal program of them all.

Why is this discouraging? Because even if Ryan’s solution is wrongheaded, he’s right that Medicare is headed for trouble....

True, Medicare is headed for trouble. But the liberal (if you like) assessment is not to stick one's head in the sand and just hope the trouble blows over; nor was that liberal "glee" merely some emotional, tribal elation over the brutal slaughter of a feral, Medicare-stomping Elephas maximus.

It wasn't, even, the rewarding revelation of a winning strategy -- to "bash the Republicans." 

At the deepest level, it was none of those: not policy indifference, not tribal elation, not a vividly promising political strategy in the can. It was instead a victory for Reason -- and that, in this profanely populist age, is something to be celebrated -- and a manifest glimmer of real hope that in 2012 the demonstrably Unreasonable can be swept from Capitol Hill, so that the nation's serious business can finally be addressed, seriously.

Which is to say, what occurred in the "victory in New York" was a kind of profound transcendence: the realization that perhaps, next year, exterminated at the ballot booth will be whole species of the political taxonomy that has brought us unfunded wars -- one unprovoked, deregulated plutocrats, endless debt, a massive unpaid-for entitlement, Katrina, oblivious and now seemingly deathless tax cuts, corrupt and Cheneyesque energy conspiracies, and torture.

No, Mr. Nocera, you have missed what lies far beneath the Medicare counteroffensive. It's just a tool, a necessary weapon, a political means to impel a rudely re-enlightened electorate to sweep -- with no small amount of righteousness -- the Pseudoconservatively Unreasonable from the floors of Congress.

And now he's a progressive saint

Before reading, in the NY Times, historian Rick Perlstein's piece remembering and honoring Hubert Humphrey -- "America's Forgotten Liberal" -- my own remembrance was about how savagely Humphrey had been treated in print by Hunter S. Thompson, in his otherwise remarkable work of political journalism, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

Here was a man, Humphrey, who, as Perlstein notes, had launched human and civil rights as a Democratic Party staple and had labored tirelessly on behalf on socioeconomic justice. Yet by 1972, "progressives" such as Thompson were deriding him thus:

There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you've followed him around for a while on the Campaign Trail.

I doubted that progressive Perlstein would care to recall in his near hagiographic remembrance just how brutally the progressive regime of the early 1970s had blackened the name of this truly progressive man, but I'll give Perlstein credit: for there it was, well within his op-ed, Perstein's notation that "In the book by which many would remember that election, Hunter S. Thompson’s 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,' each mention of Humphrey drips with mocking vituperation."

My point? There is more to be historically pondered here than just the memory of Hubert "The Happy Warrior" Humphrey, and it is this: During their tenure, authentically progressive pols are rarely honored by progressive activists, for authentically progressive pols cut deals, make compromises, play politics, and engage the opposition -- whenever possible -- with respect. To this behavior, activists react with disgust. They did it to FDR, they did it to Humphrey, and now they're doing it to ...

Reader's choice

I can't tell if the Washington Post op-ed by Ed Rogers, a former Reagan and Bush 41 staffer, is an insidiously subtle joke or just grand incoherence in print.

Writing that "Republicans need to do something radical" to beat an unbeatable Obama, Rogers first ponders Jon Huntsman, who, Rogers correctly observes, is "toast" in the GOP since he's an "articulate, attractive, cerebral, urbane internationalist" as well as "a proven conservative with a reassuring, moderate tone," and who also has accumulated "vast experience in state and federal government, including service as a diplomat," which "clearly makes him qualified to be president."

And then there's Michele Bachmann, who holds "many glib, shallow positions" and possesses a stunning "lack of experience" and any way you cut it isn't "credible as a commander in chief."

So, suggests Rogers: "Huntsman and Bachmann should have a meeting of the minds and offer themselves as a Huntsman-led ticket before the Iowa caucuses next year."

Because this, according to Rogers, seriously (I think?), is "the best team the party can offer" -- a man unelectable in his own party, and a veep candidate who's in no position to take the presidential helm should something grim happen to Huntsman.

Was Rogers drunk? delirious? kidding?

A panicked Burkean

David Brooks' column today contains two unshakable misapprehensions which only serve to undermine and thus demolish his otherwise sensible theme of reachable two-party cooperation.

Republicans [will] ... spend 2012 accusing the Democrats of sponsoring death panels. The Democrats will spend 2012 accusing Republicans of ending Medicare. Whichever party demagogues best wins.

The parties may indeed devote their efforts to death panels and Medicare as threatened. The first bugaboo, however, is just that: it's entirely imaginary. The second is nothing of the sort; it is imposingly real. To equate both as "demagogic" is but willful partisan spin that encourages no honest debate.

Republicans won in 2010 because the working class fled from the Democrats’ top-down big government liberalism.

Republicans won in 2010 because the electorate threw a mindless temper tantrum over chronic joblessness -- a national circumstance attributable to the GOP's appalling economic record and, then, stimulus-spending intransigence. Now the electorate is paying for its sin of detachment. The larger point within the context of Brooks, though, is that, once again, the denial of reality is immensely unhelpful.  

That a staid, Burkean conservative who undoubtedly knows reality better than this, and yet is willing to so carelessly molest it, shows just how panicked the GOP is about its own realistic prospects.

'This will not obtain'

This -- and not a flashy bus tour to overshadow a former staffer's devastating expose and to reinforce her inexplicable Foxie popularity -- is what a presidential candidate sounds like:

We already have a hired staff in South Carolina, in New Hampshire, in Iowa — we have people on the ground ...

which was preceded by ...

The announcement will be made in Iowa, and it will be made in Waterloo and we’ll give you the date and the time.

In one sense Michele Bachmann is running a bit behind schedule: she has yet to ensnare the media into a fiery investigation of "anti-American" members of Congress. On the other hand, her subterranean efforts to snap off a huge chunk of the disoriented, discombobulated and frankly disturbed GOP and from it someday create a distinct Tea Party are bubbling along quite nicely.

I once briefly worked for a fellow who was perhaps America's most pretentious, pseudo-intellectual fop ever (the relevance of this sentence will be shown momentarily). He, one day, about some insignificant matter I don't recall, bellowed disagreeably to a colleague: This will not obtain. At the time I couldn't suppress a guffaw or keep the coffee out of my nose, at any rate I have retained that quote for an opportune moment such as this: In Michele Bachmann's steeping tea-party brain, This -- any residual GOP Establishment -- will not obtain.

She's on a hallucinatory mission of an ideologically cleansed America in which not only liberals hold no power, but stuffy conventionalists like Mitt Romney of, shall we say, ideological flexibility hold none within the GOP as well. But that of course is a mission impossible, organizationally and electorally speaking, hence Bachmann -- who, like Palin, clearly has no interest in actual governing -- ultimately will devote her messianic passions to a third-party Creation.

Amid the intriguing underbrush of this speculation is that Iowa's GOP establishment, such as it is, would likely cheer on the likes of a Michele Bachmann -- elsewhere; that is, in some other party. For it's beginning to sense nothing but doom for its caucuses' preeminence. As Politico reported yesterday:

Leading Iowa GOP officials worry that after 2008 — when John McCain won the GOP nomination despite finishing fourth in Iowa — a victory by a deeply conservative candidate who doesn’t ultimately become the nominee could sound a death knell for the Republican caucuses, encouraging any establishment governor or senator to stay away from the caucuses in the future for fear the vote is controlled by the most ideological elements of the party.

As if to confirm the Tories' prognosis of Iowa's coming irrelevance, if something's not done and done soon, there was this inspired derangement from one Jeff Jorgensen, chairman of the Pottawattamie County GOP:

In our area, in western Iowa, the story that is being missed is Herman Cain.... I think he’s going do very well at the caucuses.

The hell of it is, Jeff is probably right; and if not Cain, then a Santorum or a Bachmann or, if she were running, a Palin.

These, for now, are the ideological extras -- not authentic political stars -- who are stealing Iowa's show. And this, as one prodigiously pretentious fop once said, will not obtain.

Not much longer. By 2016, I'd wager, the GOP's ideological runoff will, well, run off or be chased off into third-party status, since the GOP Establishment simply cannot survive its internal extortions of the tea party's killing positions, such as killing Medicare.