It’s time to nurse that hangover with another book length screed from Sparky, this one celebrating the incremental evaporation of the Republican party.  Drink up, Shriners!

True or not, it’s been said by historians that generals always prepare to re-fight the last war, instead of making new plans for the next one. It makes a certain sense. If one was victorious the last time around, one might wish to revel in the success of that campaign. And if one lost the last battle, one might wish to re-stage that conflict, hoping for a better outcome or at least the rehabilitation of one’s good name and legacy.

This is certainly true for the last crop of GOP losers, whose monumental failure last November keeps getting rehashed in various ways. In fact, the GOP is currently split into two mutually exclusive factions. There are those who claim that McCain was too moderate and insufficiently conservative to win, while others insist that by being too conservative and insufficiently appealing to those outside the GOP tent, McCain ceded too many votes to the Dems.

Obviously, both factions cannot be correct, but the GOP is no nearer to a consensus than it was on the first Wednesday of last November. If anything, they are further from a consensus now than they were then. Yet they continue to bash each other; not so much to advance the party’s chances in the future than merely to salve their own egos. They fight now to control what is left of their party’s withered soul.

The recent Vanity Fair article by Todd Purdum on Sarah Palin and her effect on the GOP ticket last year is a case in point. A 10,000 word crazy-quilt of blind-item finger pointing and anonymous bellyaching, the magazine piece has had the bizarre effect of picking at a scab that is far from having healed. The result? Instead of savaging Barack Obama and his “socialist” policies, the GOP losers are presently too busy savaging each other to pay attention to their White House adversary. Which is not much different from the way they ran that last, losing campaign.

McCain ran against the purported lack of experience of his opponent. Yet, by picking a running mate with negligible political experience, McCain was exposed as panicky in the face of an Obama juggernaut that had already vanquished more “experienced” Dem primary rivals; cynical for assuming that disaffected Hillary voters would flock toward any vagina in the race, which is why he picked one; lacking diligence for having selected somebody who hadn’t been properly vetted; and sorely devoid of common sense for selecting a parvenu who would likely be elevated to the Oval Office when the oldest candidate in US history – with a worrisome medical history – succumbed to the Reaper in his first term.

McCain might have opted for an even more spectacularly incomprehensible and unworthy running mate, one supposes, but who might that have been? David Duke? Dick Cheney? In a field of bad choices, McCain picked the worst one imaginable and suffered the consequences with unexpected grace. This humble scribe is not alone in thinking that John McCain’s shining moment of the campaign was his concession speech.

Eight years of Bush stupidity, partisan cruelty and trashing of the Constitution had made an ‘08 GOP victory all but impossible. The party’s brand had been irredeemably tarnished before McCain even became the nominee. The early-fall economic meltdown only sealed its fate.

Rather than now acknowledge the Bush/Cheney clusterfuck of unprecedented arrogance and incompetence had laid the party so low, we now see the GOP elite poking each other in the eye for their roles in a campaign that was never theirs to win. So Bill Kristol – the purported “brains” behind the Palin pick – bristles at the suggestion that Sarah Palin was an airhead diva with more demands than depth or dimension, and points accusatory fingers at McCain’s handlers for rehashing the same old shit over and over, ad infinitum. In retort, McCain’s campaign staff fires back at these recriminative assertions. “It’s over,” they keep saying. But it’s not, is it?

The Republicans may yet prove themselves stupid enough to retrofit and field a previous loser, hoping for a better result. Rudy Giuliani? Mitt Romney? Mike Huckabee? Dems certainly hope so, with good cause.

While they might and should be grooming a fresh standard-bearer to unite and lead the party into the 2010 midterms and beyond, these petulant millionaires are not yet finished kicking each other in the shins. Whither the GOP with so clueless, direction-less, valueless a leadership?

Recent events have only cemented the dimmest of futures. Each of the bright new stars the party might have burnished for future public consumption have supernova-ed into hideously spectacular irrelevance.

Only a month ago, Senator John Ensign made an exploratory pilgrimage to Iowa, where the Dems’ darkest horse and blackest sheep had staked a pivotal win. While there, this semi-modest and remarkably moderate (by current standards) long shot for ‘12 chided his own party for losing touch with its roots, and paying the price. “Republicans have strayed” bleated the Iowa story headlines.

Within days, it seems, it was revealed that Ensign had also strayed, in his case from his marriage bed, to apply a lengthy and righteous boning to one of his political staffers. Ickily, it was noted that she, her husband and her son – each working for Ensign – had all been paid inexplicably large sums by Ensign while the shagging continued. His pitiful admissions to the public were made only once the shagging – and payments – had ceased, and he was being shaken down – he implied – for more money by the cuckold husband. Unsurprisingly, pay-to-play pussy has cost Ensign whatever dreams he may have had about the Oval Office. There are now investigations into why Ensign failed to disclose the true amounts being paid to the spouse of his bit on the side, which electoral laws require.

Ensign had been touted as a possible contender for 2012. Yet, in a party that prides itself on “family values,” his admission that this was “the worst thing I have ever done in my life” has all but scuttled his chances for pursuing higher office. If lucky, Ensign will escape indictment for failure to fully and accurately disclose payments to his paramour and her family.

Also highly touted as a 2012 GOP prospect was South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. All reading this already know about this hypocrite’s fall from grace, occasioned by regular visits to Argentina to get his end wet with his “soul mate.” Initial grudging admissions from Sanford were followed by later, more fulsome confessions that his first statements on his infidelity weren’t entirely truthful. And that his dalliances with his Argentine hottie were not the only indiscretions he had committed while married.

Sanford perhaps suspected that invoking “love” would make his extra-marital shagging more acceptable to voters than admitting he just dug getting his dick sucked. If so, such suspicions were entirely wrong. His greatest detractors, and the fiercest calls for his immediate resignation from office, now seem to come from members of his own party, stung that the same Sanford who first couldn’t bring himself to tell the whole truth, now cannot stop talking about his troubles keeping his dick in his pants. While spurned wife Jenny now keeps his balls in a jar. She may sell them at her family’s next garage sale.

Wholly reality-challenged parallels drawn by Sanford between himself and King David, who killed his fancy-bit’s husband so he could have her without abdicating his throne, don’t seem to have calmed the governor’s troubled waters, at home or in the statehouse. One is gobsmacked that such a blatant hypocrite thinks citing Biblical chapter and verse – devoid of the slightest relevance to his own case – might curry favor with voters and stanch the calls for his instant removal from office.

Making matters worse for this hypocrite’s future political chances are two things. The first is that, like Ensign, it appears Sanford may have used the taxpayer’s dime to get his dick sucked abroad. Voters might, maybe, forgive a personal sin of that magnitude. They are less inclined to do so when they learn that a man of vast personal wealth, and incredibly unbelievable personal stinginess, took government-paid excursions for the express purpose of having his schvantz milked by his foreign love interest.

The second – and even more galling – strike against Sanford is that when Bill Clinton was being hounded by Republicans for having his dick sucked by an intern, Sanford was among the more judgmental of his partisan detractors: “I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally (to resign)… I come from the business side,” Sanford said. “If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.”

And yet Sanford can’t seem to bring himself to follow his own advice to Bill Clinton. Why? Because there’s some tangible difference between having your dick sucked by a “soul mate” and being Hoovered by an “intern?” Or because when Clinton was caught Sanford was a moral man and now he is just an irredeemably craven, self-serving, self-interested asshole?

Most recently, we’ve seen the resignation of Sarah Palin, the blight that helped sink John McCain’s electoral prospects last year. Just over the halfway mark of her gubernatorial term, Sarah has had enough and pulled the plug on her obligations, no longer interested in what happens to Alaskans. Anybody who has witnessed her scrambled, ad libbed abdication has been left bewildered by the blizzard of meaninglessness she expressed so ineloquently, and so unconvincingly. While her supporters insist Obama is lost without a teleprompter, this woman is incapable of expressing a cogent thought even with a teleprompter. Finally, a candidate who makes Bush seem bright and articulate.

Until days ago Palin was the acknowledged front-runner among Republican prospects for 2012. Having already demonstrated in the last electoral cycle a shocking incapacity for fluency, articulation and reality, Palin’s abdication was unaccompanied by a discernible rationale for so drastic a step. It has been speculated that she feared some pending wrecking ball of ethics complaints, criminal indictment, or personal indiscretion that would ruin her chances for 2012. Only time will tell if there is merit to such suppositions, but abandoning her statehouse gig won’t make her any more impervious to such charges if and when they come. It will allow her to milk whatever cash cows come her way, unimpeded by the drudgery of running a state into the ground.

In the meantime, however, if she hoped this step-down would mute the criticisms of mean-spirited bloggers and late night talk show hosts, Sarah will no doubt be sorely distressed to learn that she has only fed that inferno with this latest disregard for the citizens she had promised to serve, and her cavalier attitude toward obligations she sought only a few short years ago. A congenital quitter who shopped her way through five colleges to earn a four year degree and ditched a couple of prior elected positions, Sarah Palin has yet to actually see through to completion a single thing. The governorship of Alaska is simply the latest in a long line of things in which this ADHD bimbo has lost interest.

Given so fickle a nature, what assurances do voters have that if she grifted her way into higher office she would serve out a full term? Based on her performance of recent days, there are none. Meaning? If she fancies her chances for a White House run in ‘12, she can count only on a declining percentage of her party’s ever-shrinking demographic.

The three stooges named above have had their Presidential hopes sunk by their unabashed hypocrisy, and nothing else.  Social conservatives who trumpet family values, Ensign and Sanford didn’t live up to the moral requirements they impose upon others, and have shot themselves in the foot.  With their dicks.  Sarah Palin, whose chief claim to fame is a fervent desire to serve her constituents, has now told those self-same constituents that their needs come second to her own.

With no great veteran bench strength from which to draw, and without any bright new prospects on the horizon, the GOP faces another problem. Even if a Hindu-Catholic exorcism fetishist like Bobby Jindal, say, were to emerge as a plausible candidate, would he really allow himself to be humiliated at the polls for nothing more than ego? Is there really a lineup of wannabes anxious to become the next John McCain, a sadly trounced footnote to history?

A party that cannot find a message voters want to hear might still be able to raise a lot of cash from the corporate pimps that have historically been its fiscal lifeblood. But how does money alone catapult into higher office a candidate without an appealing message? How could a Jindal, or anyone really, expect to triumph over the most articulate incumbent in modern memory, who marshals the most extraordinary political machine of modern times? And why would corporate money throw itself at a guaranteed loser like the GOP, rather than align itself with the party that has a stranglehold on power? When it comes to courting perpetual power, money has no memory, no ideology, no overriding allegiances.

In politics, a week is a lifetime, so three years-plus until the next Presidential cycle is an eternity. Anything and everything could and may change in the interim. Barack Obama is not impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But at present, the fates have decreed that he will face an ever-dwindling opposition of increasingly limited effectiveness, a GOP that appeals to old, uneducated and extremist demographics that are literally dying out beneath it. Harry Houdini, David Copperfield and David Blaine combined could not pull off what the GOP magicians have conjured: making a once-proud political brand vanish without a trace.

Meanwhile, the GOP generals keep prosecuting the last campaign, and will not stop until they kill off each and every power broker who was involved in that debacle. Here’s wishing them the greatest success in that splendid endeavor.

Sparky Satori is a retired school marm.

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