GOP pols hit the panic button

Republican pols call for radical surgery to prevent disaster in 2012:

Some Republicans are so horrified about the butt-whupping that they are clearly going to suffer in 2012, that they are proposing radical surgery on the whole party, to prevent the patient from dying on the table.

Mainstream Republicans are terrified that the wingnuts, dittoheads and teabaggers will once again dominate the GOP primaries and render up a wingnut nominee like Palin or Huckleberry in 2012, who will spend all summer emitting dangerous, frightening lunacy, culminating in a landslide defeat on a scale comparable to Hoover, Landon, Adlai Stevenson, Goldwater, McGovern, Mondale….

This race is three years away, but already the GOP leaders are going public with their panic.

The race in upstate New York, in which the wingnuts are defying the GOP nominee entirely, and supporting a third-party wingnut who threatens to throw the race to the Democrats, has caused sphincters to pucker through out the GOP.

Some Republicans (apparently including one at the Philadelphia Inquirer) are talking about rigging the primary system to give more power to big-state moderate Republicans, or creating a Democrat-style system of superdelegates who could stop the wingnuts from nominating some reactionary maniac. Their argument is that 2012 will be all about Obama, so even if the Republicans nominate a moderate, the wingnuts will still come out in droves to vote against Obama.

So, notwithstanding all the screaming from Fox and Rasmussen, who are arguing on no evidence whatsoever that Obama is on the ropes, Republican leaders know that they face not just a serious ass-kicking, but their most mortal danger since Watergate.

But there are a couple of problems here.

First, most Republicans refuse to admit they have a problem.

Second, seeking big-state moderate Republicans these days is like looking for a unicorn carrying the Holy Grail on his horn.

Third, finding some Jedi Council of superdelegates who have the guts to defy the wingnuts is just not going to happen – if they had the coglioni to defy the teabaggers, they would have done it by now. They still entertain the fantasy that they can control the wingnuts, just as German conservatives were confident that they could control Hitler. But all Boss Limbaugh has to do is growl, and the party leaders will come to his heel and lick his fat, veiny ankles.

And fourth, as that New York race shows, the GOP can’t go too far toward the center, because the wingnuts could split off from the party entirely. All they need is a leader – Palin, Buchanan, Roger Ailes, Ross Perot…Clearly, for this crowd, sanity is not a prerequisite. Like lower order mammals, they will simply follow the loudest voice (Rush, perhaps?).

In other words, Doctor Frankenstein (let’s call him Rove) realizes that his monster (let’s call him Rush) is galloping across the countryside throwing little girls into wells, but they have no plan to bring him down.

“He was supposed to be a thing of beauty! Not a monstrosity!”