The Republicans: 8 Years and One Tar Baby Later, a Comic Soap Opera Prevails

If you've got a Hillary and McCain race, you've got a third option: That's the pistol on the bed table.

– PAT BUCHANAN

If the Democratic race heading into Super Tuesday is high drama, the Republican race is comic soap opera.

The number of emergency room admissions following right-wing harpie Ann Coulter's announcement that she will back Hillary Clinton if John McCain is the nominee seem to have tapered off, but a goodly number of inmates in the conservative asylum are still locked in the rubber room.

I never was any good at calculus, which might explain why I have trouble understanding why conservatives are so horrified at a McCain candidacy and stranger still is that a goodly number of them are fleeing into Mitt Romney's wet but welcoming grasp.

McCain on his most unconservative day has been more conservative than Romney ever was before he took a secret trip to Sweden to have that operation.

No, not a sex-change operation, Silly, but a procedure that enables Romney to look into conservative eyes and say "I . . . am . . one . . . of . . . your . . . own" with a Borg-like intensity that turns people who haven't changed their minds about anything, let alone politics, since forever into gelid supplicants.

At least you don't hear much anymore about Romney's religion, which is a good thing, but I have the impression that at this point conservatives would go for the guy even if he was a Wiccan.

Conservative pundit "Baghdad Hugh" Hewitt's tenuous grip on reality slipped a finger or two over the Coulter outburst and he's so desperate for his tribe to rendezvous with Romney, if not destiny, that he actually wrote that people should support Romney because he has more money than McCain:

"Which is why Rush, Sean, and Laura, Beck, Levin and Hewitt are right, and Arnold, Rudy, and Rick Perry are wrong: Conservatives have to decide right now if they will fight for Romney and the party of Reagan against the MSM-generated McCain resurrection. I think they will, and that Super Tuesday will be one for the books with surprises as great as the chattering class has had to digest in a long, long time."

Memo to Hugh: The only thing that Romney and Reagan have in common is they both have six-letter last names.

Flip-flopping is, of course, a frequently used tactic from the American political playbook. Nevertheless, with one exception I have never seen a flip-flopper as crass as Romney during the eight presidential campaigns I covered as a reporter and editor and now a ninth as a blogger.

The one exception is, or rather was, Rudy "$60 Million For a Single Delegate" Giuliani, an in-your-face New York liberal who found out that changing his stripes and having an ego as large as the Twin Towers was not nearly enough.

As Joe Carter notes in a devastating critique of Romney, in order to become more attractive to that shrunken Republican base he has reversed field on abortion, stem cell research, gun control, the minimum wage, gay marriage and gays in the military, and nowhere more so than on health care where his views were a carbon copy of Clinton's until he got the presidential itch.

So conservatives have themselves in quite a tizzy, made worse because they only have themselves to blame.

They knew in 2000 that George Bush was no more one of them than Romney is in 2008, but they understood that they could pour their own agenda in this empty vessel of a man and if things broke the right way, the payback would be aces and he'd start a war or two, to boot.

Well, they got a war, but now their party is a shambles because they also got runaway spending, crap, corruption, a recession and a failed foreign policy that has made America alternately feared and a global laughingstock.

Meanwhile, a war that was going to be over in no time at all will be over no time soon at all.

Bush is sticking to conservatives like a tar baby, which may not be the most apt analogy since one of the mantras of the about-to-be defunct Republican hegemony in Washington was that blacks and other people of color were welcome, but only if they used the servants' entrance.

What makes the comic soap opera of the GOP's Super Tuesday run-up so antic is that conservatives need to shed Bush and by all rights McCain should be the port in their storm. He has conservative credentials and has been the un-Bush in important respects. But he is unpopular precisely because of those important respects, which reveals both the conservatives' dilemma and their schizophrenic symtomology.

John McCain will outgun Mitt Romney tomorrow by a comfortable margin while Mike Huckabee will do better than expected. McCain will widen his lead in subsequent primaries, capture the nomination and have the hands down best chance against the Democratic nominee, in all likelihood Hillary Clinton.

This will leave conservatives with a stark choice: Either beat a retreat from the Mittster and vote for McCain in November or hope that their health insurance plans cover treatment for schizophrenia. If they don't, at least Clinton's will.