After last week’s adventure in craziness, watching my "team" descend into the same hysteria that Limbaugh and (I love Keith’s name for him) Bill-o the Clown propagates, I announced that I could not consort with the sort of seriously bonkers crowd that hangs around Daily Kos, and would henceforth move my invaluable wares to the TPM Café.  I decided to post my unbelievably boffo essay about how the New Yorker cover was likely to cost Sen Obama the election since it would be taken as proof positive by the rubes out there that what they thought to be true had been proven on both sites.   Amazingly, the crazies found it at both places and said roughly the same thing.  (One poster on Kos sought to assure me that the cover wasn’t so bad that Senator Obama could still recover from it.  I thanked him).

To those with at least one oar in the water, I write to today to suggest that the question of whether Sen McCain’s candidacy represents a "third term" for President Bush misses the much more significant point.  It is that point that will carry the election and, more importantly, could change the country.

Arguing that Senator McCain will just be Bush III is plainly wrong and will convince nobody except the hard core who post on this site.  Had the Republicans nominated Arnold the pig they would have presented a more qualified person to serve as president than the fool they foisted upon us for the past two terms and with all of his faults, and there are many with more appearing every day, he is far more serious, much more intelligent, and considerably better suited to be President of the United States than the man he would replace.

The more important point is that he is the candidate of the party that nominated that idiot twice and, poll them if you don’t believe me, would love to do so again, except that they are not allowed to because of a constitutional amendment foolishly enacted after President Roosevelt’s death to prevent any other president from serving more than two terms (more on that in paragraph or two) and the fact that even the hardcore in that party recognize that George W. Bush could not get elected as safety patrol coordinator in the most Republican part of the country given his historically low approval ratings.

The party tried to foist Mitt Romney on a gullible nation and, when that didn’t work even among Republicans (no mean feat to be too detached from reality that even Republicans would notice) they decided that Fred Thompson could take time off from his acting career, to serve as almost Reagan, but despite the altered history their party has written about the eternally popular Reagan, those of us who were awake in 1988 remember otherwise: that the country was quite sick of Reagan by the time his eight years were up, but since he seemed to be slipping away quietly it was not worth making too much of it.  Another actor pretending to be president was not going to work twenty years later.

So Senator McCain looked like he might be the candidate, and the party made a deal with the man they so long considered to be the devil: if he would stop attacking them and acting as if they were bad, they would suck it up and accept his candidacy.  Senator McCain in turn, like Joe Hardy in Damn Yankees, could not resist the deal and took it.  Within seconds, he stopped becoming John McCain and the man he is now is simply a front for the same Republican party that:

gave us candidate Dole to run around the country talking about "Democrat wars" meaning World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, thinking we knew no better, but eventually elected a second Bush to start a war in Iraq after we were attacked by people who were allowed to establish a base in Afghanistan and were protected by Pakistan,

piously claimed that government was too intrsusive, then tried to remove any regulation that protected the public but retarded profits and then decided to spy on us,

argued that the military was allowed to decay under a Democratic administration, then stretch it so thin by its foolish war as to endanger not only our country but the rest of the world, while sending soldiers out to die for the benefit of private contractors who contribute to their political campaigns, torturing military prisoners and removing the moral plane from which we could reasonably threaten those who did the same to our military with war crimes prosecutions,

were willing to and did impeach a president for lying about his personal indiscretions, but would do no more than shake their heads at the most destructive president since the pure evil they foisted upon us while we were distracted by all that was 1968.

This is not a "brand" that has been "damaged" as the talking heads like to say.   The Republican party of today is not the party of Lincoln or the first Roosevelt or their last president, Dwight Eisenhower, or even of Taft, Dewey or Vandenburg, not to mention Landon, Rockefeller, Scranton, Javits, or even (are you listening Senators), Chaffee (who paid for his "loyalty") and Spector (who has also, but not in the same way), nor of Snowe and Collins in Maine and, cut the crap Arnold, of Schwarzenegger.  It is the party of Rove and the late Viguerie.  It is the party that mourns the memory of Joe McCathy and how badly he was treated.  It is not fit to govern any part of this country, let alone have its nominee elected as president.

And just as the country figured this out in 1932 when they laughed Hoover out of town and destroyed that party until Hoover had become a dim memory, they have figured it out again.
Franklin Roosevelt was elected president four times; once when many people believed he was not healthy enough to last through the full term, and, indeed, he died less than three months after taking the oath of office for the fourth time.  Despite that the country, then on the way to critical decisions that would have to be made as World War II ended, trusted his party and whatever obscure Missouri Senator would become Vice President and then President to make those decisions, rather than turn to the party that wanted instead to spread discontent and lies, an art they have perfected today.

Since they could not beat him in a fair election, though, they convinced the country to prevent them from freely electing the best person available for the presidency if that person had already served for two terms.  It is the most undemocratic part of our Constitution which survives today, right up there with the one that forbids any person not born a US citizen from becoming president, which both spares us a Schwarzenegger candidacy, but prevents Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan, from being president or, umm, a candidate for Vice President.

This party means nothing good for our country.  That's the change we are all seeking and from that change, a great hundred days should follow to change our country if not forever, for a good long time.