Buy Low. Sell High.

The Great Republican Fire of 2010.

After much consideration, as reported at the GNB here, I have decided to leave the glamorous life of unpaid, sleep-deprive blogger and accept a leadership position with a group of like-minded reformers who have chosen to take up the task of rehabilitating the Republican Party into the Force for Goodness it always wanted to be.

It was a difficult choice.

However, at the end of the day I accepted the offer because the consultants who approached me presented me with some solid analysis that a once-in-a-generation moment of transformation was at hand.

This kinda thingie:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

So when this cadre of buxom, well-financed, sweet-smelling machers approached me with an offer, I listened hard and watched their lovely PowerPoint (also frankly, La Vida Bloggie has not exactly turned out to be the gloriously debauched, high-steppin’ “laid, paid, upgrade and French Maid” wonderland certain people had led me to believe it would be.)

And now that I've seen their reams of charts and polling data on the matter (which has been conducted secretly, brilliantly and in plain sight on dating sites, blog sidebars and clickable survey ads in "Juggs", "Men's Health" and "Cosmo Online" for years) there is no doubt that the clean, vicious split of the Democratic Party, counterintuitively coupled with a record turnout of Democrats voting both side of the split and the near-total collapse of the GOP, means we are witnessing the birth of that soi-disant "third party" that all the kids have been clamoring for.

But like the wishes granted as part of any Faustian bargain, it comes at a terrible price.

According to the data, the three parties which will be left standing in September will be:

The Obama Party: A digital-age Eugene McCarthy movement of young, smart idealists and affluent progressives which, over in the Better Universe, would win. But this is not the Better Universe, and the Obama Party will not survive its charismatic leader being eaten alive by…

The Clinton Party: An alliance of old-school blue-collar angries, the iron-fist-in-an-iron-glove phalanx of ladies-of-a-certain-age, and hardcore DLC-types who think the worst thing to happen to the Party in 20 years was Joe Lieberman leaving it. So by September, the Pitch-A-Fit-For-Hillary sappers will have done enough damage to the load-bearing walls of the Party to insure that…

The Hoover Party wins. Thanks to a co-opted press and a crippled opposition, Dubya will get his Third Term by a whisker and the World’s Oldest Fighter Jock will be lead the shattered leftovers of the GOP to take on the job of handling a collapsing economy, a failed health care system, a doomed war, a vivisected Constitution and oil prices heading into the stratosphere…utilizing the finest tools the 19th Century has to offer.

Worse yet for St. McCain, there will be absolutely no honeymoon: the very first time he proposes that the cure for war is more war, that the cure for corporations running wild is even less regulation, that the cure to a crumbling infrastructure and an empty treasury is more tax cuts for billionaires, the country will groan, turn off the teevee, and the McCain Administration will be effectively over.

Worser still, “Dubya III: Clusterfuck Even Harder” will actually premier to the not-so-secret horror of Modern Conservatives for the simple reason that Republicans do not want to govern.

They never did.

They want to squat in their doublewides and whine. Whine about scary Negroes, uppity wimmin, and filthy hippies ruining everything.

The want to turn on their radios and hear millionaires with Big Outside Voices tell them they are all geniuses, and that every one of their paranoid delusions, petty grievances and genocidal fantasies are, in fact, true and real and even patriotic.

According to the charts I have seen, “Dubya III” -- which will amount to twelve years of Rove Rules on top of twenty years of Gingrich/Limbaugh/Falwellism – will result in three, disastrous outcomes for the Republican Party:

1. The Whiny Base will simply be starved out. They will continue to try to blame their problems on Bill Clinton, George Soros and hippies, but will now be demoted from “political force to be reckoned with” to “the guy who rants about Lyndon LaRouche on the 157 Streeterville bus”-grade creepy laughingstock.
   
2. The more they talk, the more the Hoover Party’s doddering leadership caste will make the Konstantin Chernenko regime seem downright sprightly.
3. The record of epic, serial failures piled up by the GOP during this period will finally demonstrate beyond a doubt that the Republican Party is congenitally incapable of governing anything.

So while the Clinton Party will continue to live and breathe and kneecap its best and brightest for fear that some non-approved personage might get cutsies in front of their heir designates and achieve electoral escape velocity, the GOP will crash and burn and vanish from the Earth.

And like Bear Stearns, it's salvageable assets will then go on the market at fire-sale-followed-by-mass-foreclosures-on- the-rubble prices.

And some of us plan to be there, ready to buy low, pick up some bargains and build us the shiny new Republican Party of our dreams!

So adieu to blogging. All things considered it has been a lot of fun and, in the end, I suppose my only real regret is that I did not link to Atrios more assiduously.

Now, Mr. Howlin’ Wolf has consented to play me offstage

with sweet, sweet music,