Establishment Republicans Are Now Eating Their Own, and McCain is the Entrée

No matter what happens in November, we'll always have the delightful satisfaction of having watched the Republican Party unravel, strand by ideological strand, synapse by emotional synapse, tactic by tawdry tactic.

It just gets better and better, and when it gets to the point that the Wall Street Journal starts attacking the GOP standard-bearer as "untethered," you know things have got about as good as they can get.

But even the Journal didn't know just how untethered its populist nemesis would soon become. The paper, as you'll recall, issued its diagnosis right after John McCain again shot from the hip and winged SEC chairman and Establishment Republican Chris Cox, since Cox merely happened to be the most convenient political target of that day.

Deadeye John, however, was just warming up, in terms of untethering down.

There's no need to review in detail yesterday's bizarre events here, since they've already been exhaustively pondered by every venue with a camera, microphone, printing press or Internet connection. But let's do take the time to agree they suggested more than just "maverick" unconventionality. In fact, they suggested an exotic imbalance of the mind -- or what the WSJ, with unmistakable restraint, had earlier called a temporary untethering.

It appears the condition is chronic. McCain's campaign "suspension" -- a tactical maneuver achieved only by slamming his campaign into the highest political gear -- and concomitant debate-postponement proposal are but the latest manifestations of a general GOP meltdown.

The party is trapped like the rodent it is -- its years of ideological certainty thrown open to public ridicule and censure, its various factions squabbling with and accusing each other, its diseased desperation now strikingly unconcealed. John McCain is merely a symptom.

A few days ago the conservative icon George Will joined the WSJ in blasting McCain, charging that he was characteristically "substituting vehemence for coherence" and "behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high."

True enough, but what Will didn't reveal, or concede, was that this league is now too high for both McCain's "dismaying" populism and Will's stodgy libertarian Republicanism -- and only because the stakes themselves have become too high.

The simplistic, one-ideology-fits-all species is a rapidly dying breed. Adaptive pragmatism (which I'd like to think progressive thinking has returned to, in classic FDR style) is in, and unyielding ideology is out, because the nation's entire economic structure is finally about to snap under the latter's oppressive weight.

Will's fellow Establishmentarian at the New York Times, David Brooks, tackled this thornily broad Republican problem about a week ago, but in a cleverly backhanded way. Rather than charging at McCain head-on, he kneecapped Sarah Palin instead, using her almost incomprehensible candidacy as the lethal instrument to not only implicitly question McCain's judgment, but openly declare that the party should return to its "frankly elitist" roots.

"The elitists favor deliberation," Brooks intoned, "but the populists" -- that would be Palin, the George W. Bush wing and the newly reformulated McCain -- "favor instinct…. I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years."

In effect, Brooks was declaring war on modern Republican politics itself -- that sickly, parasitic demagoguery of populism inflicted with such artistry on the Common Man these last few decades.

The party's Establishmentarians have had enough. But their even deeper problem is that the populists of their partisan ilk have merely been using populism as cover for the Establishment's most enduring wet dream: an unregulated economy; that freest, hands-off, carefree, happy-go-lucky, socially Darwinistic marketplace of clear winners and losers.

And that, of course, is what got us into this mess to begin with. So what are elitist libertarians to do? Why, naturally: misdirect their venom at poor John McCain, who's only doing what virtually all Republican pols have been doing for the last 30 years -- pandering and groveling and demagoguing with exorbitant abandon. Sure he's an embarrassment to them, but they made him what he is.

Hell, we're so inured to it, we might even fall for it again. And that's why I prefaced this column with, "no matter what happens in November…." But for now, the Republican Party's internal angst is sure fun to watch.

In fact, it's downright delightful -- especially this here part of finding myself having to defend poor John McCain against those cranky Establishmentarians.