Blow, Blow, Blow Your Vote

With Super Tuesday’s body barely cold and Mitt Romney’s brain trust splitting their time between figuring out how to harness Montana and North Dakota as a trajectory to the GOP nomination and calling the bank to see if Mitt canceled their paychecks, the fall strategy is starting to gell for the petulant, flummoxed Republican establishment: They’re going to take their bawl and go home.

Rush Limbaugh has been the lemming Pied Piper for the GOP ever since it became clear that Mitt Romney’s suit was as empty as some of the few states that he’s carried so far. In the last week he’s twice referenced “anal poisoning” in disparaging one Republican solon’s close relationship with the Senator. Both Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter have chimed in in the last week, saying they’d sooner vote for Hillary than pull the lever for “traitor” John McCain (which is an interesting and not-at-all accidental epithet to hurl at a man who sacrificed five years of his life and endured torture with a frequency greater than most of us do staff meetings before he’d tell the Viet Cong who invented the telephone).

There has been early anecdotal evidence of sparsely-attended Republican primary polling places being understandably mistaken for Sandy Duncan book signings, but Time magazine yesterday did a devastating state-by-state study on primary voter turnout between the parties, and determined that the Democrats have outpolled the Republicans by a whopping 73% so far this election season.

This is a curious protest among the Republican faithful. After all. there’s no evidence thus far to suggest that McCain’s substantial numbers are solely the result of bused-in Massachusetts saboteurs all working on Barney Frank’s payroll. These have been actual Republicans who have given McCain the delegates he’s gained so far.

Even after the Senator George Allen “Macaca” incident and other embarrassments of the 2006 campaign, the GOP still had a reasonably-untainted New Age paleoconservative in Kansas Senator Brownback, yet before a single vote was cast the party sent him packing like he was the second coming of Nelson Rockefeller.

Rush Limbaugh has been screaming for weeks that the Republicans will be fouling their house if they anoint John McCain as the party standard-bearer. Yet, despite his listening audience being, according to Mary Matalin, more sizable than the entire roll of voters to cast their primary or caucus ballot leading up to Super Tuesday, he still couldn’t exhort his faithful to win for Mitt Romney a state that wasn’t minuscule or Mormon.

This is all great news for the Democrats as they’re mounting what’s been, after their week or two of tossing their excrement at one another, an increasingly civil if protracted race for the finish. The Republicans, meanwhile, are unshaven and disheveled in their basement, pivoting between tears and rage, as they douse their entire home from the ground up with gasoline, until they drop a lit match and burn it all to the ground just because they can’t abide their rage at the fact that they paid their housepainter to paint the entire house purple, and he did.