"The Stupid! Make it Stop!!!!"

The NY Times has just barely caught up to the AP newswire but John McCain has just been declared the winner in the South Carolina primary. Even though The Swamp Has also yet to catch up to the closing SC polls, this is what Lisa Anderson had to say about it a little over an hour ago:

The latest exit polls from the Associated Press showed that among moderates, who represented about a quarter of the vote, McCain was beating Huckabee two-to-one. The majority of the South Carolina electorate was conservative but Huckabee had only a narrow lead over McCain among them.

McCain, 71, led easily among older voters; those 65 years old or older made up about a quarter of the vote in a state heavy with retirees.

Now, it’s been rumored that I’m a liberal with progressive tendencies, so I cannot very well cheer on a Republican running for President, especially since every one of them without exception (except for perhaps Ron Paul) is guilty of saying batshit insane things during this marathon election season.

Still, Republican voters have to vote for someone that comes with an “R” after their names and their choices must be respected.

However, it baffles me how McCain can win any state primary by garnering a third of the vote (Huckabee got 29-30% with over 90% of the precincts reporting in). Anderson’s observation is a good one: McCain is 71 and will be 72 just after the GOP national convention this summer. That means he’ll be a 76 year-old incumbent running for re-election if he somehow wins.

Anyone who’s a critic of the Iraq war cannot in good conscience vote for McCain because McCain wanted an even bigger surge than Bush had initially proposed (although, as we all know, the 20,500 additional troops got bloated to over 30,000 when the administration, in a very belated postscript said, “Oh, didn’t we mention the support personnel we’d also need to send over?” Such bait and switch tactics disguised as oversights is the only way in which oversight actually exists in the massive corporate boardroom into which our legislative and executive branches have been metamorphosed).

McCain is openly advocating and even joking about bombing Iran while completely ignoring the NIE that has expressed grave reservations that they even have had a nuclear weapons R&D program since 2003. Even Bush, as clearly detached and insane as he is, at least has enough respect for a cynical public to pretend that diplomacy and other non-invasive measures are still on the table. McCain obviously won’t even lie to respect your intelligence.

Then last year, on (appropriately, April Fool's Day) he jeopardized his own life and the lives of over 100 US troops just so he could cautiously meander in a Baghdad market that wound up getting bombed, anyway, just he could show us all how safe it really was.

In John McCain, we see a man who should’ve been beaten by Governor George W. Bush fair and square in South Carolina and who later humped his leg in public and began sucking up to Jerry Falwell after calling him “an agent of intolerance” that same year, not a maverick Republican who had bravely persevered and was vindicated by beating not Bush but a motley crew of freshman Republican presidential contenders who (Romney aside) have not won more than one primary or caucus.

So McCain won the Matlock vote. So what?

Let’s take stock, people: The GOP presidential campaign is working out better than we could’ve dreamed. Duncan Hunter dropped out before the SC polls even closed. Giuliani’s an afterthought and is becoming increasingly irrelevant as he tries to hit a home run in Florida. Huckabee won a caucus, Romney’s picked up only Michigan and Nevada (after running as unopposed as Hillary in Michigan, which the late Gov. George Romney posthumously won for his greaseball son.). Fraud Thompson’s been sleepwalking down the campaign trail and his poll numbers reflect that. Ron Paul is too progressive for many stick-in-the-mud Republicans and who is this Alan Keyes of whom you speak, stranger?

As the pundits have been saying since the Iowa caucus and before, there’s no clear front-runner on the Republican side while people on our side are watching Obama and Hillary switch victories as if they’re at a tennis match.

The Republicans are beating the shit out of each other and when their field winnows down to one man at the convention, most of Republican America will be left with a Brooks Brothers-suited zombie whom they never wanted. We could be seeing Republican voters coming out in record low numbers, which will make Democratic pollsters’ and pundits’ fears that Hillary will unify and energize them seem laughable in retrospect.

And if Hillary Clinton, as fairly and unfairly hated across the red states as she is, cannot unify and mobilize the GOP vote, how could the Republican party’s current, pathetic crop of divisive losers do so?