Why I want John McCain to wreck the country

I’m monitoring Barack Obama not by listening to anything he or Joe Biden says, but by tracking the sputtering heads bobbing in his wake. I’m no longer reading blogs that appear to be taking either man or the Democratic party seriously, so when I run across something like Digby’s lament of Joe Biden’s elegiac portrait of the living McCain, it’s by way of a link from a link from one of the few sites I am reading regularly, in this instance (as in most recent others), Avedon Carol’s Sideshow. Avedon, I would say, doesn’t regard the Democratic party as a sinking ship but as an ever more thinly disguised bottom feeding amphibian, for which sinking isn’t a disaster but simply part of daily life. If it walks like a bottom feeding omnivore and talks like a bottom feeding omnivore, it’s probably one of those grotesque giant salamanders the Discovery Channel features every now and then.

She’s still persuaded, as, I must admit, am I, that the amorphous amphibean trumps whatever it is the GOP have become (an appropriate metaphor eludes me; feel free to chime in), by which is meant that however pointless the Democrats have become in any sense other than as foils for Republicans, they can never rival the GOP on any negative score because 1) they lack the instincts, and 2) they’re armless, legless and toothless amphibeans; how much damage can they really do? That’s a start toward the GOP metaphor, I suppose — it has limbs and teeth; feel free to chime in with more details — and more certainly toward the reason why I would just as soon see the slimy Democrats finally eaten by Republicans.

It’s that they are constitutionally incapable of doing as much good as the GOP are of inflicting harm. They didn’t use to be, but they are now and increasingly so. They are less a counterweight to Republicans than they are a variously disgreeable impediment. They managed, for instance, to electorally dismantle Republicans in very recent memory, but without, it turns out, materially affecting the GOP’s ability to get crappy and dangerous legislation passed by the newly fledged Democratic majorities. How can this be?

Who cares? For my purposes it doesn’t much matter what combination of venality, cowardice and ideological putrefaction accounts for the accelerating Democratic disability. I get the sense, however, that when Joe Biden waxes eloquent about John McCain’s fine qualities and decades of profound experience, he’s being honest, and that he wouldn’t really mind so much if his good friend John topped his new friend Barack in November.

And if it’s okay with Joe, who represents the liberal wing of the party (it’s difficult to write that without laughing) and is supposed to be the party’s attack dog through the election (equally difficult), then it’s more than ok with me. In the past I’ve written that the Republican party required an epic beatdown to make clear that the thugs and vicious simpletons who run it now are intolerable in a civilized country. Well, they’re still here and show no signs of changing, and far from threatening to kick their asses, Biden wants to hold hands with them in the porch swing after cocktails. And he’s not alone, one can’t blame him; it’s the will of the party; they’re willing to eviscerate one another, but draw the line at gutting the opposition.

The trend, a Democratic party becoming increasingly ineffectual even at its peak, is undeniable. The notion that, even so, electing Democrats is better than electing Republicans, begins to seem similarly beyond debate to me, but for the opposite reason: it’s wrong. Democrats have become a fake opposition party, and electing them perpetuates an imaginary duality.

That’s not to say that Democrats and Republicans are equally bad; cancer is worse than malaria. You don’t really want either, though, and both should be eradicated; good health should be an option but at the moment, and for as far as the jaded eye can see, it isn’t. Things are not well, and things will get worse, and no one who isn’t suffering a fever delirium expects either candidate or either candidate’s party to come up with a cure.

(This was intended to be Part II to this Part I, so I should mention that this bit of doomery was composed largely to the music of The Ponys Celebration Castle, which includes “We Shot The World,” a title that anticipates President McCain’s outgoing Foreign Affairs essay. Now we’re on to Bob Dylan’s semi-recent Modern Times; if McCain were running to be Bob Dylan, certainly age would be no barrier; certainly there would be other, crueler ones.)

Distilled, the case I’m making is that Democrats will never destroy Republicans, who richly deserve destruction, so the lone option is to elect Republicans and allow them to once and for all destroy themselves upon the public shoals. And if if it doesn’t happen, then something close to everyone will have got exactly what they deserved. Electing Democrats has become something similar to the mostly female, mostly teenaged compulsion of cutting; it’s a sickness, not a choice; it’s a half measure. One way or the other, please: this or that, dead or alive.