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" Illustration by Donkey Hotey for The Politics BlogThis isn&amp;#039;t a presidential campaign anymore. It&amp;#039;s a sneering, bloody, senseless mess. (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      Both Willard Romney and Rick Santorum \u2014 and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick the latter is? \u2014 ought to thank their personal deities that they&amp;#039;re not racehorses. Because, if they were, and given the way they&amp;#039;re both limping towards the finish line in Michigan and Arizona today, we&amp;#039;d already have the screen up, the syringe at the ready, and the veterinary ambulance discreetly parked off to one side. Particularly in Michigan, it is fairly plain that people have seen enough, heard enough, and had enough of these two lame and damaged zombie campaigns. It&amp;#039;s now to the point where watching it is like being trapped in a restaurant while the couple at the next table have a loud argument that ends with waterglasses flying and somebody storming out, running over the waiter on the way. I wish conservatives remembered how to behave. I truly do. I wish they still stood for calm, for reason, for politesse in all things. I wish they remembered how to use their inside voices. Because this modern form of conservatism, where everybody&amp;#039;s in everybody else&amp;#039;s business, and where everybody&amp;#039;s arguing at the top of their lungs that they and they alone can be a colossal enough dick to enough of their fellow citizens to merit the nomination, ultimately debilitates the whole process. Yes, by all means, let&amp;#039;s holler at each other some more about who&amp;#039;s tougher on the unauthorized-by-Jesus use of lady parts by the ladies who own them. Let&amp;#039;s sneer at college, but let&amp;#039;s do it loudly, so the whole country can hear us. Let&amp;#039;s sneer at science and learning and reason, and let&amp;#039;s make sure we&amp;#039;re standing on the highest platform we can find, so nobody misses a word. This is foul. This is stupid. This is doing the country no good. Right now, I&amp;#039;d settle for a nice, smoke-filled hotel room in the Midwest, where a bunch of rich foofs could get together and cut a deal that screws everybody but one candidate and puts an stop to this endless outbreak of rhetorical e.coli. Just in the last week, angling for votes from Christ alone knows what constituencies, Romney got tangled up trying to pretend that he loves NASCAR, and by claiming to see an event that happened before he was born. (&amp;quot;Zygotes are people too, my friend.&amp;quot;) Meanwhile, Santorum decided to run against John F. Kennedy for a couple of days, and then determined that the president was working to betray the nation&amp;#039;s youth by encouraging them to go to college, where the socialists and the lady parts run free, despite Rick&amp;#039;s diligent lifelong efforts to restrict the activities of both of them. Remember back when conservatives thought it was comic books and Chuck Berry that would lead the Youth of America astray? Now, apparently, college is the worst thing that can happen to an American kid. This isn&amp;#039;t a presidential campaign anymore. It&amp;#039;s a bunch of flyers that should be stapled to a lamp post somewhere. I wish conservatives still remembered how to, you know, conserve. (And perhaps the most remarkable thing about the last couple weeks is that the Republicans have managed to do all this damage to themselves with little or no contribution to the overall destruction of the brand from N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civilization&amp;#039;s Rules and Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces. He&amp;#039;s finally got the campaign of his dreams \u2014 i.e., one made up entirely of the steady repetition of mindless vitriol \u2014 and he&amp;#039;s not even a very big part of it. Where in the hell is the man? He&amp;#039;s in Nashville, calling Santorum a &amp;quot;big labor Republican.&amp;quot; Sad, really.) Part of it is the preposterous way that the GOP set up its primary calendar, and the utter inability of the Republican National Committee to keep their state committees from banjaxing the whole thing in a scramble for the influence that comes from being early on the schedule. Part of it was the long time it took to clear out the deadwood from the field; Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann never should have been in the campaign long enough to be &amp;quot;frontrunners&amp;quot; even for one day. But the great responsibility lies with the fact that, for more than 30 years, the Republicans have been sucking around for a campaign just like this one. They knew full well that their &amp;quot;base&amp;quot; was heading into the wild places, and they did nothing to stop them. They did nothing to arrest the spread of abject wingnuttery in the various state houses, from which came the generation of young Republicans stalwarts who won in 2010. They played footsie in the South with the Council Of Conservative Citizens, and in the West with the more polite fringes of the militia movement. For mean and temporary political advantages, they allowed more and more of the fringes into power in the party until, finally, there was no &amp;quot;Republican establishment&amp;quot; any more. And now, too many respectable conservatives are wandering around, blinking, and wondering how it all happened that their party has lost its mind. You were there, kids. You just didn&amp;#039;t care. &amp;quot;The big difference is that the protesters don&amp;#039;t believe in governance,&amp;quot; David Brooks laments in today&amp;#039;s New York Times. Well, where in hell does he think they learned that? From Glenn Beck? More likely, they first learned it from the sanctified Republican dimwit who said, in his first inaugural address, &amp;quot;Government is not a solution to the problem. Government is the problem.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a little bit late for people like Brooks to decide they don&amp;#039;t have the stomach for the politics of Reagan&amp;#039;s Children, or for the presidential campaign they were bound one day to produce. Watching Willard Romney and Rick Santorum lay clubs on each other over the past week, each attempting to out-Reaganite the other, as Reaganism is reckoned in today&amp;#039;s Republican party, has been a clarifying experience for the country. A party that dedicated itself long ago to the notion that government is the problem has finally run out of reasons why we should allow them to run the government they so insist they despise. A party that dedicated itself long ago to the politics of expedient division has finally run out of credible tactics through which they can pretend to unite us. A party that dedicated itself long ago to placating the social fears and paranoia of the people whose money they were relentlessly shipping upwards to the folks at the top of the food chain has finally run out of distraction and misdirection. (Willard Romney seems to have settled on a campaign theme of, &amp;quot;Yeah, I&amp;#039;m rich. Deal with it, proles.&amp;quot;) All they have left now, lying there on the track with the ambulance idling lowly off to one side, is each other, and, god knows, that&amp;#039;s all they really deserve. STAY TUNED FOR MORE FROM MICHIGAN + ARIZONA ON THE POLITICS BLOG ALL NIGHT "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12980/michigan-primary-2012-6962059/>