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" AMERICA&amp;#039;S MOST RESILIENT PARASITE /// The Republicans have produced a field of candidates so utterly comical, so completely devoid of conventional political merit, that the field itself is strong evidence for the elimination of the Republican party. (Illustrations by Chris Ware via Newscom) One year from now, the country is going to elect itself a president, whether it feels like doing so, or not. In keeping with the day, let&amp;#039;s take a look at how that process progressed over the weekend, shall we? On Friday, Mitt Romney, the Republican frontrunner and a man who could be mugged for his wallet through the mail, and a man of such iron will that he wrote a book called No Apologies in which he changed positions on several issues between the hardcover and paperback editions, went before the Koch Brothers hobby-horse Americans for Prosperity banquet and bravely promised to do everything he could not to do anything he bravely promised to do when he was running in any of the several other political campaigns that have kept him from ever being &amp;quot;a professional politician.&amp;quot; Specifically, he signed on to Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s toss-Grampa-to-the-jackals voucher approach to Medicare. Ryan was thrilled to death. Not his death, of course, but the death of a lot of old people who&amp;#039;ll be thrown onto the market of the single most disgusting industry in America that doesn&amp;#039;t involve deepwater drilling. &amp;quot;Younger Americans today, when they turn 65, should have a choice between traditional Medicare and other private health care plans that provide at least the same level of benefits. Competition will lower costs and increase the quality of health care,&amp;quot; Yes, because, in all aspects of our economy, but especially in the health-insurance game, corporate power slavers for the thrill of real competition, because American corporations want a free market where they might have to lower costs and increase the quality of their product, despite the fact that Wall Street will scream bloody fking murder when they do. That&amp;#039;s why we have 300 domestic airlines in the United States now as a result of deregulation. Thank you, Mitt Romney, GOP frontrunner. Moving on, Saturday night saw a genuinely strange spectacle in Houston. Herman Cain, by all accounts (now up to four) an unsuccessful adulterer, took the stage with Newt Gingrich, by all accounts (too many) a very successful adulterer, for what was billed as a &amp;quot;Lincoln-Douglas&amp;quot; style debate. This was rather belied by the facts that: a) the two men sat in plush armchairs, and looked for all the world like Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show; b) the two men disagreed on very, very little, and at great length; and c) neither of these clowns is Abraham Lincoln. On one memorable occasion, the conversation turned to fast-food. (God knoweth how. I was switching back and forth between Cain-Gingrich and LSU-Alabama, which was only slightly less boring.) This is the official Washington Post account of that moment: Onstage Saturday, Gingrich seized the opportunity to show off his mastery of policy matters. He spoke with ease about the intricacies of health policy, saying the nation&amp;#039;s health system should be less bureaucratic and more consumer-friendly. &amp;quot;Think about going to McDonald&amp;#039;s,&amp;quot; Gingrich said. &amp;quot;We have no national hearings on fraud at McDonald&amp;#039;s. You show up and say, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;d like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.&amp;#039; You give them money. They are happy. You are happy. If you open up your bag and there&amp;#039;s no Quarter Pounder with Cheese, you are unhappy.&amp;quot; This is the &amp;quot;philosopher-politician&amp;quot; demonstrating his &amp;quot;mastery of policy matters.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m sorry, would you like to super-size your colonoscopy? Some day, volumes will be written about how Gingrich managed to get everyone in the Washington smart set to believe he is a public intellectual with actual ideas, and not just the guy at the club whose life gets changed for him every time he reads a new book. My god, Caligula died centuries too soon. Today, if he&amp;#039;d brought his horse into the Senate, some careerist Beltway journo would find that the horse had whinnied some &amp;quot;interesting new approaches&amp;quot; to our &amp;quot;entitlement crisis.&amp;quot; The horse would be on Meet the Press the following Sunday with David Gregory, who would ignore the fact that there is a fking horse sitting across the table from him and concentrate instead on something the horse had whinnied five years ago that seems to have been contradicted by something the horse whinnied the day before. And then Tom Brokaw would come on to mumble something about how horses were more politically savvy back in his day. And, of course, this being a battle of ideas, and not the cheap and tawdry mongering of scandal, Herman Cain&amp;#039;s alleged horndoggery did not come up, except as an excuse for the kind of media-bashing that both of these giants can do in their sleep. Gingrich, for one, a fellow who once announced that he would make a speech concerning what Bill Clinton&amp;#039;s dick did to Monica Lewinsky every die until he died and went to Adjunct Professor Heaven, announced today that he has had quite enough of the gossip-hungry media that care more about old horndoggery (and recidivist comely-staffer-banging) than it does about his careful analysis of why Blue Cross needs a drive-thru window. And, to close things out the weekend, Michele Bachmann, onetime frontrunner, gave a speech this morning to the Family Research Council, a claque of noxious Bible-bangers whose research, remarkably, never has benefited a single American family, and called her rivals &amp;quot;frugal Socialists,&amp;quot; which is both cool and utterly meaningless. (Later on, she cited &amp;quot;the NFL&amp;quot; as an institution where &amp;quot;rules matter,&amp;quot; and failed to mention that the NFL has succeeded through the most thoroughgoing application of socialist principles to be found in American business today.) She went on to read the minds of The Founders for several paragraphs before English appeared to give up entirely, refusing all on its own to be her native tongue any more. And that was just this weekend, exactly a year before the election. By any conventional measure, and not entirely through no fault of his own, Barack Obama is a staggeringly vulnerable incumbent. The economy is slowly sinking up to its wheelwells. Unemployment is said to be at a now-all-but-permanent nine percent. His own base is dubious. The independents are as unreliable and dumbassed as ever. There is an energy in the streets that any Democratic president who hadn&amp;#039;t listened to Bob Rubin or hired Tim Geithner would have been able to tap with ease. Instead, the incumbent offers platitudes about &amp;quot;understanding their frustration&amp;quot; and moves along. He has only one thing going for him. By any conventional measure, and entirely through their own fault, the Republicans have produced a field of candidates so utterly comical, so completely devoid of conventional political merit, that the field itself is strong evidence for the elimination of the Republican party. The frontrunner is a simuloid fake. The leading contender is a horndog as surprised to discover that women did not want him as he was to discover that China had The Bomb. The leading &amp;quot;intellectual&amp;quot; thinks Barack Obama &amp;quot;...is about as candid and accurate as Bernie Madoff in what he tells the American people&amp;quot; and then, of course, decries the incivility that is drowning out the important discussion we need to have about the issues facing This Great Nation. The rest of them are concerned about zygotes, black helicopters, and whatever else is simmering in the Bachmann-Paul-Santorum stewpot. And there is Jon Huntsman, the invisible former governor of Utah, reasonably sentient human, and proven non-horndog. This isn&amp;#039;t a primary campaign field. It&amp;#039;s a condo-board election at the Hell Country Estates. The phenomenon of &amp;quot;indispensable enemies&amp;quot; \u2014 which the late Walter Karp saw coming decades ago, and warned us against \u2014 has required down through the years that the Democratic party be complicit in the Republican party&amp;#039;s encroaching dementia. In a real democratic republic \u2014 even one in which the people insist, through their own lassitude, on having only two parties \u2014 the proper function of a political party confronted with a demented opposition is to make that dementia so obvious to the public at large that it becomes a liability for the other party. If that causes the other party to cease to exist, well, that&amp;#039;s the free market of ideas. One hopes a more sensible one will rise in its place. Instead, the Democratic party has failed utterly in its duty to the country to force the Republicans to regain their sanity or die as a political entity. It has failed utterly even to try. What we see now in the Republican primary field is a result of that failure. It&amp;#039;s bad enough that the Republicans will pay no price for embarrassing themselves this way. There&amp;#039;s no reason why the entire country should. CLICK HERE FOR MORE OF CHARLES P. PIERCE&amp;#039;S LONG READS &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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