Who knows. Maybe McCain (and Pallin) are just the fall guys and dolls for the Republicans. There has been some commentary in speeches to Republican think tanks that I've seen on C-Span from several people, for example David Brooks who has basically stated in a nutshell here that "the Republican brand is toast and has been a failure. We've got to reinvent the whole thing from top to bottom. Our ideology has failed and we can't continue our charade as long term, our ideology is going to keep us from winning. We've got to start a new long term project. We got to create a new brand and toss out our old one [they always speak in terms of "the brand, don't they?].

Perhaps this whole charade is an attempt to lose, maybe even to be able to blame it on the right wing Christians and free themselves from that "base". And in the end, they can admit they've got to tell it straight to start over, and tell people that the old model isn't working anymore and the "new" Republican party can begin taking shape. In essense, to burn down their Rome by having a fiddle party.

In the meantime, Obama inherits a devastated economy that's going to take a decade to fix, if not longer. And the Democrats stay stuck with the problems our own party has created for itself.

Perhaps I'm seeing visions in the clouds too, but the Republicans are putting out these ideas to their think tanks that they aren't putting into print for public consumption so I do think what I'm thinking as just a weird but possible scenario could in fact be what is happening. Just another way of viewing what's happening and only putting out the idea as a possibility. Of course, they'd like to win to do more cover up of the nasty past 8 years but perhaps they know they can't.

Yes, Buck, I think you have a most reasonable analysis here. I too have been thinking that "the [actual]powers" must be considering the option of pulling the plug to effect a McCain loss, this time around.
After all, it is not only the Republicans who are running the Republican Party. Thus, having the political Republican Party "take [the blame for] the fall" might also be the more conservative way to retain control of the USA governmental processes [managing both parties, the press, etc.]; meanwhile pressuring the Democratic Party both before the November election [keep relatively quiet on USA militarily aggressive actions toward Bolivian balkinization, Venezuala, Iran, Georgia] and after the election, to maintain long-term right-wing conservative foreign and domestic policies. If he should win, the Obama Administration's survival might be only four years, in attempting to put out or control all the pre-set and ongoing fires in their inherited "legacy" [courtesy of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party].

Well Hoffman, you're going farther than I was talking about. But I presume you're talking about that outfit created by Mr. Truman after WWII.

Last glimmer of desperate happy talk by Democrats who want to believe Cinderella always gets rescued.

Time to go negative.

Keating Five. Man broken, rendered volatile and unstable by 5 1/2 years of torture.

No happy talk from me. I'm one of those pessimists who actually believes we may be in a financial condition worse than what we had during the great depression.

But I'm willing to do my part to help my party, even though we've for the most part created a sorry lot. There are a small number of exceptions but not many. Obama is one of the best and brightest to come along in quite some time, even though he's like almost all of them, willing to compromise principles to win, as most politicians do. He's displayed quite a bit of that in the last couple of months.

I just hope he's not going to be the fall guy for the financial crisis because that would make the racism problem worse, not better and we've got to fix that problem once and for all. If a mega financial crisis is to come, it probably should come between now and the time he takes office, assuming that he does. If not, I'd rather see if fall on McCain right before the dual impeachment proceedings.

Well anyway, I'm going to go back to making happy talk. And tearing down the competition. I can't live moping around about the difficult realities we really face.

McCain/Palin's hypocrisy can only become obvious to people who are willing to allow inconvenient facts to interfere with their emotional decisions. That is not a quality found in the Republican's evangelical base. As for the undecided, they are unlikely to be motivated solely by the fear of a Palin administration (did you see Frank Rich's column yesterday?). They will need a positive reason to choose Obama and it's hard to imagine what that would be.

We have an opportunity to make the word "Republican" as pejorative as the conservatives made the word "liberal."

Let's do it!