Thousands of pundit-hours and gallons of printer’s ink have been devoted to figuring out how the Clintons would try and derail Mr. Obama.  Mostly the guessing game as played among the media blatherati had to do with what dirt the Mr. and Mrs. would be able to dig up on Obama, and how they would use it. 

Never in the wildest dreams of anchor or analyst was it imagined that the crime, the unpardonable indiscretion, the Clintons would use against Mr. Obama would be the color of his skin.

An AP story dated Jan. 26, reports that “Clinton campaign strategists denied any intentional effort to stir the racial debate. But they said they believe the fallout has had the effect of branding Obama as ‘the black candidate,’ a tag that could hurt him outside the South.”  What a shabby piece of dissembling.

Mr. Clinton, America’s “first black president,” spent last week scurrying around South Carolina blaming his wife’s impending defeat on the participation of black voters.  At the same time the campaign kept her safely tucked away elsewhere where she could issue shocked disavowals of his nasty race baiting should it become necessary.  Now in a spectacularly tin-eared performance, the former president paints Mr. Obama’s triumph in South Carolina as reminiscent of Jesse Jackson’s dead-ended success there in the 1980s, and dismisses it as some sort of “black” thing.

It is not a little instructive to remember how Mr. Clinton devoted the last couple of years of his administration and the several since leaving office trying to personally define a legacy that could survive the scrutiny of history. Now he seems willing to throw it all away in service to the couple’s single-minded obsession to regain power.  For that prize, they risk both his presidential reputation and the very fabric of the Democratic Party.  

At long last, the Clintons have no decency left.

The nasty Republican civil war has been going on so long now that I for one failed to anticipate the battle royal that has broken out in the heart of the disloyal opposition. Theirs is far more dangerous to their party than ours. 

On the GOP side, partisans of one group or another have rained the insult “RINO!” down on each other in such profusion and regularity that the term has lost all meaning.  It’s like when liberals screech “Racism!” at our stubborn refusal to permit the Mexican refugee crisis to permanently transform our nation’s culture and traditions.  So impotent and old hat are all the jibes that somebody screeching “RINO!” or “Racist” at most of us has the same effect as being called a potatohead – it’s water, duck, and back.

Throughout the acrimony, our candidates have remained by and large civil, courteous and professional toward one another.  Look at the Dems, though.  Never did that party imagine that its two most prominent classes of “victims” would each put forth powerful and viable candidates at the same time and that those ambitious politicians would be forced to attack not only each other, but their representative political identities as well, to gain advantage.

There are powerful indications that a tectonic shift might be occurring underneath the Democratic Party as the ugly war between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama grows nastier by the day. Their conflict remained merely personal until the moment Mrs. Clinton, watching the usually reliable press turn against her, played the girly card on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, suddenly alerting the sisterhood in that state to the fact that Mr. Obama was, first and foremost, a man. A black male nearly drowned in her white feminine tears and the identity war was on.

The liberal coalition has stood glued in place for a long time. It’s most vociferous identities, blacks and Democratic women have together played their starring roles in the ongoing production of Whiteman on a Hot Tin Roof so effectively that a permanent alliance between them seemed assured.  Suddenly in the glare of acrimonious and public competition, both have seen that their commonality was nothing but a piece of stagecraft. Charges and countercharges, hints and innuendos of racism and sexism are roiling through the Democratic ranks and threatening to suck the party into a maelstrom of its own making.

Our GOP factions are used to fighting one another.  We’ve done it before, and will again.  Still, we always manage to put our jackets back on and shake hands at the end of our fights.  The Dems have no idea what the protocol is for this kind of brawl and are in danger of escalating theirs to the point of rupture.  

They didn’t see it coming either.

We do a slow burn in the Home Depot parking lot as they crowd around our cars like pushy piñata hawkers at a border crossing. We shake with anger watching them march through our cities with fists upraised and Mexican flags waving. We rage at our craven politicians who stand behind banks of microphones and pompously drone on about “paths to citizenship,” wondering if there is truly nothing these repulsive whores won’t do to get re-elected.

In a way, this anger is the result of believing too much in our own mythology. We believe people come to America to leave behind their past.  We have no frame of reference for those who are just visiting.  We think of people who stubbornly refuse to adapt to the American culture, to learn English and who remain defiantly Mexican as both traitorous and ungrateful, not understanding that they didn’t come here to become Americans; they’re here to be able to remain Mexican.

The illegals in our midst are not immigrants.  They are refugees, not from a vicious insurgency or civil war, but from something nearly as destructive:  a dysfunctional government that caters to a small class of oligarchs, squanders the vast riches of the nation, and perpetuates the chasm between rich and poor by allowing the few on the top to devour everything that might make for a vibrant middle class. So utterly worthless and so systemically corrupt is the Mexican government that the best police protection it can offer its citizens comes from the private armies of the drug cartels. 

Mexico’s history is one of near constant revolution.  It needs another.  Fully 40% of Mexico’s citizens live below the poverty line, compared to 13% in America. In recent years trouble has been brewing in its southernmost states. It is no surprise that the governments of five of those states receive a significant percentage of their operating capital from remittances sent home by expatriates.

The central Mexican government encourages multiple commuter airlines to maintain massive daily flight schedules emptying the most troublesome states of their poor and dumping them on the northern frontier to face the deserts of the American southwest on their own.  The logistics of this crossing are left to malevolent parasitic criminals and corrupt local officials; the government does nothing more than maintain a large diplomatic staff of perfumed Mandarins north of the border to pass out consular I.D. cards and printed handbooks to those who survive.

In one fell swoop, Mexico has emptied her most volatile areas of excess population and halved the problem of that region’s grinding poverty.  Mexican refugees remit so much of their income back home to their families that fully 3% of the entire Mexican GDP comes from wages earned by its nationals holding sub-minimum wage jobs in America.   

When Americans object to the wholesale transportation of its economic refugees into our nation, the government in Mexico screams “Racists!” at us, and we, with our dicey history and sensitivity to the subject, fall over like porcelain figurines in a high wind.  Our politicians in Washington, knowing far too well how to employ the shameful moments of our past against us, use this false indictment as a pretext for a naked power grab. They artfully create a false linkage between amnesty – which is nothing more than freedom from criminal prosecution – with the wholly inappropriate “path to citizenship.”   By insisting that these people are in fact immigrants, they cynically manipulate reality to the point that dark impulses are released among portions of the American population. As long as the crisis is spun to be that of foreigners demanding citizenship while refusing to become American, and not just a vast stream of refugees looking for ways to feed their families back home, the ugly and pointless demagoguery festers and grows.

We cannot ship tens of millions of people to the frontier and punt them across the line.  It is logistically impossible, and neither our status in the world nor our national psyche could survive images of thousands of peasants dumped into the Sonoran desert to brutally suffer in tent cities hastily assembled by U.N. relief agencies, which would surely be the result were the Mexican government left to deal with a wholesale American expulsion.

Until Mexico is forced to become a responsible neighbor, we must stop the flow of its refugees by unapologetically sealing our Southern border, thereby forcing its craven government to face reality. American politicians who will not support this action must be denied office. Mexican nationals already here need assurances of amnesty from criminal sanction to bring them into the open where we can figure out who and where they are.  We must fire any politician who fails to support vigorous sanctions against greedy American employers cheating minimum wage laws by exploiting Mexican labor.  To those dissemblers who wail that prices will rise as a result, ask them how high they think taxes will have to be driven up to rebuild our ruined social infrastructure. A cooling economy will eventually drive excess labor back home.

As soon as we quit seeing the Mexicans as immigrants, and realize that they are refugees and proud patriots of their homeland, the sooner we can devise sensible solutions to the crisis. But the crisis itself must be clearly understood to be the fault of the Mexican government, and until such time as it becomes a nation worthy of our friendship, it should be denied it.  Playing the cheerful friendly gringo, a cop-out so favored by the current administration, must stop. Though inadvertent, Mexico’s actions have created a situation more dangerous and inimical to our interests than any ever contemplated by a declared enemy of the United States. 

Mexico desperately needs another revolution, and we should make certain it gets one:  Peaceful, to be sure, but transformative.

The dismaying charge of “RINO!” has rung across the GOP battlefield for so long now that virtually all that remains of the dictionary definition of Republican is a terse  “not a Democrat” and a picture of a cartoon elephant with birds circling its head and with little x’s for eyes.

The marriage of social and libertarian conservatism that has been the source of GOP presidential majorities since 1980 has reached that point in its breakup where divorce lawyers begin to salivate: the two partners’ lust for the other’s destruction exceeds the desire to preserve the family assets. Social conservative displeasure with negative libertarian reaction to the rise of Mr.Huckabee has reached such lengths that conservative stalwarts such as Rush Limbaugh and George Will are decried as RINOs by the SoCons.

As with all civil wars, there are few purists among the combatants. The range of opinion between small-government anti-tax laissez-faire libertarianism and big government social reforming Christian conservatism forms a continuum upon which most Republicans find themselves living somewhere near the middle.  Nevertheless, this is an internecine conflict and the extremes define the battle lines.

If the ugliness of the partisanship within the GOP ranks goes on much further, which is likely, the growing gap may widen to the point where reconciliation becomes impossible.  As with the implosion of the Whigs in the decade preceding the Civil War, the GOP will split into two regional parties, neither of which alone can field national candidates and win elections.  What then?

The two smoldering halves of the Reagan coalition would step into a post-election political landscape with vastly different problems and challenges.  The libertarian wing, which in large part confines its agenda to secular government policy, would seek to build a coalition in order to gain national traction.  By and large it just needs to make friends.  As it generally does not intrude into questions of morality and lifestyle and as its primary message of smaller and less intrusive government has attracted substantial constituencies in the past, the libertarian wing’s survival is less problematic than that of the SoCons.

They, steeped in fundamentalist Christianity and deeply hostile to the current arc of American social evolution, need massive numbers of new converts to re-acquire national standing. Once they have brought to their side what fence-sitting fiscal conservatives as are willing to go with them, the SoCons are alone in a self-ordained political wilderness.  The question becomes where do they go for new supporters? 

Though their natural allies might be found within other conservative Christian groups, the SoCons have shown themselves ready to resort to accusations of heresy against denominations whose beliefs deviate significantly from theirs. Their vitriolic attack on Mr. Romney’s otherwise ultra-conservative religion is a case in point. They find little common ground with old school socially moderate Protestant denominations and none whatsoever with Roman Catholics.  With a rigorous Biblical orthodoxy as the sine-qua-non of admission to their ranks, agnostics, Jews, Sikhs, Unitarians, Quakers, Muslims and "godless" Democrats need not apply.

The natural tools of politics – compromise and accommodation – are incompatible with the social conservative agenda. This is evidenced by their tendency to condemn as RINOism any form of conservative thought that does not embrace reactionary social engineering as its core philosophy. Though it is not their goal, their new Conservative Party rising from the ashes of the GOP would be a xenophobic minority party standing in hostile opposition to both its former bedfellows and the other half the American electorate.   
    

Massive realignment of otherwise dissociative parts of an electorate are usually the consequence of long periods of political turmoil followed by a complacency-shocking event or situation.  We have had the former under the Bush administration, which is in large part directly responsible for the current war within the party.

Barring a single galvanizing event that would transform the American agenda by threatening its very existence as did war with Britain in 1812, the SoCons are in for a long wander in the wilderness if the GOP implodes.  Ironically, the most likely source for the nationalization of their brand of politicized fundamentalist Christianity would come as a reaction to some horrifying bit of mischief perpetrated by Muslim fundamentalists, a very double-edged scimitar indeed.

A terrible mushroom cloud ballooning out over a great American city will without question transform our very notion of nation and religion.  Absent that, it is difficult to see where the SoCons go from here.