Black Box Report

There's a new political disease afflicting the GOP base and rightwing pundits, and a Republican you know may be suffering from it - McCain Derangement Syndrome. Its symptoms include an inability to accept that John McCain is now the prohibitive GOP frontrunner:

Assuming there is no shocking revelation or health issue, the GOP nomination is over. Conservatives need to start practicing the phrase "Nominee presumptive John McCa....."

Sorry, I can't say it. Not yet...

Florida has launched the one ship that Romney's money and Rush Limbaugh cannot stop: The U.S.S. Inevitable. It's gonna happen. Even if there were a realistic pathway to stop him, the media have seized control of the process now and are declaring him inevitable. He is, after all, the favorite son of the New York Times.

So it is over. Finished...And the worst part for the Right is that McCain will have won the nomination while ignoring, insulting and, as of this weekend, shamelessly lying about conservatives and conservatism.

Other symptoms include incoherant rage and and a willingness to shoot their party in the foot, sacrificing a Republican White House for ideological purity (something previously rumoured to only affect Democrats):

If McCain gets the nomination, I would work towards his defeat in November before I'd vote for him...The best thing for the future of conservatism in America, would be a McCain loss in the general. And we need to start tearing the Republican Party apart and re-building, from the ground up.

The causes of MDS appear to be exposure to John McCain's positions on immigration, Bush's tax cuts, campaign finance reform and other conservative issues, but new studies show that those with hyperinflated egos and an over-developed sense of self-importance may also be at risk:

The anti-McCain contingent of the GOP, at least at first blush, looks like it should be a force to be reckoned with. Rush Limbaugh, Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, most of the Fox News crowd, most of the right’s talk-radio hosts, and nearly all of the leading conservative bloggers consider John McCain completely unacceptable...
......
Except, with McCain's ascendancy, these guys look like a paper tiger, who wavering GOP lawmakers may take a little less seriously in the future.

Initial treatment of threatening victims of MDS with a Hillary Clinton presidency has proved futile:

GLENN: Michelle Malkin, I've got 30 seconds. If it's John McCain, Hillary Clinton, do you pull the lever for John McCain?

MALKIN: Not at this moment I don't. I'm running a poll right now on my site and you can see that there are a majority of my own readers who are going to sit home. And I think it's a big warning to the conservative movement out there. We still have time to fix this.

The man for whom this debilitating disease is named is hoping new treatments, in the form of endorsements from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani, will help MDS victims to recover, but even that seems unlikely:

Now that I think about it, a McCain/Giuliani ticket might be the first Republican ticket without any actual Republicans on it.

Making the search for a cure even more complicated is a new theory, advanced by certain knowledgable analysts, saying the disease may have been misdiagnosed as primarily affecting conservatives:

The thing that needs to be said, over and over, though, is that Rush Limbaugh and those guys simply aren’t conservatives. They just aren’t. Radically restructuring government to create an unaccountable executive is not conservative. Building a security apparatus that is designed to spy on citizens is not a conservative principle. Runaway spending and bloated budgets are not conservative ideas. Torture and permanent aggressive wars are not conservative principles. Fearmongering and keeping the electorate scared is not a conservative principle. And on and on.

The fact of the matter is the self-styled loud-mouth conservatives just aren’t very conservative.

But whether this malady threatens conservatives, Republicans, or both, the suffering is real. Sadly, there is no known cure at this time, as Republicans continue to cut research funding, deny insurance and generally tell victims to suck it up and live with it.

UPDATE: Coulter: If McCain’s the nominee, I’ll campaign for Hillary

So sad.