I hope I'm wrong. And I try to resist unwarranted cynicism and defeatism. But everything I've seen over the last week leads me to conclude that this is more or less inevitable. Our system is realy broken and it's not going to suddenly fix itself.

I've been part of the cynical Greek chorus here for some time, Glenn. I have had a bipolar relationship with your posts, alternately challenging what seemed like unwarranted (pun intended) optimism and taking succor when the darkness overwhelmed me.

But now that you seem to have finally reached a level of pessimism worthy of the facts, I am merely sad.

Our fragile, infirm Constitution is aflame. The blogosphere has been clanging the bell for several years now. But alarms don't put out fires. What I want is to put out the damned fire, but the "professional" fire department is populated with pyromaniacs.

We've all been howling about that problem, too. But the final, fatal ingredient is the apathy of our larger community. They just don't seem to care if it all burns down. A few of us form a ragtag bucket brigade, but the arsonists merely laugh.

I wrote this in January 2006:

As Benjamin Franklin left the final day of deliberation by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a citizen supposedly asked him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

If all goes as planned, in a week or so that Republic will finally escape our grip. When the Senate votes to affirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the central tenet of our government - the separation of powers - will take a blow from which it will likely never recover. In its place a de facto monarchy will solidify and expand, and our Constitution will join the Geneva Convention as a quaint anachronism. And the Republic we have kept for two hundred years will join its Athenian and Roman predecessors as good ideas whose time has passed.

We can argue over the exact time and manner of death. But I don't think the outcome is in doubt.

Not because she will foreswear torture and illegal wiretapping and secrecy and renditions. Not because she will embrace the joys of checks and balances in January 2009.

She won't.

We have to elect her because the Republican party will miraculously rediscover the Constitution the day she takes office.

And because, unlike their invertebrate Democratic colleagues, they will find ways to hamstring her regardless of the number of seats they hold in Congress.

Glenn, you seem to be traversing the same arc as many of us (albeit with more force and perhaps effect). But, like many, you seem reluctant to play out the string.

The Democratic cavalry has demonstrated, repeatedly, that they have no intention of rescuing the Constitution. You articulate our outrage. But the tsunami of scandals goes on; what does our sound and fury signify?

I find myself thinking in terms of triage. We can dismiss out of hand the possibility that our nation will recover without intervention. The hard question is this: is this patient so far gone that nothing we can do will save it? I want to keep trying to resuscitate, but what can I do that will have any effect? Voting for Democrats now looks as effective as chanting and burning incense. Protest is the sound of a tree falling with no TV cameras to record it.

You are one of the most important, and one of the best bloggers we have, Glenn. But we are stuck in an endless loop of diagnosis without treatment, and the patient is dying. Your posts indicate your own increasing frustration, yet you (understandably) seem reluctant to "call it."

Dx is obvious; it is Rx that we lack. What can we do? I have no answers. I am to the point that, absent a plausible plan for treatment, I am going to have to start thinking about other patients.

The reason the wingers detest logic is that it leads them to places they do not want to go. Logic is taking me to a sad and lonely place, but the only alternative seems to be self-delusion.

The right wing (Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Ed Schrock) is anti-gay.

The right wing (Mark Foley) is anti-pedophilia.

(incredibly long list of additional offenders @ http://wizbangblue.com/2007/09/19/republican-pedophiles.php )

The right wing is anti-Nazi.

Q.E.D.

I was thinking about the Strangelove parallels, too. I have neither the time nor the techno-chops to do it, but one could create a splitscreen version in which damn near every absurdist line in the 1964 film could be matched with something equally absurd that has actually been said by one of the Neocons. The irony is that General Buck Turgidson is a composite of civilians Kristol and Krauthammer (Kubrick would have used him without even changing his name) with perhaps a dash of Ledeen. On the rationalist side, Mandrake and Muffley are as decisive and effective as the entire Democratic Party, and the good Doctor S., despite looking like a young Kissinger, could be swapped for Dick Cheney.

They all visualize themselves as Slim Pickens, but they would never put themselves so near harm's way.

Damn, man. You did tell us so.

And we miss you.