Democrats to Choose 2008 GOP Nominee

At least, that's what the WaPo's E.J. Dionne seems to be thinking:

Is a [John] McCain-Jeb Bush 2008 ticket in the offing? Some Washington insiders think so.

If McCain is to get the Republican nomination for the 2008 election, he’ll need the support of President George Bush.

Recently, NewsMax reported that President Bush’s top media adviser had signed on with McCain for his expected 2008 run.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne writes that before McKinnon announced his support of McCain, got wind of the McCain-Jeb possibility.

Dionne says "a shrewd and loyally Democratic political operative with personal ties to McCain” told him that choosing Florida Governor Jeb Bush as his running mate could be the key to McCain’s success.

Can you believe this? Donk political operatives openly dispensing advice to their favorite RINO to help him win the nomination of the party they despise?

Actually, I can. It may sound cliche, and it's subject to regular revision, but nothing about the Left ought to surprise us anymore. And, in terms of their ambitions, it makes perfect sense. The Democrat Party is moribund as a nationally competitive political entity. We are a decade into a sustained Republican era, the first since the span from the Civil War to the Great Depression. All of their ongoing extremist caterwauling and obstructionism isn't going to change that, if indeed it doesn't dig their hole even deeper. And if the Left is going to survive in the long term sufficiently to safeguard their institutional redoubts in the bureaucracy and the courts, that means, yes, co-opting the Republican Party by cultivating and reinvigorating its Rockefeller heritage. And perhaps, by so doing, causing the currently dominant conservative base to exit the GOP in disgust, opening the way for the Dems to return to past glory.

Certainly imposing Darth Queeg, a man who departed GOP orthodoxy a decade and a half ago, on a conservative base that still vividly remembers his obnoxious, over-the-top dissing of them in the 2000 primaries (to say nothing of his treachery in helping the Democrats preserve the confirmation filibuster) would, shall we say, not be well-received by those of us who are already down on the current Republican leadership as it is.

But, of course, there's your begged question. It is still the Republican base that determines the Republican presidential standardbearer, and there is no way on God's green Earth that GOP primary voters are going to choose the Supreme Chancellor.

So how does Dionne think "Sailor" will get around that?

Bush would like to hand over power to a Republican...who is committed to his Iraq policy.

Other front-runners for the Republican nomination are Rudy Giuliani and Condi Rice. But Washington Republicans don't fully trust Rudy - who had a history of bucking the party as Mayor of New York.

And Condi Rice is said to be preferred by the White House as Bush's successor. But so far, Rice has indicated she won't run.

That leaves McCain.

Actually, that would leave pretty much every other Republican in the field, every one of which - even Rudy - would be more trustworthy that McCain. A fact I would think would be obvious, except that this is the Extreme Media's favorite Republican we're talking about, and pointing out the obvious - that he's a backstabbing quisling - isn't part of the agenda.

Indeed, I could see a President McCain immediately announcing a full-scale retreat from Iraq and in the overall GWOT as soon as he took office. Hell, he's already calling for the jihadi captives at Gitmo to be turned over to U.S. courts for conventional criminal prosecution, which I seem to remember John Kerry advocating to general GOP scorn and derision a year ago, including, at the time, McCain's. Would quitting Iraq be that much more of a stretch? It'd sure please his press buddies, and their constant lathering is all he appears to care about.

And how does Dionne think McCain can possibly garner the blessing of the man whose arch enemy and all-around pain in the ass he's been for the past five years?

"The President could well come to see McCain as the only Republican with a chance to push a Republican era forward,” says Dionne. "McCain, in turn, knows that his only way around the Republican right is to run with Bush’s open blessing, if not his outright endorsement.”

Bush’s brother could be the "deal-closer,” according to Dionne. "If picking Jeb is the price of winning over George W., McCain will pay it.”

Do I really have to point out the roaring problems with this flight of left-wing fancy? Jeb Bush says he doesn't want to run for President in 2008 - why, then, would he possibly want to be anybody's veep? He already has national name recognition and is as well-suited to run for the top job as his brother was in 2000. He doesn't need to be towed there by being someone else's second banana.

Second, while the maddening Bush family propensity for ill-advised blanket forgiveness of their political enemies (The "New Tone" speaks for itself, and look how chummy they've gotten with the Clintons) is well-known, can anybody see Jeb signing on as the XO of Dubya's self-proclaimed nemesis? Or Dubya himself being bought off by it?

And lastly, what is there to suggest that, even if this backroom deal was consummated, the GOP base would buy into it and nominate McCain? Sure, we love Bush, but not blindly, and his agreeing to such a frankly corrupt arrangement would make a mockery of his entire presidency and be seen by most Pachyderms as the betrayal it would be.

Which is, of course, why it will never happen. Just like it didn't happen in 2000.

But, to modify yet another adage, a half-man can still dream, can't he?