I feel privileged to live in this time, when the world is changing.  We've all seen the numbers.  The GOP may be treading water with women, but they've lost the young.  They've lost Hispanics.  They're losing men.  They're losing the suburbs.  They lost the House, the Senate and the Oval Office.  The killer is, now they're losing big business, and Obama is sealing the deal by bailing out Wall Street.  They've lost territory - the geographical strength of the party is in the Deep South, the High Rockies and scattered among the plains - states that have checkered histories as the last bastions of slavery and separatism, home to a religious outlook that veers into the deeply superstitious.  We will see Texas become Democratic, with the possible election of a Hispanic governor in 2012.  Before then, the economic death spiral will arrest itself, and might start to grow again by 2011.  Stocks and home prices will edge up, gingerly.  Meanwhile, 40 million people will be able to go to the doctor again and millions more will see their tax burden reduced.

This is so over.  But the numbers don't show the worst problem the GOP faces: Denial, which is all the rage apparently at CPAC and has even infected the GOP rank-and-file.  For years I have debated politics and policy at great length with a conservative friend of mine and he does a great job of putting his positions forward.  But I stopped.  I just can't take it any more.  Not so much that we disagree on policy, I just can't take that he refuses to accept it is a terrible problem for the GOP that at least one-third of his party is made up of nuts -Rushites, Coulterans, Palinistas, and other assorted "neocultists" who will doom his party long before they get a chance to doom America. 

And there's absolutely no hope for the GOP as a national party in the near future. Based on the CPAC straw poll, we're looking down the road at Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee, none of whom could beat John McCain who couldn't beat an inexperienced Obama; Newt Gingrich, who already refused to take on this weak field who couldn't beat John McCain who couldn't beat an inexperienced Obama; Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal, proven liars, objects of national ridicule already and governors of small population states that go Republican anyway; Mark Sanford, arch-conservative from a small population state in a region that likewise goes Republican anyway; Ron Paul, unelectable nutjob; Charlie Crist, a moderate who is hated by the "basest" of the base; and ... Tom Pawlenty (crickets chirping).

"Someone else" finished in the high-middle, but who?  There may be whispers about Jeb Bush, who would be a formidable candidate but only to the extent of putting up the best fight, getting the most funding, and securing the closest loss - the U.S.A. has had its fill of the Bush family.  Maybe we'll see the emergence of a new candidate, but the only one of any possible strength at all might be Texas Governor Rick Perry, who will not wear well on the national stage and was so weak in Texas that his reelection-by-plurality featured competition from a Republican Texas State Comptroller who ran against him as an independent and singer-satirist Kinky Friedman, lead man for Kinky and the Texas Jew Boys.  All of this is somehow supposed to be tied into a force by Michael "hip hop bling bling" Steele, who has already alienated the three GOP Senators whose heads are closest to where America is now, and where it's going to be tomorrow.

Then will come the 2010 census, and the GOP is right to be in a panic.  What follows is redistricting, largely controlled this time by Democrats.  Eventually, immigration reform will come along, adding millions to Democratic voter rolls.  Republican representation in the House will continue to contract.  The Democrats will pass sixty senators.  States might remain about even in governors for awhile, but in this atmosphere, Democrats will control state legislatures, the "farm teams" of national party politics.

Someone please tell me where I'm wrong.  Watching the spasms of the GOP is sad, almost pathetic, and they won't bottom out until, as they say about abusive personalities, they admit they have a problem.  I haven't seen any indication this is happening, though.  They're still blaming others - their members who aren't "conservative enough,"  the good old liberal media, or their own inability to "get their message out" which translates into saying "Americans are too dumb to see how smart we are."  All the while they seem convinced that their party is poised for a rebound, that they are just in a down cycle.  This misreading of the American mindset is groupthink at a mind-boggling level.

I want two parties.  I want the GOP to survive and provide balance.  I want my conservative friend to understand that.  But until he is ready to admit that his party is on the precipice of national irrelevance, it's too painful for me to talk politics with him anymore.  He might as well be arguing for the existence of the Easter Bunny while I'm proving up traffic lights.  And the only reason I can think of that he remains in such oblivion, that he and his fellow travelers have allowed people to have the run of their party who are verging on the insane and violent, is because everything they were taught to believe about American society, economics, and politics by their fathers was wrong.  Today's GOP is so visceral on the one hand and so irrational on the other, that the only way I can explain it is that it's a reaction to a psychic attack against their core beliefs - it has made the mildly unhinged Republicans into radicals and pushed the level-headed ones deeply into denial.

Politics is as generational as following sports teams.  My parents were FDR Democrats who lived through The Great Depression.  That shaped how I looked at the world, until I became able to discriminate among theories of government and realized FDR was right all along.  My kids are Obama Democrats who are living through The Great Recession.  I am imprinting upon them while they are learning their own lessons.  I am sanguine about the loss of my investments because I know my kids and my grandkids are in line for a better world, one that they will continue to improve long after I'm dead.  Such is the price of victory.  The price of defeat, however, seems to be a psychological break with the rational.

Unless and until something happens to bring the party back to the real world, we will marvel at a GOP train wreck that continues to unfold and will do so for many years to come.  We can only wonder what will take its place.