Life Imitates Art

In my post last night, I wrote a fictional scenario which pitted the old Republican guard, in the person of Senator John McCain, against the new Republican guard, personified by a (still absent) Sarah Palin. The Party informs McCain that they're conceding 2008 to Obama so that Palin can ascend as the standard bearer in 2012.

"All that God shit and nothing else," beams [Pastor John] Hagee. "We own the Party now."

Well, the reality isn't far from my fiction, according to The New Yorker's George Packer.

McCain is collaborating with his captors. By picking Palin he knowingly guided his campaign well over hostile territory and then aimed its nose straight down. Once taken hostage, he refused to speak his captors’ propaganda, but he allowed everyone else to shout it to the rafters. He gambled, all right, but it was in the direction of orthodoxy—for Palin is a creature and an icon of the Republicans’ evangelical base, which came into full possession of the Party this week and completed the G.O.P.’s conversion to identity politics. No wonder Pat Buchanan was so fired up on MSNBC, while Mike Huckabee wore the look of a man who missed his train because he was given the wrong departure time.