It’s one thing to be partisan; it is quite another to incite, be demeaning and slanderous, and employ McCarthyite tactics. The Republican presidential campaign has crossed that bright line.

Is the McCain-Palin ticket demonstrating desperation by wading neck-deep through the effluent of character assassination, veiled assertions and reams of unsupported, inaccurate and fraudulent labels meant to arouse (unwarranted) suspicions?

Obviously (duh!).

Ah, but that is not all, grasshopper.

Ye old scribe puts it to you that there is also a deliberate long-term calculation at work. Barring a dramatic event equivalent to, oh, infinity on a Richter-like scale, the campaign and its officials can read and have clearly read the handwriting on the wall of the electoral college.

Besides snatching onto the Lowest Vulgar Denominator Express, this is (to these old eyes) a plan in action to poison the well: if it the case that the opposing ticket is going to move in and that McCain-Palin can’t have what they are after, that sorry duo and their enablers will go about methodically hobbling and aborting (in utero, as it were) any viability by dint of victory to their opponents’ tenure and term, broader consequences be damned. What is being undertaken now is the planting and broadcasting of the loathsome, stinking seeds intended to be watered with crocodile tears and foamy spittle for four years; it is a scenario designed and meant to inflict PTSD on the greatest part of the electorate and division and stasis on the greatest part of the political system as possible.

It is now beyond desperate; it is a petty, cheap, vicious, intolerant, selfish and malevolent pattern. It is beneath the dignity of the collective us as a people and country, but it has become crystal clear that it not beneath the contemptible creatures the elephant insignia-ed race has hired and those it is running.

They are not just shooting themselves in the feet, but deliberately emptying the chamber into Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty, trying to bleed the next administration into a political coma and ineffectuality by innuendo, smear and slime.

Harry S Truman was noted for the bromide “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” McCain-Palin will be noted for “If you can’t stand the heat, destroy the kitchen, raze the house and salt the ground it stood on, then linguistically sneer.”

‘We have to destroy the civic structure in order to save it’ is more than evidently what they have chosen.

The two at the top of the ticket and their advisers, surrogates, whisperers in mufti and the rest in cahoots with such a mangled, lunatic ‘philosophy’ have now more than proven both themselves and their cohorts not only undeserving of office but of commerce in the forum.