THE CONSPIRACY TO KEEP THEMSELVES PURE AND STUPID

This Hugh Hewitt blog post includes a crazy part and a really crazy part. The crazy part is of interest because some form of what it describes could actually happen, which would mean that the Republican Party is even more insular and self-sabotaging than we thought. As for the really crazy part, well read on.

Here's the part that I think could really happen, more or less. Don't struggle to understand this in detail -- just let it wash over you:

The last thing you want to think about right now is the 2012 GOP primary calendar, but I am afraid you have to, if you want the RNC chairmanship contest to have meaning and the GOP to have a good chance of recapturing the White House four years down the road....

The RNC must begin now to consider overhauling the presidential nominating process three years hence....

To do so, it needs to mandate that Iowa will caucus on the same day that New Hampshire votes, that New Hampshire will close its primary so that only Republicans so registered by the close of 2011 can cast a ballot, and that two other states will vote on the same day --the state in which John McCain won by the narrowest margin and the state in which he lost by the narrowest count, which would mean Missouri and North Carolina would be invited to vote on the same day as New Hampshire....

The point (or one point, at least) is that Hewitt, like a lot of other Republicans, believes the GOP lost in 2008 because it wasn't Republican enough, and it wasn't Republican enough because the presidential nominee was chosen by the forces of pure evil -- independents and Democrats. Therefore, for 2012, he wants to make the Republican primary process as insular and password-protected as possible.

To any sane person, this seems like a formula to guarantee a Goldwater-level blowout in 2012. But if my recent reads of the online right are correct, this is a widely shared belief. And we know a lot of big players who may shape the future of the GOP think the party has suffered because of a loss of purity.

So, while I think it would take martial law to get New Hampshire to close its primaries, or even to sacrifice its unique date on the primary calendar, I think the Republicans might try to do something to make sure the 2012 calendar has as many closed primaries as possible, and is front-loaded with contests that minimize the importance of evil Easterners, otherwise known as Satanists.

Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease.

****

Now for the really crazy part: Why does Hewitt think this is going to be necessary? Because, otherwise, a sinister cabal of Obama/netroots secret operatives is going to hijack the GOP nominating process. No, really -- we can do that. Gather round and open your mind to the sinister possibilities:

... the process as it stands now is extremely vulnerable to manipulation by hard-left activists of the Democrats who, when 2012 rolls around (or late 2011 given the acceleration in primary season we witnessed in this cycle) will want to advantage President Obama by forcing the nomination of the weakest GOP candidate....

Rush Limbaugh demonstrated the ease with which relatively small numbers of hyper-activists can invade and distort the other party's nomination process when he ran the very successful and very entertaining "Operation Chaos" in the spring of 2008. America's Anchorman urged conservatives to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary in the Ohio and Pennsylvania Democratic primaries and elsewhere, and they did, in large numbers, adding considerably to Obama's political woes at the time. Rush started up Operation Chaos late, but had he begun early and wanted to nominate Hillary, he could have....

Flash forward to the summer of 2011....

MoveOn.org activists meet with David Plouffe and Harold Ickes and decide it is time to pick the GOP nominee, and instructions go out to the Obama and Clinton networks in Iowa: "Reregister as Republicans. Instructions to follow."

[I'm imagining the evil O-bot network of wired youths all receiving the go code through messages texted to their brand-new brain-implant iPhone 8G's. But I digress.]

The same message goes to New Hampshire lefties. The left doesn't even bother to hide their design. It is legal, and it is politics. The example of Rush is everywhere pointed to when Republicans object to the hijacking of their process. No matter, the law is the law. The left will decisively impact the GOP nominee.

Unless the GOP moves now to change that....

Wow. This is paint-the-windows-black-and-barricade-the-compound crazy talk. And Hugh? If we really could do something like this, and wanted to bother, we sure as hell wouldn't pick a RINO for you guys -- our sinister operatives would go for something like a Keyes-Santorum ticket.

And you'd almost certainly applaud that.