I'LL PUT GLASS IN YOUR DINNER AND SPIKES ON YOUR SEAT

Look, I'm not going to rise to the bait by responding seriously to the new Wall Street Journal op-ed by Fox-News-Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, in which they assert that President Obama should step aside and let Hillary Clinton run in his place. They don't mean a word they say; she's not going to run, they know it, and they're fully aware of the fact that they and their friends would eviscerate her if she did. The point of the op-ed isn't to express an opinion -- it's to trip Obama and the Democrats up. It's carefully timed to rule the morning political chatter so it can do that. It's not a contribution to the national dialogue; it's a leg extended in the aisle as the bullied kid gets up to walk to the front of the classroom.

There are kids in every school who take pleasure in occasionally harassing the less favored, but even those kids don't necessarily make harassment their life's work. Modern Republicans (and their nominally non-Republican fellow-travelers) are full-time bullies -- it's all they do. The modern Republican Party is a 24/7 opposition research/dirty tricks/character assassination operation that then takes advantage of its success at these endeavors to elect candidates -- who then pretend they're interested in governing, while they continue the OR, the tricks, and the character smears.

I'm not even sure these days that Republicans are interested in governing on their own terms -- that is, I'm not sure they really believe, in a heartfelt way, that their budget cuts and tax cuts and climate skepticism and gay bashing and pro-gun absolutism and the rest are the best course on which to sheer the ship of state. They just know it frustrates us, and that's all that matters. They pass this stuff or fail to pass it -- I'm not sure they care, except that getting it passed makes us more miserable. And I know that pleasing their rich donors is vitally important to them, but they've gravitated toward financial backers -- the Kochs, the people Karl Rove's operation gathers together -- who also just want to crush the enemy, and who apparently can longer tell anymore where their self-interest ends and bullying begins.

Part of the reason the GOP can't resign itself to Romney, I think, is is that even the big-money boys pump their fists when they watch Fox, and so they can't quite bring themselves to crush the candidates to his right. (If they really want Cain to go away, for instance, or Gingrich, why aren't they putting pressure on Fox and talk radio to stop rallying around them?) The bullying has become an end in itself, even for them.