Mama Fizzlies

Two-thousand and Ten will go down in history as the Year of the Crazy Woman. Of course, the germination of this phenomenon took place back in Aught-Eight, when John McCain found the courage of his convictions and chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

The Palin factor caused mighty ripples to roll through the ranks of the Republican Party. It frightened away otherwise interested Independents, who prefer an even keel, but found no such thing in the rudderless McCain campaign. The current gaggle of would-be elected officials is almost certain to have the same effect.

This looks bad, very bad, for the GOP. Traditionally, a first-term president's Party will lose a considerable number of seats in Congress to the opposition. With that in mind, Barack Obama went for as many victories in his first two years as he could possibly get, with the ambition of his agenda equal to the pace of his pursuit.

This pushed many of those fickle Indies back to the fence upon which they so proudly straddle. Then came the primaries, fueled by the Tea Party activists, who rallied in droves at costume parties in which they alternately dressed up as Minnie Pearl and the distinguished-looking fellow of Quaker Oats fame.

The evidence bears out the fact that the Tea Baggers were not thinking with their brains. Exhibit A: Christine O'Donnell of Delaware. It's easy enough for a self-professed witch to win a Republican primary, just as it once was for a Grand Wizard to do so. In a general election for a seat in the U.S. Senate, though, she will pose more of a challenge to her own Party than she ever could to the Democrats.

In Nevada, Sharron Angle managed to wrestle the nomination away from another wild-eyed she-con, Sue Lowden, the one who seriously suggested that Americans could trade poultry to their doctors in exchange for health care. Angle is possessed with views so extreme as to make the John Birch Society collectively blush, all the way down to her "Second Amendment Remedies" rant. She has done the impossible - she made Harry Reid look palatable.

The madness, shockingly, has even infected California. There, Meg Whitman (of eBay fame) has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to rent the governor's mansion. Without delving too deeply into her psyche, consider that if one Googles the words "Meg Whitman Crazy", one will find roughly 400,000 results.

California Senator Barbara Boxer also faces a new dementian, another McCain girl, no less. Carly Fiorina, the hatchet-faced hack who ran the Maverick's campaign aground long before he squealed for Mama Grizzly's help, has also spent millions of dollars of her own cash in this race.

If you ever worked for Hewlett-Packard, chances are Carly Fiorina sent your job overseas. That's the zenith of her experience in life, firing the citizenry.

For conservatives, this should have been the season of incandescent hope, but it will instead be remembered as an electoral cycle of tremendous disappointment. Will there be some erosion in the bulwark of majority the Democrats have enjoyed for the last two years? Sure, but... but...

But a few months ago, there were expectations of a complete takeover of both Houses. With the current lineup of candidates standing before the electorate, they will probably end up with the smallest gains ever achieved in a first-term president's mid-term election. If it weren't such a good thing, it would be sad.

They will have only their fringe to blame. The American people may not know much, but they surely know better than to shoot themselves in the foot. Not when the other foot is still on the mend, still sore from the last time they stepped in that right-wing bear trap.

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