The principled Republican right has always been a minority. It has always had to make alliances with unprincipled hairpins in order to gain national power — typically with Southern segregationists, or Christian theocrats.

It has always been an uneasy and tenuous collaboration. It is so uneasy and tenuous now that “rational” Republicans have had to abandon all their principles in order to keep the hairpins on board. If this capitulation fails in 2012, the strategy may have reached the end of its practical usefulness.

If the capitulation succeeds, what will it gain for Republicans?  Power without even the vestige of principle — a moral vacuum that will itself lead inevitably and in short order to the end of The Republican Party.

I hate Barack Obama — I have no respect for him as a public servant or as a man.

In terms of the crucial issues facing America today, I don’t think it makes the slightest difference whether he or Mitt Romney gets elected as President in November.

Having admitted that, however, I also think that The Republican Party, with its efforts at nihilistic obstructionism and voter suppression, and Mitt Romney, with his strategy of cynical mendacity, represent the lowest depths of moral depravity that have ever been sounded in the history of American politics.

The election of either Obama or Romney in November will represent a practical disaster for America. The election of Romney will represent a moral disaster from which the republic may never recover.