No, not this column, no matter how much some of you want that. I give up trying to write about the 2008 election.

The reason I didn’t crank out something last week was due to intense stomach pains. They started on Saturday morning the moment I saw the words “Joe Biden”. It’s been over a week, and I’m still shaking my head. Is Obama serious? Joe Biden? The guy who totally flushed his presidential-run momentum down the toilet by plagiarizing a speech from, of all people, Neil Kinnock? Is this how Obama reacted to the criticism about experience, bringing Joe Biden on to the ticket? Now, Hitlary’s statement about who you want answering the phone at three in the morning at the White House has moved into stark clarity. This was a move made from pure panic, nothing more. It silenced one area of criticism, and opened up about a dozen more. Karl Rove calling him a “big blowhard doofus” puts me in a bind: I now actually have to agree with something Rove said.

I didn’t watch one moment of the DNC. I couldn’t, not after that. Honestly, if I want to see my guys continually shoot themselves in the foot through bad decisions, inability to admit mistakes, and outright mule-headedness, I’ll watch a Bears game.

My candidate, as I said many times on this site, was Hitlary, purely from practical considerations. I know Obama. I knew how much of his idealism would be ditched in the name of pragmatism and party unity. When JJ was going rhapsodic about Obama, I told him that I’ve seen this before. 1972. George McGovern got into the same position that Obama was in by playing to the idealistic primary voters in the Democratic Party, then once he got the nomination, realized that he had to make compromises to appeal to the Powers That Be in the party, both to reestablish a modicum of peace in the party and to try to remove the perceived stigma of being a hard leftist. His veep choice was part of that. Unfortunately, McGoo chose Tom Eagleton, who’d hidden his alcoholism and ECT experiences from the press, and not very well. We all know what happened when that got revealed. That won’t happen to Obama, because Biden already has his stupidity on public record.

So, was there an opening? Could I reach into the darkest recesses of an already-dark soul and consider voting for McCain? I have said before that the only way I could consider voting for a Republican was if the Republican in question was McCain. And I have to admit, a spark flared when I saw the words “McCain chooses Palin”. It then vanished a fraction of a second later when I realized that Michael Palin wasn’t eligible to hold that office. But in an election like this, the only way anything would make any sort of sense would be to place it in a context in which an ex-Python would flourish: the absurd.

Well, if Biden was a sick joke, Palin is Dead Baby Comedy, which is ironic considering her stand on abortion. If McCain wanted to pick a woman in order to attract Hitlary voters, he sure as hell didn’t pick the right one. You see, John, there are these things called “issues”. Hitlary voters didn’t vote for her because she has a vagina. There’s the fact that Hitlary has a well-documented stand on social issues that appeal to these voters, and an equally-well-documented trail of leadership, both in the Senate and in the White House (we all know who was running the country between 1993 and 2001). Sarah Palin’s stand on social issues…well, let’s just say it doesn’t appeal to the average Hitlary voter, of which I am one, despite the lack of vagina. As for leadership, the first-term governor of a minor state does not make a case for that. A first-term senator from a major state has more leadership experience, right?

Appeal to youth? Two things, really: first of all, McCain’s medical history makes it abundantly clear that he’s got about a 20% chance of surviving his first term. Yes, his veep is youthful. But does anyone, including hard-core GOPers, see her as president? She’s as lightweight as British toilet paper. James Carville didn’t even have to try when he ripped her to shreds on Larry King. It’s still nice of him to do it (any appearance of Carville is welcome), but it’s definitely a case of getting rid of your termite problem by burning down the house.

It’s not the female thing, at least with me. As much as I loathe Thatcher, she had four years of experience as leader of the opposition before becoming PM. Ditto with Merkel, who’s proving to be more centrist than I thought she’d be; intelligent pragmatism would be lost on someone like Palin. Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi were capable dynasts in a part of the world that still takes that principle seriously. Ellen Johnson-Shirleaf is an experienced technocrat who’s a bit over her head trying to restore peace and something resembling prosperity to a country that’s so war-ravaged that it’s almost impossible to fix, but she has a moral gravitas and sense of mission. What does Sarah Palin stand for, other than the discredited policies of the Right? This stuff has to be considered given McCain’s health. There’s a far, far greater chance that she’s going to land up in the big chair than Biden. And it scares me.

Of course, I am getting some serious enjoyment over the fact that her seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter is about to make her a rather young grandma. The evangelicals are spazzing around like a kid with ADHD, and that’s always amusing to watch. Some of them are going to vote Obama now that their social values have been oh, so blighted. Some of them are turning total hypocrite, pulling a Chris Crocker and screaming “LEAVE SARAH ALONE!”, not willing to face reality and realize that birth control and/or abortion could have taken care of this issue before it became one. And the rest of them are ticked off because when this happens in their family, it’s usually a relative doing the impregnating and therefore it’s nobody else’s business.

GOP insiders are pissed about this. They’ve just had one of their old reliable fangs removed. You’re not going to get any more hypothetical questions about abortion and birth control during this campaign, not after this. The fang was almost out after that moron Rick Warren got finessed by Obama in regard to when life begins; now the dentition is complete. The GOP can’t do a repeat of 2004 and swing the election on social conservativism.

This puts an interesting question on the table: McCain said he knew about the pregnancy before selecting Palin. Could this have been a positive factor in that choice? Is McCain using this situation to de-ball the Religious Reich once and for all? He’s had a mad-on for them since 2000, when Dubbaya and Rove used them to destroy McCain in South Carolina. I’ve always believed that McCain had a well-hidden fragment of Nixon in him, and now it’s coming out. This could be the only interesting thing about the next two months: how far will McCain go?

But it isn’t interesting enough for me to keep writing about it. The 2008 campaign has turned into a sick joke, and I can’t laugh about it anymore. Nor can I entertain. My idol Hunter Thompson faced the same dilemma in 1976. He was able to use the rage of 1968 and the apocalyptic portents of 1972 to his advantage, but 1976 gave him nothing to work with, especially after he fell in love with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jimmy Carter (I love saying that to piss people off). The sense of mission I had in 2000 and the need for justice of 2004 aren’t there this time for me. The events of the last week and a half have turned the next two months from mere ennui into a death march. US Politics has turned into something that Feydeau would consider too absurd to use.

I’m going to walk into the booth on November 4th and vote for Obama. But I’m going to walk out of there with the same feeling I had in 1984 voting for Mondale and 1988 voting for Dukakis. I never wanted to feel that way again in my life.