Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble

After Stalingrad on the Delaware, I had had enough of Christine O'Donnell. Enough of her scorched earth campaign tactics, enough of her personal and ideological hypocrisies, enough of her windmill-tilting cynicism, enough of her fratricidal mania....just enough. Just give me the pin-up picture, sew her mouth closed, and try to make up that Senate seat somewhere else.

Which is why I haven't had much to say about this debacle since. It's unfolded precisely as [ahem] Rove, Krauthammer, and I predicted it would: Lefties have had a gleeful field day with her personal liabilities, and after debuting eleven points behind Vladimir Coons, CO'D slid steadily further behind from there.

Arguably the dumbest thing dredged up from her background (by that noted and respected political commentator Bill F'ing Maher) was an M-TV clip from the nineties where she made mention of considering Wicca at one time. Why do I bring that up? Because that's the personal attack angle that Dan-Quayle-In-A-Skirt chose to defend herself against in this maudlin spot:

Wow, I can just see the bumper stickers now: "O'Donnell For U.S. Senate: She's not a witch!" Sheesh, if she was going to dignify Maher's foolishness, why not mock it in turn with a Halloween theme (give her the hat and broom as props) or throw in a Bewitched homage by showing an inset graphic of Coons, complete with Lenin beard and goatee - hey, there IS an eerie resemblance - and then she twitches her nose and the pic disappears in a puff of smoke. If she wanted to put over the "I'm you" line, it might have worked better if she'd displayed a self-depecating sense of humor.

What this spot did is threefold:

1) Left all her other personal peccadillos unaddressed, the clear implication being that she ducked what was more releveant to voter concerns about her background;

2) Insult that large majority of Delawaries who aren't supporting her by linking all of them to her genuine flakiness in the effort to ingratiate herself with them;

3) Rip off feminazi hypocrisy by implicitly suggesting with this "soft" theme that playing hardball with her is out of bounds because "she's a girl," after having ripped Mike Castle from rectum to belly button in the GOP primary.

The sequel did nothing to address these deficiencies:

What Christine O'Donnell wants Delawaries to think she's made of: Sugar, spice, and everything nice. I guess.

Arguably, by playing the populist card, she only succeeded in inviting even more scrutiny of her own questionable credibility:

O’Donnell begins, “I didn’t go to Yale.” Er, no, but she’s been accused of serially misrepresenting her education record. She continues, “I didn’t inherit millions, like my opponent.” Besides the slight dollop of envy it suggests, it’s a poor defense to the accusations of stiffing former employees. Again, if the aim is to make the race about what’s happening in Washington or what Chris Coons would do in office, turn to those issues a bit quicker – Election Day is in less than four weeks!

She should have been all over Coons' ass like a wildcat high on PCP from day one. I wouldn't have bothered with trying to ameliorate her negatives, and turned the same brass knucks strategy she used on Mike Castle against the Bearded Communist. If there was a way for CO'D to pull off the upset, it was to convince fifty percent of the electorate plus one that Coons is even worse than she is. Instead, we get this "I'm you" cooing. Pardon me whilst I barf.

All of which made the Coons-O'Donnell debate showdown even more predictable:

The debate was contentious and free-wheeling, but O’Donnell failed to land many punches, much less a knock out, and was put on her heels several times when asked about her views on evolution and her past financial problems…

Coons declined to attack her on her financial past, calling it a “distraction.” But that prompted one of the more awkward lines of the night. O’Donnell referred to the multiple skits on “Saturday Night Live” in which she has been mocked for her comment that she “dabbled in witchcraft,” among other things.

“You’re just jealous that you weren’t on Saturday Night Live,” O’Donnell said to Coons.

Coons said he was “dying” to find out who would play him. But for much of the debate his scorn for O’Donnell was barely disguised, and he risked appearing overly negative toward his opponent.

In short, Coons was a dick, and O'Donnell did pick up a few sympathy polling points from it. But....everybody already pretty much knew that Coons was a dick. The reason he's still up double-digits on Samantha Stevens is because Delawaries don't take HER seriously, and she's done nothing to convince them that he's worse than she is where they think it matters: personal gravitas. You can't even get to front-burner campaign issues until that hurdle is dismantled. "You can't be mean to the girl" ain't gonna cut it.

But now we return to the central reason why I have never taken Christine O'Donnell seriously: Her true campaign isn't against Chris Coons or the Democrat Party, but her own:

I don't know if she or her zealot supporters ever TRULY believed that she could win the general campaign like they angrily insisted she could, and bellicosely smeared as RINOs anybody who questioned that fanciful claim. But this dollop of fratricidal paranoia, verbally deposited like the proverbial flaming pile of dog shit on John Cornyn's front stoop, tells me they know she's doomed now and are moving on, in classic leftwing templatery, to classless fingerpointing at their REAL enemy.

Her number one fanboy at AmSpec, Jeffrey Lord, was already carrying the fetid water Thursday evening, and in the comments I let him - and CO'D - have it between the eyes:

You've got to be kidding, Jeff. This is rank paranoia, as well as getting a head start on rolling out the lame-ass, finger-pointing excuses for the utter debacle that the TPE has made of what was a gimmie Senate seat pickup.

Let's, once again, establish the context for this Senate race: Christine O'Donnell has been double-digits down to Chris Coons since early August. She never had a chance in the general election, and she never was going to have a chance no matter how much money was poured down the rathole that is her ill-gotten campaign.

She raised several million dollars since the GOP primary and what's she done with it? Make those maudlin "I'm not a witch" ads that made the colossal blunder of acknowledging the devastating, gravitas-laden political judgment of....Bill Maher??? Why didn't she ignore this witch nonsense and stay on Coon's throat like a rabid wolverine? She wasted a good two weeks at least.

As if it mattered. What we're seeing in this general campaign is exactly what Rove and Krauthammer and those [ahem] less well-known C'OD critics said from the beginning: She's an awful candidate in a state so "blue" that even Ronald Reagan would [have] be[en] hard-pressed to win. And now, confronted with the looming "We told you so", her - and your - rigor mortic retort is to accuse the NRSC of "sabotage"? What part of "down double-digits for the past two months" isn't getting through here? Why would the "establishment" need to sabotage a campaign that was never afloat to begin with? And why should they pour good money after bad to prove their innocence like Barack Obama is demanding of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when there are other, actually winnable Senate contests where that dough can do some bona fide good?

Mark my words, Jeff: Christine O'Donnell is doing more to discredit the Tea Party movement, and damage the Republican re-ascendancy, than any Democrat could have dreamed. Tighty-righties would be well-advised to jump off her doomed crazy train before it plunges, like the locomotive at the end of Back To The Future III, to its fiery end at the bottom of Eastwood Ravine.

Here's a visual, in case you needed it: