On Wednesday I listened to Rush Limbaugh devote two segments of his show to bashing primarily two people: Barack Obama and John McCain.

Considering his longstanding antipathy to McCain, and his urging of Republicans to vote for Hillary, and considering that the polls show Obama is easier for McCain to beat, it strikes me that Limbaugh does not want McCain to win. I realize that he does not speak for all Republicans, but there is a fairly sizeable contingent of hard core McCain haters who have long maintained that they Absolutely Will Not Vote for McCain. When I was supporting Fred Thompson, I worried that some in the anti-McCain wing -- especially the angry pledge taker types -- might be cementing themselves into positions they might regret later.

Am I off base (ugh, that word!) in speculating that Obama might be causing them to have serious second thoughts? Because, if you think about it, for those McCain haters who are also Obama haters, sitting it out as they promised they would look less and less attractive.

And what about those who advocated -- who seriously advocated -- voting for Hillary against McCain? Are they going to vote for Obama? Or are they now facing the unpleasant possibility that Obama might be less palatable than McCain?

In addition to this, I think there's an emergent conservative Republican paradox: Obama is making Hillary Clinton downright attractive to conservatives.

This is crazy, and it is something Hillary never could have done. I can remember when she was the She Devil incarnate, and the mere mention of her name would sent any red-meater into a frothing, foam-flecked frenzy. But look at the stages they've gone through. First, they saw McCain -- the epitome of a base-betraying RINO -- actually win. Meanwhile, cheap demagogues like Ann Coulter softened them to vote for Hillary against McCain, and while Rush Limbaugh only urged them to vote for her "strategically," I think this has had a corrupting effect on that group called "the base." It's human instinct to defend what you've done, and by voting for Hillary once, many people will defend that vote.

Add Obama hysteria to the mix, and little wonder the old-fashioned conservative Hillary hatred has almost entirely dissipated. Right now (save a few cranks like me), most of the criticism of Hillary is coming from the Obama left. (This will most likely generate more sympathy for her, and with any luck, red-meat conservatives will start seeing her as a quasi-Lieberman.

There's nothing logical about this, as Hillary has not changed. She remains what she has been all along: a corrupt and venal socialist, and her campaign is a Peronist style end-run around the 22nd Amendment.

So, I worry that the driving force behind some of the current opposition to Obama is stuff is that the anti-McCain "sit it out" Republicans find him wholly, terrifyingly unacceptable. They fear that if Obama is the candidate, it will wreak havoc with their "sit it out" or "vote for Hillary" strategy, so they're in a panic. They would hate to have to swallow their pride and get behind McCain, so they're fighting Obama with everything they've got.

What makes this even crazier is that if Obama is the candidate, all signs point to him being easier for McCain to defeat. Perfect example:

"PRINCETON, NJ -- A sizable proportion of Democrats would vote for John McCain next November if he is matched against the candidate they do not support for the Democratic nomination. This is particularly true for Hillary Clinton supporters, more than a quarter of whom currently say they would vote for McCain if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee."

"The conventional wisdom among Republicans is that they would much rather run against Clinton than Obama. But McCain insiders see Obama as more vulnerable to McCain than Clinton in the West, partly because of the Hispanic vote -- in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico."

Wouldn't any reasonable person think that Republicans who want to win in November would be positively jubilant at the prospect of having him as the nominee? Instead, some of them seem terrified of the prospect of Obama being on the ticket.

Why?

What gives?

What could possibly explain such irrationality?

I mean, if we test out this theory by applying it to the other side, let us suppose that through some combination of factors Huckabee instead of McCain were poised to be the Republican nominee, and that all the polls and statistics showed that he was likely to lose in the fall. The Democrats would be delighted, ecstatic, even. The last thing they would do would be to attempt to derail Huckabee before he had clinched the nomination.

This is not to say that the attacks on him wouldn't come later, and quite viciously, but for now, they'd mostly be quiet, holding their breath and keeping their fingers crossed.

Yet counterintuively, the closer Obama gets to the nomination, the more the Republicans freak out.

As to what's going on, the explanation that makes the most sense is that hatred of Obama is being coupled with hatred of McCain -- especially in the minds of those who want McCain to lose, and who believe he will lose.

Once again, I worry that the problem is with this fanatic, hard-core, loser wing of the GOP.

It wasn't enough to lose Congress, and I think they badly want McCain lose this race -- but their outrageous and childish demand is that he must lose it to Hillary, a trusted (and above all, profitable) old enemy.

As far as I've seen, none of the angry Republicans who declared for Hillary have ventured that they'd vote for Obama -- because they wouldn't. I think that if McCain loses to Obama after they sit it out, they'll be unable to live with themselves. So they are having an absolute fit.

This can be called many things, but it's hardly a victory strategy.

Quite the opposite.

Let me be blunt here: I think the GOP loser wing is engaged in treachery to their own party.

The irony is that they'd call me a RINO. And not just for the crime of wanting the Republican Party to win. But for a reason I find astonishing:

For not supporting Hillary Clinton!

I admit I'm very cynical. I've seen a lot of crazy things in politics, and for years I've been predicting that Hillary would be depending on the right wing to win.

But I never thought I'd live to see anything like this.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I hope this post doesn't sound too dark, because I think there might be bright side once all these shenanigans have subsided...

The conventional wisdom used to be that Hillary Clinton was the great uniter of the GOP. The way things are going now, Barack Obama may be (assuming he becomes the candidate) on the verge of doing what Hillary Clinton could not have done -- unite the conservatives behind McCain.

(I don't know how much more irony I can take....)