I predict that by about March 1, every Republican Presidential candidate will have imploded to the point where none will be left.
Just look at what's been going on the last couple of weeks:
The most fun has been watching Rudy's poll numbers tank as his "Sex on the City" shenanigans have become known. It's one thing to have an affair, ditch your wife, and marry your mistress. It's entirely another thing to expect the taxpayers to cover not only your fooling around, but to provide taxi service for your mistress all over the east coast as well.
Sex IOKIYAR (except gay sex). Screwing the taxpayers to pay for your sex, however, just won't cut it with the uptight wing of the Republican Party. That is, of course, unless you're an anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-gay bigot. Guiliani might have skated if he'd been a good right wingnut hypocrite. But the combination is toxic.
And I haven't even mentioned Saint Rudy of 9/11's penchant for making up statistics out of thin air, or his BFF Bernie Kerik. That's just frosting.
John McCain's campaign died because he tried to be reasonable about immigration. Republicans can't stand their leaders to be reasonable. If there's a reasonable postition to be taken, it is necessary to reject it as 'librul' otherwise government might actually work, and we can't have that. McCain tried to recover by being unreasonable about Iraq, but it was too little, too late.
Big Fred Thompson is auditioning for the part of Ronnie II but can't remember his lines. He actually seems to be playing the part of Ronnie in his later dotage. Too tired, too lazy, too forgetful. He's TV trying to pretend he's big screen.
Next is the empty suit known as Mitt. He tried to have a Kennedy-esque moment in Texas. But all he succeeded in doing was giving the news media reason to replay Kennedy's speech about the absolute separation of church and state. Mitt looked so small, so empty in comparison.
Then there were his completely illogical statements of belief:
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
That just doesn't make sense. Not only does it exclude everyone who doesn't have a religion, but it flies in the face of history. By that logic, religion should have died out long before the USA came into being. Then he railed against the 'new religion of secularism' even as he asked for tolerance of his 'new' religion of Mormonism. He ended up just pandering to the bigoted evangelical vote, and everybody knew it.
Mitt is collapsing in the face of a true religious nut case - the Huckster. Unfortunately for Huckabee, his support for the totally unworkable 'Fair Tax' will blow him away as soon as homeowners realize it means a 30% sales tax on their house payments. Poof!
If that's not enough, there's the little problem of letting a serial rapist out of prison so he can rape and murder 2 more women. And he lied about it, then tried to blame Bill Clinton for it (12 years after Bill's term as governor).
That leaves nobody but the nobodys. Libertarian Ron Paul, and hatemonger Tancredo just don't have enough star power to get anybody's attention. Imagine a Republican Convention where 'none of these assholes' is the winning choice.
Republicans are probably going to have to turn to Dick Cheney to help with the selection process again, and he'll nominate himself. At which point he'll declare the election results a matter of executive privilege and elect himself President for as long as they can keep his bionic heart beating.