Work with me here. We're still a long way off from having a Republican nominee, let alone a victor in the 2012 election. Barack Obama isn't doing well in the polls now, and while it seems unlikely there is any engine that can pull the American economy out of the ditch, there are too many uncertainties to count him out.
That said, Rick Perry, with all his folksy gut-speak and straight-from-the-nutsack attitude, slathered heavily with wretch-inducingly saccharine religious pandering, might be precisely the man that the hyperpolarized Republican party is looking for. If so, and circumstances work against Obama, we might end up with a Rick Perry presidency. Shudder! But follow along...
I think we can all agree that such a presidency would be a disaster. Whether it would be as big of a disaster as the George W. Bush presidency is hard to predict, but we've all seen the harm and waste that a bad presidency can inflict.
But even a Rick Perry presidency would come with a silver lining. Given the extent to which he has surrounded himself with the craziest of the crazies in the religious right, his new-found religious piety is starting to make GW Bush's religious zeal look like Yankee Methodism.
Don't forget, though, what Bush's religious santiomony unleashed all that we know of the modern atheist revival. I was biology major at Oberlin College and I my special love was for evolutionary biology, but (despite his book The Selfish Gene) I'd never heard of Richard Dawkins until the Bush presidency. And I'd never heard of Chistopher Hitchens. There's a reason those atheists are rockstars now: George W. Bush. Just imagine how much more mainstream their views will be once we have a real premillennialist nutjob for a president. I shudder to think about the smoking hole America will have become by that point, but if it means the end of America's religious nutjob exceptionalism, I might be able to take it.