John Kerry is going to lose this election and he’s going to lose it badly. This prediction will probably embarrass me, but I’m going to come right out this point and predict that on November 3rd President Bush will find himself re-elected with a popular vote total in the mid-50’s and wins in more than forty states. What’s more, the Republicans will pick up as many as twenty seats in the House and seven in the Senate. On Election Day, Republicans will win where no one ever expected them to. George Nethercutt will be elected as the new junior Senator from the State of Washington. In California, both the state’s fifty-five electoral votes and Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat will still appear to be up for grabs on Election Day.

What’s more, this vision of the future will be almost universally-clear by the end of this month. That Senator Kerry will win anywhere at all is simply reflective of the sad fact that in states like New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois these days the Democrats could run Jeffrey Dahmer for President and win (and, being dead, Dahmer would appeal to a core Democratic demographic).

Now, it certainly didn’t have to be this way: while the odds always favored the re-election of this President, the Democrats could certainly have run a respectable candidate who would, at the very least, have managed to keep things close up until the end. Given a first-rate campaign, that candidate might even have managed to win. However, the adherents of the Democratic Party itself made this impossible through a combination of the folly of their leaders and the increasing psychological distress of its leading followers.

The first and most obvious factor leading to the present Democratic dilemma is the decision to drastically shorten the primary season which allowed John Kerry to essentially capture the Democratic nomination in a one-month lightning campaign. Had there been a longer process, with real space between the primaries, I strongly suspect that John Edwards and not John Kerry would have won the nomination and we would now be facing a very different election.

How a good chunk of the nation’s electorate developed a mass delusion in January-March 2004 and decided that John Forbes Kerry was the most “electable” Democratic candidate is a subject that you could get a good thesis out of. However, the nomination of Senator Kerry occurred, thus leaving the Democrats without a candidate they can any interest in voting for and, therefore, they were freed to let loose the darker angles of their nature.

Without any exaggeration or hyperbole, I assert the following: the most fanatical followers of the Democratic Party have worked themselves into a frenzy of paranoia and anger which, in combination, have brought many of them to the brink of insanity. Moreover, because the left is so desperate to win, they have decided to welcome these obviously unwell people into the front ranks and use them as expendable cannon fodder as part of their effort to win this election.

The problem, of course, is that once the Democrats let their lunatic wing out of its padded cells, they rapidly seized the asylum. A quick survey of major Democratic sites on the internet, such as Democratic Underground and Daily Kos finds that the level of discourse in such places is broadly comparable to that of a meeting of the John Birch Society circa 1962.

The John Birch Society was named for a Christian Missionary who was killed by the Chinese Communists in 1945 (believed, by Society founder Robert Welsch, to be the first casualty of the Cold War). It was, to put it mildly, a strange group which got progressively stranger than time. It first came known to the public via its bizarre claim that President Eisenhower was a Soviet agent.

Why it’s significant is this: like the fringes of the modern Democratic Party, its fanatically-dedicated members were willing to work, and so they sought to infiltrate the political process at every level. The Birchers practiced a tactic known as “Entryism”. They would seek to infiltrate respectable organizations (such as the Republican Party) in order to advance their agenda. They were stopped, for the most part, because the Republicans themselves sought to fight them off and drive them out of the party, realizing that whatever short-term benefits their support might confer would have negative long-term consequences.

The Democrats, however, welcomed the members of the Rachel Corrie Society into their ranks with open arms, hoping that they would be able to utilize the energy of these people while controlling some of their… stranger impulses. Groups such as MoveOn.org and the Presidential campaign of Howard Dean worked to unite these people and fuse them into something resembling a cohesive movement which, for all of the individual causes it represented, were united in one common goal: the defeat of George W. Bush.

Unfortunately for the Democratic leaders who decided on this course, the supposed cure has already proven to be much worse than the disease. Instead of merely having to deal with a President they despise for the next four years, the Democrats are going to have to do it while being attacked for being insufficiently zealous by wingnuts who suddenly hold a commanding position in the party. Given the ideological bent of the newest and most fanatical leaders of the Democratic Party, I fully expect that the senior members of that party will be required to attend self-criticism sessions as a way of coming to terms with the defeat of John Kerry.

A fairly large portion of the base of the present-day Democratic Party believes, among other things, that the Bush Administration started the War in Iraq to make money for Halliburton, that it murdered Senator Paul Wellstone, that it either staged the 9-11 attacks or deliberately allowed them to occur, that it’s plotting to rig the November elections, and that, upon the whole, the leaders of the Bush Administration should be considered the moral equivalent of the leaders of Nazi Germany.

Now, there will be those who will point out that certain sections of the right harboured similar paranoid delusions with regard to Bill Clinton and his Administration. However, it seem important to note that these people were never embraced by the so-called mainstream of the Republican Party. Steve Forbes didn’t tell reporters that he considered rumours that Clinton ordered Vince Forster murdered an “interesting theory.” Republican Senators didn’t attend and applaud screenings of “The Clinton Chronicles.” The hatred and insanity was there, to be sure, but it wasn’t embraced or manipulated by people in the same way that Bush-hatred has by the Democrats.

And this, I think, is going to be a big part of their undoing. If you watch and read the mainstream media closely, the signs of the crack up between the rational and irrational left are more than evident. Watch the expressions on the faces of the reporters and anchors as they talk to some of the wackier Democrats today: they know that these people are simply out of their minds. They know it, and they don’t want to sink with them.

Just wait and watch for the signs. You can see it in all of the fuss over the forged memos being waved around by CBS. The mainstream media tried to carry water for the left over that issue but, eventually, most of them simply ditched their buckets and faced up to the truth. Look for that to be a common occurrence in the coming weeks.