"When the going gets weird," Hunter S. Thompson famously said, "the weird turn pro."

This quote has been running through my head all week. It's been such a weird week, in fact, that I even wrote a column praising a Mitt Romney campaign ad. Weirdness abounds, in other words. Well, I was really just wonkily praising the cars in the ad, but still....

Speaking of weirdness, we had what could be the final Republican presidential debate. In it, the three top Republican candidates explained how they were going to -- simultaneously, mind you -- both bring down the cost of gasoline and bomb Iran. This qualifies not just as weird but downright bizarre. I mean, how stupid do they think the American public is? Well, I suppose it's just the Republican primary electorate, but even so....

When the going gets weird, the weird run for president, apparently.

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A tectonic shift is in process in American politics, and while individual incidents occasionally draw attention, the larger continental drift is usually not in focus. Because Democrats have started winning the so-called "culture wars."

The culture wars (at least, the modern incantation of them) began roughly in the 1980s, with the rise of the Religious Right (or the Moral Majority, as they liked to call themselves back then). Since then, sometimes the battles are fought out in the open, and sometimes there is a lull in the fighting; but over and over again Republicans (mostly successfully) used "wedge issues" to divide the Democratic rank-and-file, and thereby win elections.

"Culture war" is a polite way of saying "war over sex," of course. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s generated a backlash, to put it another way, and we began calling this backlash the "culture wars." But all of these issues had one common thread -- sex. Gays were a big target. So is abortion. And now, increasingly, so is contraception.

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Watch out!
You might get what you're after.
-- Talking Heads, "Burning Down The House"

You might not know it from the extended bouts of hair-pulling-and-garment-rending anguish emanating from the Republican Party establishment these days (see: any recent GOP commentary by a party elder or deep thinker which uses the phrase "brokered convention"), but the Republican Party is getting exactly what they asked for. Not just asked for, in fact, but specifically planned on.

Ever since the 2008 presidential primary season, the Republican Party as a whole came down with a serious case of Democrat envy. The GOP took a look at their own primary process, and then they took a look at what had gone on between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and they decided they liked the Democratic plan better. Obama hadn't been destroyed by the months-long primary fight (as many at the time predicted), he was in fact toughened up by the experience and a better candidate when the general election started -- as a direct result of the long primary calendar. This is the root cause of the Republicans' envy.

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Well, OK, not really. But it did make for a good headline, didn't it?

Ahem.

Mitt Romney is making a few waves with a new ad, reportedly running in Michigan, which is titled "Growing Up." This was a natural move for him to make, since he did indeed grow up in Michigan. But the focus from the media has so far been on the wrong car -- at least as far as I am concerned. The news story is that the car "present-day" Mitt is driving around what I assume is a Michigan neighborhood is either a "bailout car" or (even worse, in Michigan) not actually made in America. I leave these squabbles to others. I also offer up a warning: if you do not care about this ad, or cars, then I would advise you to just stop reading now.

What I personally noticed from Mitt's new ad were the cars at the very beginning and at the very end of the ad. Four years ago, I actually contacted the Romney campaign, after seeing him on Jay Leno's show. Mitt told the story that his kids had bought him (as a surprise) a 1962 Rambler American. This is a "family joke" sort of present, because Mitt's father was also the father of the Rambler (having run American Motors Corporation at the time).

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George Washington, celebrated today by federal holiday, was (of course) our first president. When he died, the phrase which spread the country as part of the myth-making around Washington was: "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen."

While this may -- as a direct result of a very successful mythmaking campaign -- be almost universally true today, it was not when the flesh-and-blood man (not the myth) held office as the new nation's first "Chief Magistrate" (as it was referred to back then). Yes, even Washington had his media critics.

This was due to the emergence of what I call "proto-parties" in American politics. The first two parties went by various different names (such things were fluid, and usually not even capitalized back then). Washington became the head of the Federalists. Their opponents were originally called "Anti-Federalists" but preferred to be called "Republicans," and are now historically known as "Democratic-Republicans" (mostly to differentiate between them and today's Republican Party, which are not the same party). As one partisan newspaper helpfully defined: "it is not a question now between federalism and anti-federalism, but between republicanism and antirepublicanism." Such hair-splitting was common, because the entire concept of a political party was a fluid and changing thing, back then. True political parties quite simply did not exist -- there was no central party committee or other group, there was no corporate presence of a national party like a "head office," and there was no communications network for the party to discuss the "party line" on any issue.

What did exist, instead, were newspapers. The partisan press, in essence, were the party structure. All newspapers in America were able to mail each other copies of their papers for free (due to a special postal exemption), and "copyright" was unheard of for newspapers back then -- they all freely copied articles or quotes from each other with nary a thought of payment. Because of this, the newspapers constituted the best communication network in the country -- and they used it to define what the parties stood for.

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I normally don't do this sort of thing, but today I have to begin this column with a criticism of a single media voice, because the writing was just so offensive. I mean... bad puns? In today's polite society?

The boundaries between politics and show business have become murky ever since Ronald Reagan became president. The lines between the media and politics are equally as blurred. But the line between certain types of comedy and the political/media world should be brighter than ever. This is a lesson Dana Milbank of the Washington Post apparently has yet to learn.

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While the political world seems to be consumed with the news that (gasp!) a presidential debate just got cancelled, my eye was instead caught today by a sheerly speculative (and absolutely wonktastic) article, written by the incomparable Greg Sargent over at the Washington Post. He posits a very interesting "nightmare scenario" for Republicans, come convention-time:

Specifically: What if Santorum wins the bulk of contested primaries and caucuses and leads in national opinion polls -- but Mitt Romney wins the nomination? If that happens, the general election could get a whole lot tougher for him.

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Is the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party becoming irrelevant?

It's hard to draw any other conclusion to the news that the House Republicans have apparently agreed to extend the payroll tax holiday for the rest of the year -- without paying for it. The only open question is why the Republican leadership chose to throw in the towel without a fight. Perhaps the dismal single-digit approval ratings the American people have been consistently bestowing on Congress are beginning to be noticed. Perhaps, because it is an election year, Republicans in the House made a political decision that keeping their jobs was more important than grandstanding on the not-so-popular issue of raising everyone's taxes. Perhaps President Obama's call, in his State Of The Union speech, to move the bill through Congress with "no drama" sunk in (OK, well, probably not).

Whatever the reason, though, the Tea Party Republicans come out looking a lot weaker than they previously did. Tea Partiers, after all, are supposed to be all about the deficit and the debt. Yet here are the Republicans about to consent to adding $100 billion to this year's deficit, without even attempting to offset it with budget cuts. They're not even giving lip service to the idea any more. One wonders what the Tea Party rank-and-file voters are going to think about this deal, or whether a few Tea Party Republicans in the House will denounce it with fury in the conservative media.

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Being a watcher of not just politics but also the mainstream media which covers the subject (or at least attempts to), I am always a bit confused as to what merits the national media's attention. Why, for instance, is one horrific kidnapping or murder/suicide elevated to national obsession by the editors, when dozens of similar crimes go unreported? On a less dramatic level, why does one political soundbite or anecdote get covered by everyone in the punditary echo chamber, when others never even rate a mention?

Which is why I'm scratching my head today at the absence of headlines like the one at the top of this article in the national media. While the actual facts of the case are pretty mundane, the juxtaposition of a major presidential candidate would have allowed for even more sensationalistic headlines than mine (it's easy to come up with a "screaming banner" for the story, one would think).

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The primary season opens with so many Republican candidates for the party's nomination for president that it seemingly takes forever just to ask each of them a single question in the televised debates. Three different Republican candidates win the first three states' races, in a wide-open contest with no incumbent on the ballot. The first results thin the large field of hopefuls, as minor candidates run out of funding and throw in the towel. As more states vote, the two top candidates get to a point in early February where they are neck-and-neck in the number of individual states won -- with the third candidate lagging, because his support is based mostly in the South. Ron Paul is also running, but not winning any states. Dark mutterings are heard about the presumed-frontrunner not being able to "close the deal," and about his overall weak support among conservatives in the party. The media is in a frenzy, all but drooling over the prospect of an open convention, where no Republican candidate has the magic number of delegates to secure the nomination.

While this all sounds very contemporary, what I'm describing is the 2008 primary season. This may come as a surprise, because few in the media have picked up on these similarities.

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