This line from Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore sums up the whole Beltway mess, doesn’t it?

I grew so rich that I was sent, by a pocket borough into Parliament. I always voted at my Party’s call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

I had forgotten how much I love a Gilbert and Sullivan farce until I was reminded of them over the weekend by, of all people, Mickey Edwards, in an otherwise bland column but for the G&S reference and this:

Political theorist Bernard Crick wrote that "politics is how a free people govern themselves." Strong political parties, on the other hand, are how a free people lose that ability. Parties choose which candidates can be on the November ballot, and do so in primaries and conventions that cater to the extremes. Parties reward fealty and discourage independence. In an earlier time, before the Internet, when it was hard to get information about candidates and they had to depend on party support for campaign funds and volunteers, political parties made sense; today, they are passe, black-and-white television, remnants of a time that has passed.

There is a reason elected officials fear sunlight. Especially party leadership.

Heaven forbid the American public actually starts paying attention to all the scurrying going on in the dark nooks and crannies and underneath all those shady rocks. Things like this:

This report from NPR’s Nina Totenberg contains a fairly remarkable piece of news: So determined to block Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina ever nominated to the Supreme Court, McConnell took the unprecedented step of getting the NRA to do his dirty work.

One top aide to GOP leader McConnell confirmed that McConnell, at a meeting of conservative groups, asked the NRA about scoring the Sotomayor vote as a key vote hostile to gun rights. The aide conceded that in asking the question, McConnell was promoting an unusual step that the NRA then took.

You have to wonder how it is going to play in the Hispanic community around the country that the Republicans were so diametrically opposed to the nomination of Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee with the longest resume in nearly a century, that they called upon the NRA to twist Senators’ arms — even though they knew they didn’t have the votes to stop her nomination.

I smell 2010 electoral kabuki posturing, and not just because weird billboards have been cropping up along highways here in WV offering free bumper stickers that talk lovingly of guns, bibles and lower taxes, but gripe about "illegals."

Fool and his money and all that rot aside given that its some wingnutty business doing the advertising, it’s awfully early for this sort of posturing, isn’t it? Especially when it’s bass ackwards and stupid as all get out given the demographics involved.

Digby is sensing something similar:

It occurs to me that they are seeing something much more devastating in their numbers than just losing the Hispanic vote of the future. It seems they must be afraid of losing the white working class. Assuming they are behaving rationally (which is assuming a lot) the only logical reason they could have for ginning up all this racial animosity is if they feel the need to secure their base with the old tried and true racial resentment.

Except… then there’s this. Nothing like the smell of stoking loony anti-Christ fear, is there? (I so wish I were kidding.)

Who wants a dog whistle?

The Sotomayor debate and floor vote could happen as early as Tuesday. But the level of crazy? It’s already over the top, down the hill and into a fricking ditch, isn’t it?