Under the amusingly euphemistic headline "Enthusiasm gap plagues GOP convention," the DC newspaper the Politico reports that Republicans aren't fired up about their nominating extravaganza scheduled for the first week of September in lovely St Paul, Minnesota.

There's a lot of expositional excuse-making about St Paul's lack of proximity to the Beltway and its comparatively sedate reputation. The last GOP convention was held in New York City, which not only provided loads of wholesome entertainment for the "Family Values" crowd, but also had the added benefit of providing the perfect backdrop for the ritualistic exploitation of the 2001 attack on NYC's World Trade Centre, led by 9/11 überghoul Rudy Giuliani. St Paul's got none of that sparkle, so goes the argument.

But it is the unidentified press secretary for an unnamed Republican senator who is, from behind her or his cloak of anonymity, willing to be the most honest about the "enthusiasm gap" plaguing the GOP convention: "Nobody likes a funeral."

Well, nobody who cared about the deceased, anyway.

But I sincerely doubt I'm the only person wishing that Bush Brand Conservatism were given a proper burial with an actual grave, just so I could piss on it.

What is, in equal parts, stunning and horrifying and impressive about the spectacular death of Bush Brand Conservatism is that it was mortally wounded not because it was a failure, but because it was an unmitigated success.

Bush was the golden boy of modern American conservatives - a rightwing ideologue with no checks or balances, left to pursue every conservative wet dream with abandon. Upstairs and downstairs at the same time, he appealed equally to white, working class bigots whose jobs were being shipped offshore and to the barrel-chested tycoons of a new Gilded Age who raucously bellowed about the superfluity of a social safety net and roared that the government "never gave me anything!" while depositing million-dollar profits from their latest no-bid defence contract and buying themselves new yachts with their fat tax returns.

It was this corporate shill with the affected demeanour of a country bumpkin who was able to hold together the unholy alliance between Big Money and Big Religion, standing at the altar and giving the blessing to the crackpot marriage between the business interests who sought to get rich off the stupid snivelling sods who marched in hypocritical lockstep with the warmongers and the corporate mercenaries, as long as they were promised protection from radical feminists and kissing boys. Bush spoke the language of robber barons and Nascar dads, of war profiteers and preachers. He told them they were the patriots, the Real Americans - and they gave him their votes, while the media gave him a free pass.

He thumbed his nose at the law. And the opposition party, such as it was, took impeachment off the table.

He got (almost) everything he wanted, everything Conservatism wanted.

As a result, the hideous underbelly of unfettered authoritarian conservatism was exposed as the grotesque mosaic of avarice, antipathy, incompetence and corruption that it is - hostile not only to the laws and liberties and democratic traditions of this nation, but to its very people. Who finally, at long last, stopped breathing life into Bush Brand Conservatism.

Now, even as McCain's campaign fights to keep it on life support, his own party is ready to pull the plug. There can be no regeneration, no rebirth, no re-emergence, no reclamation of the majority until the beast is good and dead. Time to let it die. They know it's over.

St Paul's as good a place as any for a funeral.