(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Wednesday's edition of Where In The Hell Have The Rails Gone? began early, when one of the co-hosts of Squint And The Meat Puppet let a particularly scary kitty out of the burlap, as reported by CNBC, one of the sister networks of the National Broadcasting Company, which now was merely two days away from the First Olympiad of the Flesh-Eating Bacteria Era.

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"Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them," Scarborough said on his "Morning Joe" program. Scarborough made the Trump comments 52 seconds into an interview with former Director of Central Intelligence and ex-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden.

Is this something that actually happened? Who knows? It reads for all the world like one of He, Trump's claims that some top man somewhere told him that Martians are mating with scallops in the Central Park lagoon. Let's assume for the moment that it is true, and that some foreign policy expert was so terrified by this that his first thought was to call Squint, so that the waking nation could be told that one of the two major-party presidential nominees was, in reality, Major Kong. Does this tell us anything that we didn't know before?

Why yes, it does. In the immortal words of an anonymous Irish headline writer, regarding a story about the closing of a beloved saloon, the ship is deserting the sinking rats.

John Moore Getty Images

The last straw for most folks—including obvious anagram Reince Priebus, the emptiest suit in American politics—was He, Trump's musing that he "wasn't there yet" on endorsing Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin. Given all that's happened since the Republicans closed their Masque of the Red Death convention in Cleveland, it says something about Priebus' moral compass that this was what it takes to make him realize the true nature of his party's nominee, but let's leave that aside for the moment.

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Khizr Khan's gift for turning the knife is plainly driving the candidate and what's left of his operation out of what's left of its mind. Just yesterday, spokesbot Katrina Pierson blamed the death of Humayan Khan on President Obama and Hillary Clinton, even though Captain Khan was killed in action in 2004. Later, just after Jeff Zucker had argued publicly that hiring him was a master stroke of media genius, as our pals at Tiger Beat On The Potomac reported, CNN embarrassment Corey Lewandowski decided that the time was right to bring the whole Birther thing back up. Via TPM:

"Look, the only reason it's germane is because she brought the issue up, and said Donald Trump raised the issue of his Harvard transcripts. And I just simply said, 'Have those transcripts ever been released?' And the question was 'Did he get in as a U.S. citizen, or was he brought in to Harvard University as a citizen who wasn't from this country?' I don't know the answer."

There are people at CNN that I like and respect—nobody on TV works harder than Dana Bash and Jake Tapper is a helluva reporter—but no news organization covering this freak show has demolished its credibility worse than CNN has. Between Lewandowski and Scottie Nell Hughes, Jeff Zucker should go to Media SuperMax for life.

Finally, somebody inside Bedlam whispered to a number of reporters, including MSNBC's indefatigable Ali Vitali, that the campaign staff is looking longingly at the distance between the windows and the sidewalk. This prompted First Mate Starbuc…er…Paul Manafort to issue a stern denial that everybody is just mailing it in at this point because the candidate is losing his marbles. The response from the campaign was pretty much what you'd expect. TBOTP has the wrap-up:

Citing a longtime ally of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, CNBC correspondent John Harwood tweeted Tuesday that Manafort is "not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal." Jason Miller, Trump's senior communications adviser, responded with a Federalist article critiquing Harwood's performance as a moderator at CNBC's debate last October.

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I'm convinced. Thanks, Jason.

Anyway, all of this has people speculating more openly about a mutiny belowdecks against the party's nominee. Technically, there's nothing stopping the party from stripping its nomination from He, Trump. Politically, of course, it would be cataclysmic, at least for the moment.

Joe Mahoney Getty Images

However, I suspect that, within days, the elite political media would congratulate the Republican Party for this bold move, and work very hard to establish a Year Zero horse-race narrative between Hillary Rodham Clinton and whatever stalking horse—Mitt Romney? Paul Ryan? Zombie Rutherford Hayes?—the party throws out there. The fact that a vulgar talking yam decimated his primary opponents by running a campaign based on incoherent bigotry and mindless xenophobia, and the fact that he was able to do that because the GOP had cultivated those qualities over four decades, will go swiftly into the bonfire of institutional memory.

This, of course, assumes that He, Trump would get out of the way, which ignores the fact that this is a fellow who gets into a three-day public rage over a heretofore obscure pair of Gold Star parents, and which also ignores the fact that he's lost his marbles. He's just as likely to stay in the race and spend the next 90-odd days with the Rage-o-Tron Deluxe dialed up to 11. (And, frankly, he'd have something of a point.) It also ignores the fact that ratfcker supreme Roger Stone is already out there stirring up civil insurrection in the event that HRC wins in November. How many more rats would get vigorously fcked if the party chucked its nominee over the side? The tree of liberty and all that…

(Financially, of course, it would be a circus, because if you think He, Trump would leave without getting luxuriously paid off, I have an Ivanka Fellowship from Trump University I would like to sell you.)

I would watch the news carefully all day Wednesday to see if the stirrings in the crew quarters gets louder as everyone gets his rum ration and moves towards the weapons locker.

Don't believe, no don't believe/Don't believe everything you hear…

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