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In Friday's New York Times, the former director of the CIA wrote something that's going to leave a mark even through nine layers of spray-on tan.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests—endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

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The polls have gone so utterly sour on the Republican presidential nominee over the past week that many Very Serious People inside the Beltway have developed an even more devastating night-terror than El Caudillo de Mar-A-Lago with a nuclear arsenal at his beck and call—namely, that Hillary Rodham Clinton will get elected and then try to govern according to the progressive platform that was hashed out with so much sturm und drang with the Democratic primary process. This likely is also true of the many billionaires who have rushed to her side as the GOP nominee cratered.

There already is a strong undertow pulling HRC toward "reaching out" to the GOP, toward governing from "the middle," and toward not accelerating the now-rapid descent of the Republican Party into the final madness of the prion disease it has welcomed so warmly into itself ever since the late 1970s. Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker even posited that, as a gesture of good faith, HRC should allow the Republicans to pick a Supreme Court justice, a stratagem that has been proven to work only on The West Wing, which was not a documentary series.

Professor Krugman has knocked down most of the arguments in favor of this rainbows-and-unicorns idea. First of all, it's insane politics. It will divide the Democratic Party just as the Republicans are engaging in what is bound to be an entertaining interlude of public fratricide.

Second, it would be an act of astonishing bad faith that would set in concrete all of the most unflattering opinions held about HRC by the people who trust her the least.

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Third, it assumes Democratic control of the Congress, which remains a long shot. As long as the Republicans still hold the House of Representatives, where all the bills involving federal spending are born, and assuming that the Democrats aren't gifted with a supermajority in the Senate, it's logical to expect that the GOP won't be any more willing to cooperate with a President Clinton II in governing the country than they were with either President Clinton I or Barack Obama.

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And, finally, and this is something Professor Krugman touches on only briefly, there is a more important reason for a President HRC to press her advantages on all fronts to put in place the policies she committed herself to run on: For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

Ever since the late 1970s, when it determined to ally itself with a politicized splinter of American evangelical Protestantism, having previously allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid, the Republican Party has been reeling toward catastrophe even as it succeeded at the ballot box, and taking the country along with it. Crackpot economic theories were mainstreamed in the 1980s. Crackpot conspiracy theories and god-drunk fantasies were mainstreamed in the 1990s. Crackpot imperial adventures abroad were mainstreamed in the 2000s. And all of these were mainstreamed at once in opposition to the country's first African American president over the past eight years.

Modern conservatism has proven to be not a philosophy, but a huge dose of badly manufactured absinthe. It squats in an intellectual hovel now, waiting for its next fix, while a public madman filches its tattered banner and runs around wiping his ass with it. It always was coming to this.

For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

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There have been three chances since 2000 for the Democratic Party to beat the crazy out of the Republicans. The first was after the thumping that the Avignon Presidency received in the 2006 midterms. The second was immediately after the election of Barack Obama. Both of those went a'glimmering because the Democrats listened to people who convinced them that, because they were the grown-up governing party, they had to make nice with the pack of vandals on the other side of the aisle. Even this president bought this line of argument, until it became obvious to him that the prion disease was too far gone.

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Ever since he looked deeply into that big back of fcks and discovered that it had been empty for a while, the president obviously determined to keep proposing sensible measures even though he knows the Congressional majorities will decline to do even the minimal work required of them by the Constitution. My god, they won't even come back into session to address the Zika epidemic that is now breaking out in Florida. Merrick Garland is sipping a cool one on the veranda somewhere, waiting for someone to tell him where he'll be working come winter. The president is not budging. Why should he? He's not the crazy one. He doesn't belong to the party that, with its eyes wide open, nominated a vulgar talking yam for president.

It long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this, to act unilaterally in returning sanity to the Republic, never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now. To argue that responsible government requires that you treat sensibly a party that has gone as mad as the Republicans have is to argue for government by delirium.

Trump doesn't need an intervention. His party does.

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