The McCain-Clinton Team Goes Gold

Cancel the conventions, call off the debates and go straight to the Election Night scoreboard to see how large McCain's margin of victory has turned out to be. The pollsters and pundits are wrapping the story into a neat package: The Republicans went to school on Hillary Clinton's last-minute Obamacide and are finishing off what she started.

At last weekend's Saddleback shootout, the Democratic nominee did not pull the sound-bite trigger fast enough to gun down McCain's prefabbed POW anecdotes and pithy gates-of-hell promises to protect Americans from Osama, the Russians and whoever else is lurking out there in their paranoid fantasies.

Maureen Dowd, insightful as ever but much less funny, wraps it all up imagining a dead-of-night celebration by Hillary and Mac the Knife of their joint victory over the Senate upstart who wanted to take away the country they have been pandering so hard to take over.

We can turn our full attention to the Olympics, where the competition is keener and the judges aren't announcing the results before the contestants start their routines. Then, during the next two weeks of convention blather, we can all go to the beach and get a nice tan instead of watching political volleyball when we all know the score.