I have been known, from time to time, to howl at the moon. As a card carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I have been known to hold what some would consider as controversial beliefs (just look at my political compass numbers in my tagline).
Nonetheless, I smell something foul in the air.
Please, for the sake of my insanity, suspend all sense of disbelief in conspiracy theories for a few seconds, and follow me away from reality as you know it.
Suppose, for instance, that you have a political party in power who are insanely addicted to the ultimate power they have ascribed to themselves for the previous 7 years. As all egomaniacs do, they believe that their god-given work is incomplete, because for one thing, there still exists a central government from which social entitlement programs can operate. The economy is tanking, and the approval rating for the President, as former titular head of the party, is somewhere south of Trig Palin's future IQ (rather blunt, but a statement of fact). Now, this unpopularity has been laughed off, or generally ignored, until election season, when the party is forces to come, asshat in hand, to beg for the continuation of their lease on federal power. The base of said party is concentrated into two main locales of ideology; the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives. The problem, as one might imagine, is how in the face of such dismal public approval of the party in power to get re-elected. Turd Blossom, or perhaps one of his disciple-spawn, might come up with the following multi-pronged attack. (Don't worry folks, the insanity is coming.)
[1] This is the previously accomplished step of firming up the social conservative base. Being that the gay marriage card is nearly spent, and the direct playing of the abortion card is getting old, they decide to go subliminal. This is, of course, where they choose a female with an infant born with a genetic defect, who to boot has a teenage daughter currently pregnant and choosing marriage instead of abortion. Mission accomplished, religious conservatives go ape shit.
[2] This is the more complex part. In order to stave off complete defeat in the senate races, how do you distance your party from the failure after failure that has been visited upon the nation under the control of said party? What is required is a shock-doctrinesque assault aimed directly across the bow of the fiscal conservatives who have been as yet sitting on their hands electorally. Just as sure as religious conservatives have pro-life views as their defining characteristic, fiscal conservatives worship the free market. What if they set up Bush as the bad cop, and McCain as the good cop. What if the magnitude of the market failures isn't as dire as it seems, but is initially made to seem so. Out comes the bad cop telling us the sky is falling, the sky is falling, and we need to throw out the holy grail of fiscal conservatism with the bath water. What do you think happens next? The good cop decides to halt all this childish campaigning and come to the rescue. The democrats, who were about to give away the bank to the bad cops, look all the while like the weak-willed and ineffective opposition party they have recently appeared to be. The only party powerful enough to stand up to a republican administration is a mavericky republican administration, don't you see?
Now, if the Republicans are seen as the one's who are standing on principle, and block this deal....and it turns out not to be the disaster the bad cops (who hardly anyone should believe on face value anyway) are saying, they will come out looking like stalwarts of moral integrity and 'defenders of the constitution (TM)', and more importantly will have succeeded in getting all of their base riled up and ready to support their mavericky beau, and created some massive distance from the current asshat-in-chief's administration.