"Frenemies," Big Daddy Catfish and The Rosey Test.

A "Big Daddy" 102 pound Alabama Catfish

Michelle Malkin writes:

Michael Corleone said to "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." But what, pray tell, do we do with our frenemies? This is the awful election-year quandary of movement conservatives. And everything you need to know about our heartache can be summed up in one image: 2008 presidential election loser John McCain and Mitt Romney together on the campaign trail.

When they're together, they look like they're holding each other (and the rest of us) hostage. Their toxic chemistry makes seething, ex-newlyweds Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries look like Fred and Ginger. In New Hampshire last week, after Romney's Iowa caucus squeaker, an overly giddy McCain mocked his endorsee for his "landslide victory." Awkward.

Then in South Carolina on Friday, McCain mistakenly referred to Romney as "President Obama" -- as Romney and South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley rushed to correct the gaffe. Freudian slip? Senior moment? Sabotage? All of the above?

Of course, if you choose to pal around with a double-talking, big government barnacle, you get what you deserve.

Elitists of all stripes -- both within the GOP and without -- are convinced that once Mitt Romney gets the nomination he will naturally get the votes of all of those who despise Obama -- i.e., the Tea Partiers, libertarians, firearm rights advocates, evangelicals, etc. "Who else are they going to vote for?" they opine smugly, sure (as they always are) in their analysis.

Such people have convinced themselves that the Tea Party, that powerful popular movement that brought the GOP out of the wilderness in 2010 and thrust them into power in the House, was reacting to the presidency of Barack Obama and all he threatened. In fact, the Tea Party was made up of cumulative frustration at the political failures of principle represented by the GOP, the Bush presidency and the big government, go-along-to-get-along Beltway Elites who call themselves "Republicans." (A term that has always, I must admit as a small "r" republican, chapped my ass, for they long ago turned their backs on the constitutional Republic of the Founders.)

The Tea Partiers were disgusted by the unprincipled candidates of the GOP, whether they were elected or not, and decided to give the two-party system one last try. They would try to take over the GOP from the bottom up, and 2010 was the result. Two years on, they are beginning to understand how stacked is the two-party deck against them. But remember this: they don't blame Obama or his party for that. They quite rightly blame the people whose failures pissed them off in the first place -- the GOP elitists who are desperately trying to cram Mitt Romney down their throats.

Down here in Alabama, we've got a lot of dams. At the base of those dams, way down deep, there are big catfish who grow to their incredible size because all they do is sit where the water requires minimal effort to stay stationary while the ever-flowing river stuffs food in their mouths. That's all they do. They sit still, even sleep with their maws open, every now and then they procreate, and just get bigger and bigger. A fisherman friend of mine calls 'em "big daddies."

The big daddy catfish are invested in the dam. If they were sentient beings and could vote, they would make sure that no politician threatened that dam in the interest of the other fish who might want to swim free upstream. That is exactly and precisely what the GOP elitists are, big daddies. They are invested in the dam of big federal government and uninterested in free navigation. They would rather be the big daddies in a small lake, as long as the dam feeds them.

If there were Tea Party fish who proposed that life was better before the dam, when all fish could swim free, I'm sure the big daddies would ignore them and wish them gone. If it looked like they might succeed in their reforms, I'm sure the big daddies would turn on them and kill them to remove the threat to their way of life.

The thing about today's very human elitists of the GOP and their "who else are they going to vote?" analysis is that they fail the Rosey test.

My wife Rosey has been paying particular attention to the GOP race for president this year. She watches EVERY debate and switches the television back and forth between FOX and MSNBC. Rosey's first vote for a GOP presidential candidate was for Ronald Reagan. Since then, she has always tried to vote for "the lesser of two evils." Not this year. This year, she told me, if the GOP picks Romney she will be voting for whatever third party candidate seems best or for "None of the Above."

I rather suspect that that's what the majority of the Tea Partiers who, with their money and enthusiasm, put the GOP in the catbird seat in the House in 2010 will do this year. They will sit on their hands, or vote third party, but they will not vote for "Windsock Mitt" Romney.

The big daddies will not particularly mind this, of course, since in any case, they've still got theirs. At least until somebody decides their rotten system no longer has even a fig leaf of legitimacy and decides to blow up the dam and watch as all of the big daddies of both parties get sucked downstream and dashed to death on the rocks and debris below.