It’s 24 days to the election and Glenn Reynolds is following John Hinderaker to the showers today in anticipation of a GOP defeat. While cautiously beginning with “It’s still too early to say” he quickly follows with “that’s certainly the way to bet.” Which is a pundit’s way of saying “we surrender, reserving the right to pick up our guns if the Rove/Cheney calvary gets here in time with a red terror alert, a new war, or a collection of reprogrammed Diebold machines.”

How odd that he speaks of the GOP in the third person as if to maintain a claim to virginity to the oncoming troops, as if any don’t know he’s a ‘camp follower’ with his modest skirt capable of being dropped faster than a Bush pledge to rebuild New Orleans. And he doesn’t even blush about his ‘partial list’ of reasons in his ‘pre-mortem’ autopsy of his not-quite-dead-yet patient.

The GOP is not even on life-support yet and he’s already pulled the plug. While I recognize his patient is a vicious old bastard, I don’t support euthanasia for those without a terminal condition and who still maintain a will to live.

No, I won’t call his surrender a ‘cut-and-run’ because the phrase itself makes a mockery of the very serious issue that support for our military requires the humble capacity to withdraw their lives from the battlefield after the war planners have already admitted no strategy for victory exists. But I will call his list a betrayal of honesty as it’s a pale reflection of the truth.

His reasons for the perceived loss of a GOP Congressional majority? Terry Schiavo. Harriet Miers. Our port security outsourced to a Dubai company. Intransigence against illegal immigration. Hastert’s support for ‘insider privilege’ in his backing of William Jefferson. And Foleygate, as the final straw.

As I said, there’s nary a blush on his face for his recognition of the sting of several angry honeybees, without acknowledging the grizzlies in the room that flattened the hive and are continuing their feast on live human flesh.

Insty, it’s the war, stupid.

The nation’s recognition of the GOP’s disregard for American lives came to the fore in the response to the disaster that befell New Orleans and Gulfport and Biloxi. With that wake-up call, it was a simple transition to recognize that the Iraq War policy was just as hapless and just as dismissive of the value of human lives.

A complete and honest list could mention the Social Security sellout, the doughnut hole in Medicare coverage, the budget-busting boondoggle handed to pharmaceutical companies like the one Donald Rumsfeld headed. It could also say something about the crassness of war profiteers like Halliburton, which Dick Cheney headed. It could include selling out the security of every intelligence agent in our nation’s employ with the professional ruin of Valerie Plame, and Bush’s reneging on dumping the architects of that - Cheney, Rove and Armitage - while offering up the lackey, Libby, as an appeasement.

It certainly would have to include Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, numerous others under indictment or under well-deserved suspicion for ties to their rigged games: Weldon in Pennsylvania, Sweeney in New York, Pombo in California, Hayworth in Arizona, Burns in Montana, Doolittle in California, Renzi in Arizona, and numerous others.

The Abramoff corruption, after all, leads right to the top of the GOP, despite White House claims that the matter is now closed. It is not closed. It is an open, festering wound that no citizen should want closed, until all the dirt is cleaned out. Both the Plame and Abramoff betrayals of the nation’s trust clearly lead to Karl Rove, if not higher.

Insty, review that broad spread and high degree of corruption, and the long, ongoing efforts to cover up in Plamegate, Abramoff’s wheelings and dealings, and the Peda-Foley-a scandal. Then contrast that with the way Democrats responded to the corruption case being built against one of their own: they knocked him from his powerful committee position and they now have refused to endorse his re-election, even if the seat gets lost to a Republican.

Or contrast that with the Republican FBI agent-turned candidate who voted for Bush in 2000, and who tried to get the FBI to do further investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, which could have thwarted the 9-11 attacks. She’s not a polished politician, she does not evade the issues nor project a false image to sell herself, she’s just a citizen convinced the war on Iraq is wrong and that Congress can do better. Compare that to her opponent, who remains terribly wrong on Iraq, wrong on Terry Schiavo, and wrong on stem cell research, at least.

In the record-setting climate of corruption our nation has endured, and in the terrible price paid for a wrong war with a wrong strategy, can’t you concede that a strong wind of fresh ethics and competent decisionmaking deserves a say in the nation’s course ahead, when polish and the refusal to change course has led us far from an actual solution?

Hurricane Katrina’s wake-up call belongs on the list. But the three great grizzlies that are chewing up the GOP are the war, the corruption, and the ongoing failure to take out the leaders of Al Qaida, which now threatens to lose the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

There’s no Osama on your list, Glenn. There’s no mention of the unAmerican practice of torture, which the Republican Congress overwhelmingly rubberstamped.

I certainly hope Americans are ready to reject the ongoing destruction of our troops and Iraqi civilians, to deny further oxygen to the Corruption Club, to refuse torture as an American value, and to demand real progress against the terrorist masterminds who have killed more than 3,000 of our fellow citizens.

But while you’re betting and sweating the outcome of an election, why don’t you join the millions of Americans actively working for solutions that will define the outcome of OUR COUNTRY well beyond this election?

A partial list of GOP errors accomplishes nothing. Not one soldier will be spared by that. Not one civilian will be safer. Not one constitutional right will be preserved. Not one principle or value will be defended. Nobody’s health will be improved nor Social Security pension saved.

Listing a few of the holes in a leaky boat isn’t a solution. Like it or not, we float or drown together, so plug a freaking hole or get out of the way and let somebody with better sense do it.