With the political demise of the repulsive Chris Christie, the Republican establishment is in shock and denial. Their golden boy, the one they were grooming to take on Hillary, is now fading into the pack. First there is this about how Christie has leapt from the George Washington Bridge:

The pleasure Mitt Romney loyalists are taking in the struggles of Chris Christie.

The condition is prevalent, stemming from a range of perceived Christie slights towards Romney during the 2012 campaign, which several Romney loyalists ticked off quickly — and with still-evident bitterness.

There was the New Jersey governor’s barring Romney from raising money in the Garden State, his unwillingness to answer vice presidential vetting questions and his highly autobiographical convention keynote speech. Most of all, though, Romney allies remain resentful of Christie’s embrace of President Barack Obama as the two worked together on Superstorm Sandy relief in the waning days of the campaign, which Romney backers believe boosted Obama’s bipartisan bona fides and cost Romney valuable swing votes.

The right word is not “resentful’. The right word is disgust. The only description of what Christie did in the last week of the presidential campaign in 2012 is to say that he double-crossed Romney. He so comprehensively put his own ambitions ahead of every other consideration that he felt no compunction about doing what he could to sink Romney’s campaign so that he could run four years later himself. Anyone who thinks four more years of Obama was preferable to four years of Mitt Romney is such a brainless clown that it is unimaginable for me that I would ever support Christie for president. I am now closer to thinking along just these lines:

The “Republican Party establishment’s chosen champion for 2016 is in the cross hairs of the liberal media,” influential Iowa talk radio host Steve Deace said. “You can’t take out the Democrats until you take out the Republican establishment.”

He added, “I’ve never been happier to watch the liberal news media tear down a Republican because he’s one of their own.”

Romney was not one of their own but they had to wear him because he was so much superior to anyone else as his performance in the primaries showed. That Christie is all they can think of even now shows what an empty cupboard the Republicans now have at the national level. Which is why this story at Hot Air is less ridiculous than you might think:

In interviews with more than a dozen party officials, fundraisers, and strategists in New York and Washington over the past 10 days, Republicans described a palpable sense of anxiety gripping the GOP establishment in the wake of Christie’s meltdown, and an emerging consensus that the once promising cast of candidates they were counting on to save the GOP from the Tea Party — and the nation from Hillary Clinton — is looking less formidable by the week…

“There are definitely people jumping ship,” the operative said, noting that confidence in Christie’s electability has dropped off sharply among the donors he’s heard from…

In fact, it’s gotten so bad, the operative said, that some donors have started looking back fondly on the good old days of 2012: “You know what a lot of them say to me? I think we need Mitt back.”

Well Mitt’s not coming back, not least because his wife has said that Mitt is not coming back. And it’s anyway too late, especially if those who run the Republican Party think it needs saving from the Tea Party. The US is rapidly sinking into an impotent backwater and who’s going to save them now: Hillary Clinton with her husband calling the shots or Jeb Bush continuing another dynasty on the other side? And given how idiotic American politics now seems, what’s to say it won’t be Michelle that will give us the third Obama administration and maybe even a fourth.