Bauer launches presidential campaign(At least that's how it looks to your blogstress)

What won't your blogstress do for her devotees? Today, for instance, she has been at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, feeling the hate pouring off the rostrum of the Family Research Council Action PAC "Washington Briefing" gathering for "values voters." (Don't all voters have values? Otherwise, what would be the point in voting?)

While there was so much more hate to report on than your cybertrix has energy for at this late hour (imagine Ann Coulter, L. Brent Bozell and Gary Bauer speaking from the same podium on a single day), it was Bauer who took the cake in the category of hard-core demonizers of his opponents. Most interesting was Bauer's swipe at Senator John McCain (R-Az.) for his refusal to accept the White House version of a bill that would have created unconstitutional tribunals for so-called "enemy combatants" that also would have permitted some forms of the "inhumane and degrading treatment" forbidden by Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. [McCain, together with Senators John Warner (R-Va.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) yesterday announced a compromise bill negotiated with the White House.]

What makes this all so interesting is that, in the 2000 presidential campaign, Bauer permanently lost his spot as head of the Family Research Council (FRC) when, after dropping out of the race himself, he threw his support to John McCain. (Your blogstress actually broke this story.) The rest of the religious right had thrown in with George Bush, and during the South Carolina primary, religious right leaders ran a vicious campaign against McCain, insinuating that he was the father of a black child. (Misegenation is apparently still a sin in South Carolina.) (The "black" child actually turned out to be an orphaned Indian girl whom McCain and his wife adopted.)

Tonight Bauer delivered a speech to his faithful that wreaks of a coming presidential run, one that would put him up against McCain in the Republican primary. Given his long absence from FRC events, and his sudden rehabilitation, one suspects that he may have been recruited for this job. No, he won't win, and your net-tête figures that he suffers no delusions of victory. What he will do, quite convincingly, is push McCain, the self-styled "maverick" -- or whomever should win the G.O.P. primary -- far to the right. Two years out, and it's already looking ugly.