By @BGinKC

I am becoming convinced that the Goddesses of yore are messing with me.

I said when Todd Akin stayed in that I feared I hadn’t lived a good enough life for that to happen, but he did. I’m still pinching myself over that to see if I’m awake, so I didn’t even dare dream that the Missouri GOP would respond by mounting a write-in campaign or running a republican as an Independent. Yet yesterday on This Week, there was Mary Matalin saying just that.

GOP operative Mary Matalin on Sunday said that the Republican Party would mount a third-party or write-in campaign to defeat Rep. Todd Akin (R), whose bid to defeat Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is in danger after he suggested women could not get pregnant by “legitimate rape.”

Matalin told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Republicans would find a way to run Missouri congressional candidate Ann Wagner against Akin after he slipped nearly 15 points in recent polls, now trailing McCaskill 49-44.

“George, he may have dug in, but he’s not going to have a shovel to continuing digging,” Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top adviser explained. “Because he’s not going to have any money. George Will is right. We need to win Missouri. We’re going to win Missouri. Ann Wagner is going to end up being our candidate. The party is going to get Ann Wagner in.”

“So you’re just convinced that he’s going to get out?” Stephanopolous asked.

“Or we’ll run a third party, we’ll run a write-in,” Matalin insisted. “We can do it. We have the money to do it. We are going to transfer the money.”

For the love of all that is sacred and holy, I plead with the fates and all the gods and goddesses in the pantheon, please, I beg of you, let her be serious. Please let the natioal know-it-alls be that pig-ignorant about Missouri and our particular brand of Chock-ful-o-Nuts religious zealots — and the “z word” is one I use judiciously.

Here’s the bottom line…Akin is in. He’s on a Mission From God. He stays in and the money doesn’t matter. All he needs is gas money to get from church to church and he can raise it from the folks in attendance if he has to. The 14% of the Missouri population that is die-hard anti-choice forced-birth nutjobs are going to vote for him. Even if he were to drop out and a court order was issued to remove his name from the ballot, I would wager that he would get between ten and fifteen percent of the vote. He has the zealot vote locked down, come hell or high water.

If the GOP puts Ann Wagner up as a write-in candidate, I would imagine that she would pull about 20-25% of the vote. There are still some sane republicans left in the state. Not many, but a few. Enough to split the vote on the right between the social-issues-driven Missouri chapter of the American Taliban religious freaks and the sane, moderate, business-driven republicans, therby allowing Claire McCaskill to cruise to reelection with a strong plurality of the vote.

I can not believe that this is happening. I knew that the MOGOP was going to reach critical mass and a reckoning between the religious and moderate wings of the party would become inevitable. But I didn’t think it was going to happen this soon and under these circumstances. It’s another one of those things I dared not dream possible.