The Republican Party hasn't just lost its soul. It's lost it's ever-lovin' MIND!

Sometimes you come across a news item so jaw-dropping that you keep looking for a disclaimer that it's a joke. But this is no joke, and it sure as hell isn't funny.

53% of Republicans consider Donald Trump to be a better president than Abraham Lincoln, according to an Economist-YouGov weekly tracking poll with a 2.8% margin of error,

Let that sink in for a moment.

I left the Republican party when it so willingly and completely embraced the most unqualified, bizarre, and emotionally unfit candidate ever nominated by a major American political party, the candidate of the conspiracy theorists and the alt-right, back in 2016. I loved my country too much to willingly embrace the notion that a man who has argued long and hard that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and even was willing to go along with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job was fit to lead it. I still do. Since then, Mr. Trump has disgraced the presidency and embarrassed the nation with a series of libelous, intemperate, and just plain bizarre statements and tweets that ought to have been enough to convince any reasonable person that he isn't fit to rub the shiny bronze nose of Abe Lincoln's bust outside Mr. Lincoln's tomb in Springfield.

Long before anybody took the notion of Mr. Trump as a serious candidate for the White House seriously, I was already getting uncomfortable with the direction in which the party was going. Years ago, when I was still serving on the County Republican Central Committee and the Tea Party was becoming more and more influential, I was uncomfortably aware of how extreme the party had become. And since the party has so completely embraced and identified itself with Donald Trump, I don't see how I can ever be a Republican again.

But this represents a quantum leap in crazy. When the majority of the rank-and-file believe that our worst president was a better president than our best one, it goes beyond a matter of bad judgment and twisted values and priorities. This poll makes it hard to escape the conclusion that the average Republican has lost his or her ever-lovin' mind.

Doubtless, some will find a silver lining in the news that 47% is still more or less in contact with reality. And I have no doubt that a great many Republicans and those outside the party who wish it well are trying this morning to convince themselves that there is any comfort to be found in that fact. But even if Mr. Trump is obliterated in the election next year and the 47% becomes a majority again, it's hard to see how a political party which has even close to a majority that can say with a straight face that Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln can ever be taken seriously again, much less saved.

The Democrats, sadly, are too much in love with abortion, the mainstreaming of every eccentric lifestyle imaginable, and the idea that at least orthodox, historical, Biblical Christianity is not only evil but conspiring to subvert the separation of church and state to provide a refuge for the sane folks who can no longer identify with the Ga-ga Old Party.  I hold out little hope that either of the major parties can ever be saved. I hope for a day when a reasonable, sane, centrist third party will emerge to provide a home for those of us who believe that Abe Lincoln was a better president than Donald Trump- and more than that, who will settle for nothing else than it once again to be the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and Ike and Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, and who understand that the Christians are no more out to get us than the Mexicans and Muslims are.

But in the meantime, I'll take Abraham Lincoln's advice. I stood with the Republican Party when it was right, and parted from it when it went wrong, and I'd rather spend the rest of my life as a partyless independent than be a member of the lunatic asylum it has become.