It simply does not get any better than this.

Think about it.

A thoroughly discredited, saturnine, multi-millionaire with scruffy brown shoes and an ego the size of Australia decides to run for president. Despite having set back the national progress of one party for at least a decade, having elected a president he professes to abhor and having no known supporters among real voters, he is still determined to run for the nation’s highest office again, this time as an “Independent.”

Bound and determined to produce a remake of “Groundhog Day,” he sets off to re-elect the very target of his spiteful hatred and wild hyperbole.

It’s truly both amazing and amusing.

Only in America!

Central casting in Hollywood could not come up with an odder duck in an odder scenario – or a more effective music score than the sound of him chanting, ominously and slowly, fervently and fast, high and low, irrespective of venue or audience: “Duopoly, duopoly, duopoly.”

My God, Ralph Nader is running for president again.

When I wrote four years ago in this column (entitled “Run Ralphie Run”), I received much hate mail and calls from liberal Democrats who said my calling him both a “useful idiot” from the Republican point of view and an insurance policy for George W. Bush, was unkind, harsh, cruel and just plain wrong.

But when Ralphie delivered Florida, New Hampshire and the national election for Bush on cue, my early criticisms seemed mild in comparison to many of the epithets used by prominent wailers in the Democratic Party.

Now he’s back at it again, pathetic and unwanted but nevertheless determined to repeat his historical blunder of monumental proportions (if you’re a Democrat anyway). Is there anybody left in America who doesn’t wonder how Nader got so rich supposedly fighting for the poor?

I wish Nader would drop out of the race so Bush could face and beat Kerry straight up with no assist from Nader. This time Bush won’t need it.

Note to those who wrote, e-mailed and called about my last column concerning Bush, please be advised that I serve not the Republican Party, but the Norse god of mischief, Loki. Many of you also proved my very point by listing all the hyperbolic reasons, real and imaginary, why you are voting against our wonderful president.

Note also to all those who wrote, e-mailed and called to thank me for upholding the Republican conservative banner, you might want to withhold some of your applause until you read my future column on gay marriage.

But back to the business at hand.

Bush versus Kerry, the race is already shaping up as one for the history books.

It is going to be very, very negative from the very beginning. Remember it’s only February. When you see polling numbers like the ones which pertain today – with both guys at 45 percent and only 10 percent undecided – and when you see the “stacks” (the piling up of 12 or 15 reasons to vote against him) against Bush, you know that 10 percent is going to learn everything, and I mean everything, negative about the Kerry until the stacks are even.

The intense polarization of the electorate, based as it is on issues, ideology and even cosmology, requires that both candidates unload upon the other, constantly and with something beyond the usual mild hyperbole. There is simply no other way to change the electoral balance and put either candidate over the top.

We can’t do much but sit back and enjoy the process. It’s going to set a modern indoor record for negative commercials from both parties. It’s going to be a titanic struggle rather like the one depicted in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”

But fear not, however negative this year’s presidential race becomes, no matter how much mud is slung and re-slung, it will have to go “a far piece” in order to match the cogency of President Ulysses S Grant’s campaign slogan for Republicans of the post Civil War era: “Vote the Way You Shot.”

The power of this slogan and its appeal to the memories of the American Civil War were echoed in the super-heated rhetoric of the 1870s as witnessed by the excerpts from a speech by Republican Robert G. Ingersoll (thanks to Joel Moser who sent to the quote to me from the Muskie Achieves at Bates):

“Every man who endeavored to tear the old flag from the heaven that enriches it was a Democrat. Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat. Every enemy this great Republican has had for twenty years has been a Democrat. Every man who shot Union soldiers was a Democrat.

“Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat. Every man who helped to burn orphan asylums in New York was a Democrat. Every man who spread small-pox and yellow-fever in the North was a Democrat. Soldiers, every scar, every arm that is lacking, every limb that is gone, every scar is a souvenir of a Democrat.

“Every soldier who drank out of a skull was a Democrat.”

Now that’s negative campaigning!

Nothing George W. Bush or Karl Rove or Lynn Cheney, let alone Terry McAuliffe or Teresa Heinz Kerry, can come up with will even be in that ballpark. Nothing said this election cycle by either presidential ticket will come close to that level of vitriol.

I hope.

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