After backing GOP candidates for many years, the New York Times is not endorsing a single Republican for this election. They claim in their editorial that they are loyal to a "viable two-party system" and the Republicans are "undermining the checks and balances" that have made American democracy possible.

The Times isn't the only evidence that the GOP is in extremely excavated excrement. All across the nation, voters aren't playing the Republican game of running scared to the polling place to push the "R" points on the Diebold touch screens every time Dick Cheney emerges from his Sekrit Kummand Hidey-hole to shout "Osama's coming!" It's so bad that Republican pollster Glen Bolger says that, for the GOP, "It's the worst political environment for Republican candidates since Watergate."

It has to be "the worst of times" for the GOP when a life-long Montana Republican is voting Democratic in the second straight election. He voted for John Kerry in 2004 because "the Republicans tried to trash the man's war record," and is going to vote for Jon Tester for Senate because he sees Tester as someone "who wants to fix some things in Washington" in ways he doesn't see in the incumbent, Conrad Burns.

Desperation over losing control of the Senate is leading the Republicans to use the lowest of campaign ads in an effort to sway the voters, but with the exception of the nasty Tennessee ads targeting Democratic Representative Harold Ford, voters across the nation are left "hoping for something better than Divorce Court."

But, to the Republicans' dismay (as the Democrats have learned from their past attempts to attract voter support prior to this election) the people generally aren't buying the message.

In a completely unrelated, non-political Times editorial, which chides the publishing industry practice of changing the covers of books to match current fashions in order to sell more books to readers "because they look different," concludes that such a practice is meaningless because "you could read almost anything safely camouflaged behind this year's color-coordinated cover."

So it is with the same-old attack ads, which have little to offer voters concerned with real issues except real-or-invented personal slander. The candidate whom such ads support could be "almost anyone safely camouflaged behind this year's party-coordinated cover."

The voters aren't as willing to fall for the litany of foul clichés substitution for informed and rational debate as they used to be. As New York Times contributor Charles Baxter puts it, "[Y]our intelligence is insulted. You are not really being informed; you are, like a child witnessing a divorce, being asked to take sides."

They feel, as the Times does, that "the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits," and that "An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today."