Times like these drove Rod Serling to a career of chain-smoking and penning screenplays about such things as mysterious furry monsters lurking on airplane wings. Conservatism's biggest mouth urges his listeners to switch parties for a day and vote for Clinton - Hillary, no less - in the Texas Democratic primary. An Illinois lawmaker who scarcely has finished going through his U.S. Senate orientation handbook is leading presidential election polls. And a political relic named John McCain, whom conservatives revile, is the GOP's last man standing.

If this is not sufficiently bizarre, consider that Rush Limbaugh is taking credit for Hillary's campaign-saving win in the Lone Star state, and the numbers back him. Although Barack Obama still edged Hillary 53 to 46 percent among Republican crossover voters in Texas, the margin was far narrower than in previous contests, in which Obama routinely took two-thirds of the GOP switch vote.

The motive driving what is being referred to as the Limbaugh Effect was to throw the rival party into chaos by depriving Obama of what was to have been a coronation in last week's crossroads primaries.

Limbaugh also believes that Hillary is a more beatable foe for McCain, who now has the luxury of preparing for the big November showdown while Democrats slug it out over which candidate the country would prefer to be at the receiving end of an emergency 3 a.m. phone call at the White House. On this point, it has to be acknowledged that the Clintons have a decided advantage on the subject of late-night emergencies on Pennsylvania Avenue, although Hillary probably had something other than bimbo eruptions in mind.

Whether conservative radio's king yapper wields the sort of clout he imagines remains a subject for debate. A more intriguing question might be whether Limbaugh's tactics - comically being decried by leftist pundits - will produce the effect for which he most surely longs, putting another Republican, even one with McCain's dubious conservative credentials, in the Oval Office.

That task figures to be considerably more formidable than nudging a few radio proselytes into pulling the switch for Hillary amid the sound of their own schoolyard snickering. Only once since Harry Truman rode the coattails of VE Day and liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to presidential victory has a party managed to notch three straight presidential wins. That happened in 1988, when the first President Bush followed the mother of all conservative candidates, President Reagan, with a kinder, gentler victory over Democratic historical footnote Michael Dukakis.

This time around, McCain must follow a truly tough act in George W. Bush, who has bequeathed his beloved party with a still-unpopular war, a burgeoning recession, a monstrous deficit and approval ratings only slightly higher than those of Congress or Attila the Hun in Rome after his sacking of Italy in the 400s.

Worse yet, Democrats have pummeled Republicans in the critical realm of turnout, topping the GOP by an average 2-to-1 margin. That disparity has been fed in no small part by the intriguing duel at the top of the campaign between Clinton and Obama. Hillary's comeback in Texas likely will result in a tight race through summer and into the party's national convention in late August.

In the intervening period, the Democratic combatants will continue to control the attention of media while McCain strives to look busy and plot strategy against two candidates whose policies are near-identical but whose styles are a study in contrasts.

Limbaugh has acquired the substance of that for which he hoped - a resurgence by Hillary - but the evidence in November might well show an effect counter to his ultimate goal, the return of Republicans to their right, if not rightful, place atop American politics.