If we can't win, are there degrees of defeat we can accept?

Both the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal have inveighed this week against using the midterms as an opportunity to punish an errant GOP, raising the grim specter of a Ways & Means Committee under Charles Rangel, an Appropriations Commitee under David Obey, a Judiciary Committee under John Conyers, and - above all - a House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi. This is a convincing argument, to my mind. While I can see the silver lining in a Democratic takeover of the House, the prospect is just too persistently ghastly for me to happily jump on the Washington Monthly Seven bandwagon. For that reason, I've tended to take the view that here in Indiana - where we have two closely-contested races, Hostettler in the Eighth District and Sodrell in the Ninth - it's vital that whatever disagreements we might have within the party (and Hostettler in particular gives ample cause for disagreement) we stick behind those candidates, because whatever their failings, and no matter how angry we are with this Congress, their winning is vital to our retaining control of Congress, and our retaining Congress is vital to America.

My question for today is (at time of writing, at least) hypothetical, but far from academic. Suppose that, in the next three weeks, it becomes readily apparent that our retention of the House is no longer on the table. That is, we're going to get ripped a new one, and the only question is whether it's blood on the carpet or blood in the streets. (It's not an academic question because, as George Will put it today, if the Democrats can't win the House in this electoral climate, they should go into another line of work; on the other hand, it has to be said, that if the Democrats were an even half-competent opposition party, this would already be over, and it would be over on the scale of Eisenhower's first midterm, not Clinton's second). Does that change the calculus any? If the theory is that we can't give our representatives the damned good shellacking they deserve for six years of betrayal of principal, lethargy, corruption and ostrich government because, well, they're our team and we're not going to win this year without them -- well, wouldn't that argument go out of the window if we're going to lose anyway?

In other words, if we're going to be in the minority (and certainly where the House is concerned, if you're in the minority, you have no more power, realistically, with two hundred representatives than with half that number), if it becomes apparent that we're no longer talking about a knife-edge 215-215 race and we're looking at a complete reversal or worse -- is that a scenario where it would be better to get absolutely slaughtered, and clean house?