Freaks and, uh, more freaks... Republicans in 2012

A few excerpts below, but this one is really worth a read.  Don't know if it makes me laugh or cry or both.  One of the worst pitfalls of modern American politics is the pervading feeling among the majority of voters that we are left choosing between the lesser of two evils.  Unless a miracle happens, 2012 will be no different for most voters.

While I have yet, in my voting life, to actually pull the elephant lever for President, I always root for them to have a serious, competent candidate for the job.  I would argue this happened in 1992 (in hind sight), 1996, and (questionably) in 2008.  While this current freak show of a Republican field might be "good" for the Democrats a year from now, it is BAD for our country.

And, make no mistake, my money says that Herman Cain will get the nomination before Romney.  The primary voters will vote black before Mormon.  That is the dirty little not-so-secret secret of the 2012 election so far.  And if he does get the nomination, expect many on the wacko right to stay home in November.

Who knows, maybe Huntsman can pull it together?  I do not know too much about him yet, but he seems the least vile of the bunch.  Romney wasn't too bad until his swerve to the far right, past the nicely trimmed lawns of Conservative Lane into the tall razor wire fences surrounding the armed compounds in Crazy Town.  Unfortunately, Huntsman also suffers from Romney's small L.D.S. problem.

Blah...

The GOP's sad, intolerant 2012 field - Yahoo! News: "At the weekend's Values Voters Summit, Republican presidential candidates and conservative kingmakers proved that bigotry is among their chief values

There's a good reason for the otherwise inexplicable reality that in most surveys President Obama, despite his currently desiccated job approval ratings, leads all but one of his Republican rivals — and even against him, the president nonetheless runs neck and neck.

And there's a deeper reason, beyond the inchoate, predictable, and perennial yearning to find an alternative, why so many of the GOP's smartest strategists and most prodigious fundraisers fought so hard to broaden their field of candidates. They sought someone else, anyone both serious and authentic — from Indiana's diminutive but economically literate Gov. Mitch Daniels, who once committed the conservative capital offense of contemplating a tax increase, to New Jersey's blunt, at times bullying, and comprehensively heavyweight Gov. Chris Christie, who believes in the heresy of global warming.

What's unfolding in the Republican arena is not a campaign but a spectacle that repels mainstream voters and rejects or infects mainstream conservative candidates.

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Huntsman, as Tish Durkin argued, has qualities that ought to recommend him — among them, that: "He's not Romney... He's not crazy... He's not swearing on a stack of Bibles." Yet these very qualities are disqualifying in today's Republican Party. Huntsman doesn't want, or can't get, a séance with Donald Trump, who's become the grinning Joker of today's GOP. And Huntsman won't get a second look or a second chance — not this time around.

Instead the party marches to the tin drums of ideological extremism and angry fantasy, while its stiff and fragile frontrunner compliantly frog-marches to the right. Mitt Romney isn't setting the pace; he's trying to do just enough to placate a party where crazy now flourishes in many forms."

...

There's persistent resistance to Romney — on the shameful ground of religious bigotry and on the defensible ground of doubts about his sincerity, his personality, and his principles. The result: The extremism and pratfalls of his opponents, which should benefit the Mitt-man by making him seem relatively sensible and reasonable, have generated a miasma that's enveloping the Romney campaign. Not only has he toed a bright right line on social issues; he's adopted the GOP habit of fact-free argument — almost certainly the easy reaction of someone who's already treated his public life as record-free.

...

Even in an economy where the congressional GOP has intentionally and successfully stalled jobs and growth, the party's nominee may prove to be as vulnerable as the Christie-imploring Republicans calculated. It's clear that the president won't let 2012 be cast as a referendum; he's now setting out the basic choice: Who's on your side? Romney will call this class warfare, but people are coming to understand that we've already had a decade of class warfare — against the middle-class. That's what Occupy Wall Street is all about. And that's why Barack Obama should and will go the next step — and week after week, month after month, challenge Wall Street and vested interests across the board.


Mitt Romney will be ill-prepared for this contest. He will enter the general election burdened by the craziness to which he's had to kowtow. The primaries are also stripping away the strands of his already threadbare character. And they're leaving him on the wrong side of the great dividing line of 2012 — for the privileged, not ordinary people."

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