Thursday, May 05, 2011

Did you know that there is a GOP Presidential Debate tonight?

Well there is and Matt Taibi has a few choice words about the Republican field of candidates (most of whom have declined to attend the Faux News-sponsored event on Crackertown, SC.)

Yes, you read the news right: there is going to be a 2012 presidential debate this evening. Five Republicans are getting together in Greenville, South Carolina to kick off the long process of burying their party as a mainstream political force for the next decade or so. ...snip...
First of all, for the next eighteen months, Obama is going to respond to every single foreign-policy question by holding up Bin Laden’s head and swinging it in front of him like a lantern (metaphorically speaking, of course)....snip...

[F]or the next eighteen months, Barack Obama can walk into Florida and Arizona and California and explain to every person over 50 that the Republicans want to eliminate the Medicare program as they know it. The Republicans meanwhile are already running sideways away from Ryan’s program[.] ... And this is without even taking into consideration the highly negative (for the Republicans) demographic picture heading into 2012, in which a Republican base that skews older, male, and white is slowly shrinking, while Obama’s urban, ethnic, and young base is growing....snip...

Of course the one way to combat all of this would be to put forward a unifying, charismatic candidate whose personality reaches across the middle and snags that extra 4-5 percent of middle-ground undecideds who would put the Republicans back on top. But that’s exactly who the Republicans do not have. Instead, the potential Republican field is made up of two distinct types of candidates: loony-ass, polarizing insurgents drunk on Christian mysticism and/or ego sickness (Michelle Bachmann, Donald Trump, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin) and waffling, opportunistic bores destined to spend most of the primary campaign arguing that they are less terrifying to imagine holding the nuclear briefcase than anyone from the first group (Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney).

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