Idiocy Quotient

From SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL:

The US Republican race is dominated by ignorance, lies and scandals. The current crop of candidates have shown such a basic lack of knowledge that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein. The Grand Old Party is ruining the entire country’s reputation.

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Herman is Squirmin’

From the Atlantic wire:

His fellow Republican presidential candidates were reluctant to comment on accusations that Herman Cain sexually harassed several women in the 1990s, but now that a woman is claiming they had a long-term consensual affair, they’re ready to speak out.

Jon Huntsman told the Boston Globe‘s Michael Levenson that Cain should think about dropping out […]

…snip…

The Des Moines Register‘s Jason Noble notes Michele Bachmann told Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson Tuesday morning that Cain said he will “reassess” his campaign because that’s “code language for the fact that they’re looking at the viability of their effort moving forward … I think that they recognize that the support has really dropped out of their campaign because of those questions.” She went further on the Scott Hennen radio show, CBS News reports, saying, “Everyone has said to me yesterday – when it came out yesterday, everyone said this is it, he’s done … People just don’t see that there is an ability for him to be able to come back after that.”

Newt Gingrich, who’s less desperate for better poll numbers than Huntsman or Bachmann, wasn’t willing to call Cain’s campaign dead yet.

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The Seducers…I mean, Producers

From STEVE KORNACKI at OPENING SHOT at Salon:

We may be witnessing the political world’s answer to “The Producers,” the Mel Brooks musical about an avaricious showman who concocts a sure-to-flop production that somehow turns into the surprise hit of the season. It’s called the Newt Gingrich presidential campaign.

The former House speaker has rocketed to the top in national GOP polling, and with only weeks remaining until the Iowa caucuses he now has an opportunity to cement his status as the conservative movement’s designated alternative to Mitt Romney. In a month full of breakthroughs for him, Gingrich scored his biggest coup yet over the weekend, when the Manchester Union Leader awarded him the most coveted newspaper endorsement on the Republican side.

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B-lather, Rinse, Repeat (whatever you think people want to hear)

From Ruth Marcus at POST OPINIONS at The Washington Post:

Let us now contemplate Mitt Romney’s hair.

Actually, let us now join the crowd contemplating Mitt Romney’s hair.

The growing crowd. The would-be First Hair made the front page of Friday’s New York Times. At a debate in Michigan a couple of weeks ago, the blogosphere responded to a few uncharacteristically stray Romney locks as if they were loose nukes.

And when late-night television host Jimmy Fallon asked presidential rival Michele Bachmann recently what comes to mind when she thinks of Romney, she answered, perhaps inevitably: “Hair.”

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He even flip-flops on his name!

From THE HILL:

Early stumbles at Tuesday’s GOP foreign policy debate had little to do with policy — instead, the Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination struggled with names.

First, Mitt Romney tried to play off of a joke by debate moderator Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer asked candidates to give short introductions, joking, “Here’s an example of what I’m looking for:  I’m Wolf Blitzer and yes, that’s my real name. I’ll be your moderator this evening and I’m happy to welcome each one of you to our debate.”

When the introductions turned to Romney, he opened with, “I’m Mitt Romney and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.”

But as political watchers were quick to note, Romney’s first name is not Mitt — it’s Willard. Mitt is Romney’s middle name.

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Gaffe-ing It Up

From THE FIX at The Washington Post:

On Thursday night, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told Fox News that she hasn’t “had a gaffe or something that I’ve done that has caused me to fall in the polls.”

The idea that Bachmann hasn’t made any gaffes in her roller-coaster campaign for the 2012 presidential nomination is far-fetched at best. But in a sense, Bachmann is right. Her fall had (almost) everything to do with Texas Gov. Rick Perry and (almost) nothing to do with her misstatements.

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Putting the Ass in HarASSment

From Dave Wiegel at SLATE:

There are two contradictory rules in politics about how to handle an opponent’s embarrassing scandal.

Door Number One: Pile on. The guy’s not “under fire” unless there are flames on him. In the words of James Carville, “if he’s drowning, toss the sonuvabitch an anvil.”

Door Number Two: Back away. The guy’s on fire: You don’t want to get singed!

The choice that Cain’s opponents are making tells us a lot about how he can move past this. They’re all picking Door Number Two. Rick Santorum, in Iowa, isn’t talking about it. Ron Paul is explicitly saying he won’t go after Cain’s “character.” The Perry and Romney campaigns merely deny that the story came from them.

So who outed Herb Herman Cain?
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Hollow Weenies

From Newsweek/THE DAILY BEAST:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Republican leadership’s tether to the Tea Party, flutters the hearts of the government-bashing, budget-slicing faithful with his relentless attacks on runaway federal spending. To Cantor, an $8 billion high-speed rail connecting Las Vegas to Disneyland is wasteful “pork-barrel spending.” The Virginia Republican set up the “You Cut” Web site to demonstrate how easy it is to slash government programs. And he made the Department of Housing and Urban Development the poster child for waste when he disclosed that the agency was paying for housing for Ph.D.s.

But away from the cameras, Cantor sometimes pulls right up to the spending trough, including the very stimulus law he panned in public. Letters obtained by Newsweek show him pressing the Transportation Department to spend nearly $3 billion in stimulus money on a high-speed-rail project—not the one he derided in Nevada, but another in his home state. “Virginia … will demonstrate that this historic investment in rail will create jobs, reduce congestion, spur economic growth and improve our environment,” says a letter he signed with other Virginia members in October 2009, cribbing President Obama’s own argument for the stimulus.

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