Greetings From Tit Town!*

POSTING may be light last week.

Kevin Drum surveys the Republican Presidential field and spots a tiny contender:

But the usual question remains: how does he get through the primaries? When he hops over to Iowa, they'll expect him to denounce sharia law, make jokes about Obama's Kenyan birth, throw himself wholeheartedly into the culture wars, pretend that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, and make dire remarks about the specter of socialism taking over America. In other words, he'll have to act like a public clown, and if he doesn't do it, he'll lose.

First, when all about you are shouting Socialist! saying "Statist Big Government Nanny-Stater" in a normal tone of voice isn't proof of reasonableness; it's just trying to attract attention by setting up your tent a little off to the side, and hiring a receptionist with all her front teeth.

Now nobody knows better than I that you can't chase down every jot and iota from these guys, even if you have nothing better to do; if nothing else there's the Catch-22 thing, where the intelligence required to form shapes into letters and words into sentences would glaze your eyes over ten minutes into The Collected Utterances of Newt Gingrich, and weld them shut in self-defense a quarter-hour after that if you persisted. But, Kev, it really is best to assume that the sky is blue and grass is green and anything you see looking otherwise is Photoshop. Mitch Daniels is a Republican. That's not an accident. As such he has already denounced global warming science, on C-SPAN last year, about the time The Coyness Campaign was shifting into second gear:

There’s been nothing but dubious news about the science about this for about a year. Meanwhile we’re still left with a situation that if zealots had their way and the most extreme methods were taken by their own computer models we don’t move the world thermometer at all.

Now, the best possible fucking light you can put this in is Daniels pimping for Trans-Global Cupidity, which is at least consistent, and the best use of his talents. But the man was all for reducing carbon emissions when that sounded like a good selling point for his pals at Big Ethanol.

Look, Kev, I've seen the man close up. Consider yourself fortunate. If there was any way Daniels could pretend to be a Birther, a Crusader, or a Right-to-Life bomb-thrower and not scare off Boardroom America or shut off its money spigot, he would. After that "Culture Wars on the back-burner" thing became a national flapdoodle--as it was intended to, Kevin--the Campaigning Non-Campaigner went to Laura Ingraham not to reiterate his call for the religious wing of his wingnutty party to shut up and vote for him, but to tell her, and her massive listening audience, that he was Indiana's most anti-abortion governor, ever. As was also intended, Kevin. Mitch Daniels is never gonna out-Palin Sarah Palin; for one thing, he looks ridiculous when he tries. The man's been a Republican insider since the 70s; he watched the Rise and Co-opting of the Religious Right from his perch on Dick Lugar's shoulder.

And no one else who watched the same thing can mistake where this is headed. Should Daniels win the nomination the religious nuts will get their audience, their baksheesh, and their Attorney General; no one observes the niceties of Mob territories more fully than the Capitalist on the make. And for chrissakes, if you imagine we'd spew one less cubic liter of carbon during a Daniels administration than during a Trump administration you're just writing "Mrs. Kevin Daniels" over and over across your composition book. For the life of me, political insiders are like wine merchants: in order to take one seriously you have to pretend he knows everything about the current crop, and absolutely nothing about anything he doesn't have to sell.

Speaking of which, one of the things I did last week instead of completing a post was catch up (a little) on David Weigel, reporter:

• Teabaggers can't be blamed for any government shutdown.

• Trump's birtherism is uncomfortable for Republicans, who'd hoped the issue "would either 1) go away or 2) come up only in town halls where they could dispatch it." [Curious how "Republicans" want an issue to go away when 58% of them believe in it.]

•Sarah Palin is "horrifically unpopular", but her tweets remind people there's an election coming up.

• Newt Gingrich is horrifically unpopular, but his latest retelling of the Great Government Shutdown of '95 proves that a government shutdown today wouldn't be blamed on Republicans, and, especially, Teabaggers.

• It's, like, totally understandable that a full-fledged lunatic like Michelle Bachman would raise huge amounts of cash from Republicans for a Presidential run, because she's a lot more exciting than Mitt Romney, so this should not be taken as evidence that Republicans would actually support a loon for President. Again.

• According to a poll, Teabaggers are, like, total hypocrites on Defense spending. The obvious conclusion, here, is that Teabaggers are not so powerful that people who just want to avoid paying personal taxes without signing up for an Amway distributorship can't share a party with them in good conscience. (I dunno; you read it and explain the argument to me. Seems to me that if someone says "Government shouldn't spend my tax dollars, except on my favorite projects" the first part of the argument is rendered null and void by common fucking sense. But I was educated in a previous century.)

• Rand Paul is a legislative genius for pulling a one-day parliamentary delay in legislation over an issue no one, including Rand Paul, really believes in except as it scores a one-day gabbing point over a weekend when nobody is paying attention, not that anyone with any sense would. Take that, people who laugh at libertarians.

• The idea of balancing a budget in wartime (as defined by that DOA "Balanced Budget Amendment" which exempts military conflict when so defined by 3/5 of both Houses) is frivolous, as any good Teabagger knows. The idea that 3/5 of the Congress could rubber stamp a war it hadn't actually declared gets a free pass.

Look, just tell me how you come by this entire suite of ideas independently. Or any other way other than taking incoming Republican talking points, deflecting them one or two minutes from True, and publishing the results as reporting. Skip that; just tell me how you come to believe in the existence of something called The Tea Party as anything separate from Republican Bidness as Usual. 'Cause damned if I know.

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*My Poor Wife watched Behind the Burly Q over spring break, presumably as part of her Free Pay Channel marathon, and reports that Indianapolis was known as "Tit Town" in that golden era, because it loved it some mammaries. I have never been prouder of my slightly Klan-tinged heritage. Although that really isn't saying much.