Funny, The Actual Confederate Army Spent A Lot Of Time Retracing The Campgrounds, Looking For Edible Kernels Of Corn In Piles Of Horseshit, Too.

Jindal tells Iowans that Rick Perry is the best choice for the GOP.

AND I'm indebted to Halloween Jack for pointing out the picture above, at Roy's:

Not a lot to add to the commentary on the text; I just wanted to mention the picture that accompanies the article, in which Perry possesses the mien of a used-car dealer who is telling you that the car that you're looking at is a great car, a steal really, and you know that he's full of shit and he knows that you know that he's full of shit, but it's all that you can afford and you need to get to work and you can already see the days ahead when you're cursing the damn thing as it falls apart around you in slow motion. I hesitated to use the used-car-dealer metaphor, because it's been a political cliche ever since Nixon, but it fits so well here.

I know I sound absurd, or more absurd than usual, but I still say it was a major failing of the Nixon era that a half-dozen years later a man who looked like Ronald Reagan--the death rictus, the coiffure of one of Larry Welk's minimum-wage singing stars, the practiced Hollywood carriage--Reagan moved like a man who was accustomed to being carried everywhere, and not in the character-building, struggle-just-for-a-normal-existence way FDR was; more like a foot-bound Chinese wife--and that orange dye-job which he insisted, until he couldn't remember to, wasn't a dye job, not because that fooled anybody but because he felt obligated to sound like he'd fooled himself--could become President. No matter what came out of his mouth. Which, mind you, was even worse, but that's beside the point.

Who, in 2011, is fooled by that Perry air? It's a look that screams "Hi, my intellectual vapidity is only exceeded by my unwarranted self-regard". It's a look that traces at a glance the last thirty years of American social and economic decline.

It's not just the picture of a guy who's been carefully schooled in how to look for the camera. It's a picture of a guy who's been carefully schooled in how to look for the camera because his handlers fear that some stray shot some day might actually reveal his actual soul. Which is so awful that laughable plastic routine up there is preferable.

I swear to God, it may very well have been my callow youth which convinced me, in the early 70s, that by the time I was middle-aged people in America would be meeting at the local bar to drink beer, swap lies, and pass around joints, or that American foreign policy would no longer mean aiming billion-dollar aircraft carriers at Third World nations. But I was absolutely convinced that the risible hard sell and ring-a-ding-ding insincerity of black & white television advertising was dead as the Dodo, and I still can't figure out what happened there.