Just pick one, dammit

I didn’t watch the Republican debate Saturday night — I haven’t watched a single one, in fact, in this endless dog and pony show. I’m wondering why, as Brad deLong mentioned in a tweet last night, we have  what seems to be dozens of debates to choose one of the clowns in that field to run for president and we’ll only have two to actually choose the president.

Instead of the debate, I was watching a live feed from #OccupyDenver as the the Occupiers were evicted from Civic Center Park and then led police on a merry chase through the streets of Denver. Much more entertaining.

But back to the Republicans. First, the crazy queen Michele Bachmann, who never met a fact she would check, was the front-runner. Then it was the crazy king, Rick Perry, who really digs executing people. Now it’s womanizing madman Herman Cain, and, apparently, womanizing, condescending, arrogant asshole Newt Gingrich will be next.

Will it soon be Sick Rantorum, who couldn’t even hold his Senate seat? And how about Ron Paul? He’s even got some liberals behaving favorably, just because of his anti-war stance and acknowledgement of the bankers’ culpability in the financial morass, although he’s as rotten as the rest anywhere else.

All this to avoid the Mormon Mitt Romney, who makes whatever flip-flops John Kerry made look positively rigid. Romney would disavow his own mother if he thought it would win him the nomination. And he probably will win it, once the Teapublicans finish going through the rest and finding out that they’re all stark raving mad and will do more drive the all powerful independent voters away than any contrived scandal on the left.

And they can’t even count on god to help them. He’s told three candidates to run — Bachmann, Perry and Cain. Apparently god loves a good joke, because he’s sure created one with this batch of Republicans. Jeez, Romney isn’t even Christian, which is apparently more damning to the base than the blackness of Cain.

Keep that in mind — the Republican base is basically ultra-fundamentalist and white, extremists to the core. But it’s that fundamentalism that drives them. Their desire for a fundamentalist Christian state is as fervent as any ayatollah’s in Iran for an Islamic state. They only throw in the “Judeo” part so as not to be barred from the Holy Land.

But apparently Perry’s god missed that part. At last night’s debate (I wasn’t watching, but I was watching the Twitter streams of those who were), he announced that his foreign policy aid would start at zero — even for Israel. They’d all have to make their case, he said.

Now, I don’t believe for a minute that Israel would start at zero if Perry were to win. That’s like saying corporations aren’t people in this Brave New America. But that’s enough to turn off the end-timers, most definitely.

The candidates said all kinds of other nutty things at the debate. Romney and Gingrich would go to war to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, even though there’s no proof that they’re working toward that. Iraq, here we go.

Did you know, by the way, that the vaunted satellite imagery that our vaunted intelligence community said was proof of fresh activity in Iraq’s weapons facilities — proof that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction — was actually desperate Iraqis looting the facilities? Ha ha, funny joke that led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis.

None of the candidates supports torture, but enhanced interrogation techniques are ok, including waterboarding, an “enhanced” technique we hanged people for after World War II. Oh, wait. Paul and the other Mormon, Jon Huntsman, know that waterboarding is torture and said no.

Huntsman, by the way, has far too many liberal ideas and will never get a shot at being the front-runner, even though he’s by far the most sane of this raft of loons.

Somehow, the Republicans will pick a winner, Romney in all likelihood, and we’ll have the most vapid presidential campaign in recent memory because progressives are almost equally uninspired by our current president.

Let’s just hope that uninspiration doesn’t lead to another 2000. That’s how we got saddled with George W. Bush. And we all know how that turned out.