Delusional GOP Nutcases and the Run Up to 2012

George Will and I agree on very few things nowadays. But we do agree on one thing - that the lunatics and tawdry prostitute like panderers in the GOP are destroying that once respectable political party and driving more and more sane and even half-way thinking people running away from the GOP screaming. Will is especially harsh with Mike Huckabee - who Rachel Maddow suggested should stick to shilling for weight loss products - and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. These two men - along with Rick Santorum and others of similar ilk who would prostitute their mothers if they thought it would endear them to ignorant, Bible thumping Christianist - are making the prospects of a viable GOP presidential candidate ever more difficult. Here are highlights from Will's Washington Post slam of the delusional loons who are increasingly the face of the GOP:
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If pessimism is not creeping on little cat's feet into Republicans' thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party.
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The most recent vibrator is Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who won the 2008 Republican caucuses in Iowa and reached that year's national convention with more delegates than Mitt Romney, and who might run again.
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Republicans should understand that when self-described conservatives such as Malzberg voice question-rants like the one above and Republicans do not recoil from them, the conservative party is indirectly injured. As it is directly when Newt Gingrich, who seems to be theatrically tiptoeing toward a presidential candidacy, speculates about Obama having a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" mentality.
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Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon - Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.
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Will the rank and file of the GOP get Will's message? Probably not for the simple reason that most of the GOP base is a least as crazy and untethered from reality as are Huckabee and Gingrich. Today's GOP base embraces ignorance, wild conspiracy theories, and a rejection of objective fact and reality.