Fed Up With the Author of "Fed Up!"?

You have to love it when the putative Tea Party champion in the GOP is getting slammed from both the right - e.g., see Michael Medved in the previous post - and the queen of snark, Maureen Dowd. The irony is that the Tea Party loons (not to mention the Christianists who attended Perry religious extremist confab) could not wait for Rick Perry to get in the GOP presidential candidate race. Now Perry seems best suited for advancing the candidacy of Mitt Romney who is loathed by Tea Party Kool-Aid drinkers. It's truly enough to make one smile on a dreary rainy day like we're having today in Hampton Roads. One can only hope that the trajectory for Perry continues downward and that the result is a repudiation of the Tea Party embrace of ignorance and bigotry. Here are some highlights from Dowd's column in the New York Times:

IN a flash, Rick Perry has gone from Republican front-runner to cycling domestique, riding in front of the pack and taking all the wind — or in this case, hot air — to allow the team leader to pedal in the slipstream.

In the debate on Thursday night in Florida, as Perry grew more Pinteresque, lapsing into long, paralyzed pauses, Mitt Romney grew less statuesque, breaking his marble mold and showing a new sarcastic streak. Romney unveiled his own version of Reagan’s “There you go again,” repeatedly blowing off Perry with a smile and a “Nice try.”

[F]or now, Perry is proving to be Romney’s best asset. Asked the 3 a.m. question by a moderator, Bret Baier of Fox News, what would a President Perry do if he got a call saying Pakistan had lost control of its nuclear weapons to the Taliban, the Texas governor offered a Palinesque meditation on “the Pakistani country.”

“Well, obviously, before you ever get to that point, you have to build a relationship in that region,” he said. “And that’s one of the things that this administration has not done. Just yesterday we found out through Admiral Mullen that Haqqani has been involved with — and that’s the terrorist group directly associated with the Pakistani country — so to have a relationship with India, to make sure that India knows that they are an ally of the United States.” But can he see the Taj Mahal from his house?

For now, Romney is effectively using Perry as a whipping boy on issues that matter to conservatives, like illegal immigration. And when Perry attacks Romney as “Obama lite,” he could be doing Mitt a favor by reminding independents and Democrats that the Stormin’ Mormon is a pseudo-conservative whom they can abide. Authenticity can be overrated, especially in a rabid conservative.