Considering the reported backlash (by mainstream Republicans) towards the spurrious claims made by Palin, Bachmann, and now Huckabee, as well as others catering to the fringe, maybe they should just STFU? They wouldn't have so many lies to backtrack.
No wonder Romney's hiding out somewhere. He's waiting for this bunch to self-implode before declaring. Did you know that this time four years ago there were 8 (count em!) declared Republican candidates for the presidency?
Huh. Even the right's beloved George Will agrees with me!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030407029.htmlBy George F. Will
Sunday, March 6, 2011
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.
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.
A spokesman for Huckabee dutifully lied, saying his employer "simply misspoke": "The governor meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia." Obama did not really grow up there - he spent just five of his first 18 years there and the other 13 years in Hawaii. But obviously Huckabee, with his dilation on the Mau Maus, was deliberately referring to Kenya. Unless Huckabee thinks the Mau Maus were Indonesians, which he might count as another "one thing that I do know."
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.
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.
