What is it with these Republican presidential candidates? Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels decides not to run because of an embarrassing family secret: he and his wife divorced, she ran off to California and married her high school sweetheart, discovered that she was no longer in high school and divorced him, moved back to Indiana and remarried Mitch. So she’s a wacko, he’s a pussy, end of story.
Newt Gingrich announces, pisses on Paul Ryan’s save/smash Medicare plan, and gets caught running a million-dollar tab at Tiffany’s, making wife Callista looking like a cross between Lorelie Lee,* Holly Golightly, and Carrie Bradshaw, as well as a home wrecker. Plus, it turns out that that Diamond Newt also owes half a mill to Moby Dick Airways, the choice of big dicks in a hurry the world over.
And, of course, there’s Sarah Palin, off in the wilds of Palinsylvania, lost in the windmills of her mind. It would take a Stendhal or a Flaubert to unlock the riddles of Palin’s sensibility, not that either one would take the job, but personally I think she went off the rails when she allowed herself to be photographed on a hunting trip with Daddy loading her rifle for her.†
And now comes Ms. Tea Party, Michelle Bachmann, who apparently suffers from chronic migraine attacks—“an issue that threatens to spin out of control,” according to the furiously spinning Politico, whose relentless reporting team of Kasie Hunt and Molly Ball have assembled an almost endless stream of anonymous former staffers, happily pissing on their former boss. I guess, sometimes, it helps to be nice to the little people.
*Lorelie was the protagonist of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, once one of the most famous books in American popular culture, now known almost entirely through the Marilyn Monroe film version of the Jule Styne/Leo Rubin musical. Wikipedia has an extended bio of Loos, once enormously famous as well, and now almost forgotten.
†Was she afraid she’d break a nail? Probably.
