From Pine View Farm

Falling Dominoes 0

The latest straw poll winner in the GOP is Herman Cain. From John Baur in my ex-local rag:

WATCHING Republicans stagger through their candidate-selection process is like watching kids at a birthday party play Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

They’re blindfolded, so you never know where the pin gets stuck.

How else to explain Saturday’s surprise win of pizza king Herman Cain in Florida’s straw poll?

The event itself was meaningless was a meaningless fundraiser in which voting came with a fee and few persons participated, but it reminded me of Dick Polman’s column on teabag litmus tests last week:

Perry certainly passes the right-wing litmus test on a huge range of issues – global warming is a fraud, Social Security is a con, regulation is bad – but conservatives are looking for someone who will toe The Line 100 percent of the time. And Perry soured his Florida debate listeners when he stood up for the ’01 Texas law that provides in-state college tuition rates to some children of illegal immigrants. For purists, the law that Perry signed is a no-no. Worse yet was the way he defended the law:

“If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children, because (otherwise) they will become a drag on our society.”

Two problems for Perry: (1) The tea-partying Floridians want to kick out the illegals, not educate them; as one straw-poller told Politico last night, “If they’re illegal, they need to get the hell out of America.” And (2), the kick-’em-out folks resented being told that they are heartless.

Litmus paper, in case you may have forgotten because of the adoption of that term by political reporters, is used for quick and dirty pH tests.

Litmus tests reveal that the Repubican base is acidly corrosive.

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