Politics: Michelle Bachmann helps set the bar low for Newt Gingrich

Maureen Dowd has this hilarious column in the New York Times:

What does it say about the cuckoo G.O.P. primary that Gingrich is the hot new thing? Still, his moment is now. And therein lies the rub.

As one commentator astutely noted, Gingrich is a historian and a futurist who can’t seem to handle the present. He has more exploding cigars in his pocket than the president with whom he had the volatile bromance: Bill Clinton.

But next to Romney, Gingrich seems authentic. Next to Herman Cain, Gingrich seems faithful. Next to Jon Huntsman, Gingrich seems conservative. Next to Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Gingrich actually does look like an intellectual. Unlike the governor of Texas, he surely knows the voting age. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, Perry wouldn’t have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.

In presidential campaigns, it’s all relative.

She goes on to simply take him apart for all of the ridiculous things he has done. But right now, I’ll focus on the stupidity in the GOP field…and how they typify the typical Republican: they are too stupid to even recognize their own ignorance!

Today’s target with be Michelle Bachmann. Sure, she has little or no chance:

For the record, Obama is at 50.5, Romney at 22.0 and Gingrich is now at 20.0. But Bachmann trails people that aren’t even running!

Nevertheless, she is supposed to be a “serious” candidate.

So let’s see: she claims that she has never said “anything inaccurate” in the debates. This is laughably wrong.

Well, now she is saying that she would close the US Embassy in Iran. One problem: we don’t have one.

What is troubling is that being this ignorant is, well, normal for a Republican.

Remember that she isn’t some moron with an obscure blog; she is running for the top spot of her party, and evidently SOMEONE is backing her.

Of course, she isn’t alone. Republican candidate Rick Santorum is whining about public schools not teaching creationism as an alternative theory to evolution:

During a meeting with the editorial board of the Nashua Telegraph, Rick Santorum urged public schools to begin teaching claims that undermine evolution, no matter their scientific veracity. He blamed “the left and the scientific community, so to speak,” for the inability of schools to teach about the role of God or a Creator, and said that “maybe the science points to the fact that maybe science doesn’t explain all these things.”

Note: if he were on the left, he’d be (rightly) dismissed as a crackpot. But he is completely in the mainstream among Republicans, at least on this issue.

On another note
This New York Times article discusses why presidential primaries are much harder to predict than general elections. Upshot: the candidates are rarely at a great funding disadvantage by the time they win their party’s nominations and they have the time to get well known and to get their message out. That isn’t always the case in primaries, though, perhaps, we might be seeing a change in that in this new internet age.