Right wing cringes

Michele Bachmann may have won the Iowa Straw Poll, but there's a new frontrunner in town: Rick Perry, who edges out Bachmann and Mitt Romney in a new poll of Republican voters in the state. Perry would take 22 percent of the vote, just ahead of Romney at 19 percent, Bachmann at 18 percent, and Ron Paul at 16 percent. Sarah Palin pulled in 10 percent, only beating the bottom tier of the race, which includes Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman. Only 33 percent of Iowa Republicans call themselves Tea Partiers, but Perry dominates among that bloc, taking 32 percent to Romney's 6 percent. In other news, only 35 percent of Iowa Republicans believe in evolution, and 32 percent still believe President Obama was not born in the United States.

Well, that proves that (at least) a third of Iowan right wingers are idiots.

Conservative intellectuals don't have a candidate in the 2012 GOP primary, and they're making their worry more and more public. "To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke, and Mitt Romney is a fraud," Politico reports, citing a series of Wall Street Journal editorials that wrote Romney out of the race and dismissed Bachmann and Perry as unelectable. The Journal's editors wrote that it was time for "someone still off the field to step up." But the options are short: Rep. Paul Ryan shot down conservative pundits' fantasizing about a run when he said definitively that he would not enter the race. Mitch Daniels, right-wing intellectuals' previous crush, also decided not to run, and Tim Pawlenty, whom they saw as a serious policy thinker, dropped out of the race. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said there were still "leading lights" who aren't in the race, and wore a Ryan-Rubio button on Fox News last week.

Paul Ryan? The one who wants to dismantle Social Security? O, please nominate him!

“I would hope that whoever the Republican candidate is, he or she will not tell us that creationism or intelligent design is the equivalent of evolution — just another theory about the origins of the biological man,” said the syndicated Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who declined to weigh in on specific candidates, though Perry was recently recorded telling a young boy on a rope line that Texas schools teach both theories. “To put intelligent design on that level is like offering grade-school children a choice between astronomy and astrology,” he said.

But that is what these bozos consider important, and they pander to the extreme right wing of the Republican party.