The 2012 Election Field Is an Embarrassment to Democracy

From Charles Pierce, at Esquire. It's basically snark, but Pierce skewers folks pretty hard, so it's worth it for the comical insight to smug left-wing intellectualism:

By any conventional measure, and not entirely through no fault of his own, Barack Obama is a staggeringly vulnerable incumbent. The economy is slowly sinking up to its wheelwells. Unemployment is said to be at a now-all-but-permanent nine percent. His own base is dubious. The independents are as unreliable and dumbassed as ever. There is an energy in the streets that any Democratic president who hadn't listened to Bob Rubin or hired Tim Geithner would have been able to tap with ease. Instead, the incumbent offers platitudes about "understanding their frustration" and moves along. He has only one thing going for him.

By any conventional measure, and entirely through their own fault, the Republicans have produced a field of candidates so utterly comical, so completely devoid of conventional political merit, that the field itself is strong evidence for the elimination of the Republican party. The frontrunner is a simuloid fake. The leading contender is a horndog as surprised to discover that women did not want him as he was to discover that China had The Bomb. The leading "intellectual" thinks Barack Obama "...is about as candid and accurate as Bernie Madoff in what he tells the American people" and then, of course, decries the incivility that is drowning out the important discussion we need to have about the issues facing This Great Nation. The rest of them are concerned about zygotes, black helicopters, and whatever else is simmering in the Bachmann-Paul-Santorum stewpot. And there is Jon Huntsman, the invisible former governor of Utah, reasonably sentient human, and proven non-horndog. This isn't a primary campaign field. It's a condo-board election at the Hell Country Estates.

And that's how progressives see the GOP. We'll see who has the last laugh, however.