Watching a man with the intellectual heft and moral clarity of a Rick Perry endorse a man with the character and intellectual honesty of a Newt Gingrich really puts the inspire into the word inspiration, don’t you think? I would suggest pinching oneself as a reality check should it be a beautiful dream rather than a real event, though if you are among the 50 million Americans lacking health insurance at the moment I would advise against it.

Increasingly stormy clouds have been darkening the skies of the Republican snake pit, and only one with a heart of stone can keep from splitting a gut to paraphrase Mr. Wilde. The Republican presidential field always was a stable of political hemophiliacs waiting to spill it all, but now Obama will have the    eventual nominee fully bled out well before election day. Listing the electoral frailties of likely Romney runner-ups Rick and Newt would risk election to the Hall of Repetitive Redundancies so I’ll refrain. Gingrich’s ex confirming at this point he is less Plato than Plato’s Retreat is not a Man Bites Dog story but a Scorned Woman Bites Rodent story.

With Romney on the record on both sides of every major issue of the current era, it shouldn’t be a matter of compiling ad material but of where to edit. Harvey “The Punisher” Weinstein is a loyal Democrat , one who admonishes virtually every director who presents him a film for distribution that it be chopped down to a putatively more commercial length. So his recommendations would appear critical.

In purely performance terms, Romney has the political skills of a ventriloquist’s dummy without the ventriloquist present. Now we know that not only does he have a larger bank account than God he pays the same amount in taxes. The Cayman Islands may be Paradise, indeed. And Romney having his flesh stripped to the bone for his rapacious brand of wrecking ball capitalism by proponents of rapacious wrecking ball capitalism is almost too rich for anybody’s blood.

More delectable for those of us who love to laugh is the battery of polls released over several days showing respectively: Mr. Obama’s favorable to unfavorable metric far superior to Mitt Romney’s; the president soundly defeating Mr. Romney among independents; Americans trusting President Obama more than Republicans on the economy, health care, jobs, the deficit, Social Security and Medicare. On the bright side for Republicans Richard Nixon remains dead…probably.

Also in Hard Times for Reptiles news, Wisconsin’s medieval governor Scott Walker had his head handed to him this week in the form of over a million signatures asking to have him recalled.  For reneging on the promised pensions and healthcare commitments to public employees of that state in deference to an indefensible corporate tax reduction, among other scabrous acts, Walker earned his well-deserved bad karma as a magnificent douche bag. Of course,  soon to be out of a job, and too much the rugged individualist to take the loser’s route of unemployment insurance one is certain,  I see a place for him on a Romney ticket this fall. He will have stuck around in his job longer than Palin I believe.