Time to Crash and Burn

All the talk about Jim Demint being a kingmaker makes me chuckle.  He's got loads of money, especially since his Watergate-style minions have been able to fix the primaries so that he doesn't have to run for re-election, and he's not afraid to say whatever's on his mind, and with conviction.

But the secret to his success is that he NEVER HAS TO FACE HIS OPPONENT.  From speaking on an empty Senate floor, to nasty anti-American sound-bites in front of a crazed Tea Party crowd, he has been able to pretty much have his image molded for him.  I say, "for him" because despite his advertising background, I don't think he's that swift with the pen.

I remember the good old days when Inez Tenenbaum was making him defend his faux-Christian right-wingnut positions.  I would never get tired of hearing him talk about not allowing a pregnant single woman to teach for fear she would influence our children.

But six years ago, the smaller Bush and Mark Sanford had only just begun to wreak havoc on our lives, and the dream of living high without paying taxes was very appealing to our electorate, and so he became Senator Demint.

Since then, he has made us proud by being featured on The Daily Show as South Carolina's "colorful socialist-fearing, Erkel-quoting Senator Demint".

Yes, Jim Demint is pretty darned sharp when it comes to quoting Erkel, and he can give you the plot line of nearly all of the episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, but don't think for one minute that that proves his intelligence.  When he is not reading from a speech, his sentences meander around words like "freedom" and "free-market" which tend to pop up with both irrelevance and irreverence.

I hate to say it, but Jim Demint sounds like a product of an inadequately funded education system.

He's also managed to alienate the real republicans in his party, with his megalomaniacal plan to seed the Senate with crazies who share his own psychosis, figuring that he has pretty much bought and paid for them.

But in the real world, Opie doesn't always win the fight, or get Andy's approval.  The media may be enjoying the tantalizingly creepy sound of "Jim Demint, Kingmaker", but face it,  if you take a close, more analytical look at the races, bullying his way into a state's primaries with a ton of money didn't get him all that much in terms of results.

He's bragging about republicans on the Hill asking him for favors in 2012, but I'm betting by then he'll be as much in demand as the smaller Bush was during the campaign of '08.