Apparently our Mitt thinks the GOP nomination is going to go to the candidate who's able to establish himself most clearly as certifably bonkers

The race for the GOP presidential nomination appears to have taken a new turn. No longer content with elbowing and scratching one another to establish themselves as the stupidest and most dishonest, they've raised the stakes to certification for full-blown, certifiable, lock-'im-up-and-throw-away-the-key insanity.

Mitt Romney went a-pandering yesterday, on graduation day at Pat Robertson's Regent University, trolling for the support of people he clearly considers dumber than a gob of muck he would scrape off his shoe. Like all the other GOP candidates, Romney's policy is apparently "I'll pretend to believe any damn thing, no matter how stupid or pointless, if it'll trick really stupid people into thinking I'm cool."

And so to those newly certified imbeciles being ground out of the Reverend Pat's diploma mill, he pretended to give a damn about families. It's those damned Europeans, he suggested, who are killing marriage. "In France, for instance," he said, "I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."

Now I don't know whether someone really told Mitt this nonsense, or he just made it up in his own diseased brain, but of course it's gibberish. Some smart folks on another list quickly pointed to the 2003 film 7 ans de mariage (Seven Years of Marriage), directed and co-written by Didier Bourdon, who also plays the husband in a marriage that after seven years has fallen into a rut, which he tries to shake up with the help of a sex therapist friend.

Another poster pointed out that it's a newfangled take on the old Seven-Year Itch. An even smarter poster pointed out that, most appalling of all, the Washington Post reporter (for the record, Perry Bacon Jr.) simply reported Mitt's blithering whopper as if it's true, without even questioning it. And we shouldn't let the editor(s) in question off the hook either.

I guess the Republican candidates are terrified that being caught showing any sign of sanity, let alone intelligence or decency, will doom their hopes. Who am I to say they're wrong?