MITT ROMNEY KNOWS THAT IF THERE'S ONE CULT EVEN CRAZIER THAN THE MORMON THING, IT'S THOSE WILD AND WHACKY SCIENTOLOGISTS

I'm not sure who the Moonies are supporting but Mitt, the candidate of the "Church" of the Latter Day Saints, may have just sewn up the Scientologists yesterday. No, really; he did. It doesn't take much to get the Scientologists on your side. And Romney said a mediocre novel by their manipulative prophet-- whose wealthy cult is based on a dare and a practical joke-- is his favorite novel ever. No Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? James Joyce? Melville? Hawthorne? J.D. Salinger? I would have pegged Romney as a big Judith Krantz devotee or maybe an Ayn Rand fan, but L. Ron Hubbard? Well, not one notable book has ever been written by a Mormon, so why not by the founder of the next most fake religion? “I’m not in favor of his religion by any means, Romney told Fox yesterday. "But he wrote a book called ‘Battlefield Earth’ that was a very fun science-fiction book." And it's still an improvement over coloring books and "The Pet Goat."

(Actually, it's a really crappy book and would never be on a list of the 100 best novels of all time-- nor even of the 1,000 best or 10,000 best. "Battlefield Earth is awful. Nobody reads that book except Scientologists and smartasses who want to giggle at Scientologists, and even they start to cash out by the 7000th page or so.")

And Romney probably needs something to take his mind off the campaign when he's not out collecting tithes donations from fellow cult members. He did raise the most money of any Repug so far. But the more he raises the more his favorability ratings stay the same. And then last week his Deputy Campaign Manager, Jason Roe, suddenly decided he needed to spend more time with his family as he got swept up in the Tom Feeney/Jack Abramoff bribery scandals. He resigned just in time to avoid giving Mitt this particular variety of Republican cooties.

But Romney has another kind of cooties. Most of the bigots in the GOP base ain't votin' for no cult member who wears Holy Underwear. They don't even take him as a serious candidate. Even relatively sophisticated Republicans can't stop thinking about his cult status. When someone asked Bush's batty old mother about Romney she blurted out "It was in 1897 that bigamy was outlawed in that church. You know we have a lot of Christian wild people too, and a lot of Jewish wild people and a lot of Muslim wild people. The Mormon religion takes care of its own, they don't have people on welfare..." I guess you can count that as a pro-Romney vote as he's likely to get from a Bush.