GOP PRESIDENTIAL RACE UPDATE: McCAIN LOSING SUPPORT, ROMNEY LYING, RUDY CHANNELING BUSH... KRUGMAN READY TO THROW UP

RudyMcRomney and some other doofus

The big Repug campaign news yesterday was how the McCain campaign lost some wingnut county chairman in South Carolina, David Nix, who ain't buyin' none of that thar amnesty stuff. But toothless rednecks who hate people with darker shades of skin aren't all the McCain campaign is losing. Today's Washington Post carries a front page story about serious sources of financial support deserting McCain for actor/lobbyist Fred Thompson. Even the guy who rescued McCain when he was caught taking bribes way back in the Keating Five Scandal days, has jumped ship.

McCain has slid from front-runner to everybody's best guess for who is most likely to drop out. Actor/lobbyist Thompson is viewed by conservatives as their best hope to stop the waking freak show from NYC from getting their party's nomination. "Thompson is aggressively pitching himself to conservatives uncomfortable with Giuliani, McCain and Romney, and hoping that he will be seen as a viable-- and fresh-- alternative to the current Republican field when he announces his candidacy early next month. He has already lined up the backing of a number of prominent Republicans, including George P. Bush, a nephew of President Bush."

There are few substantive differences between Thompson's record and McCain's. If anything, Thompson's is less conservative, but McCain is so hated and distrusted by the right wing base that they're giving Thompson a pass-- especially because he has taken advantage of McCain's vulnerability with the far right by coming out against McCain's and Bush's hated immigration bill. The result: Thompson is rounding up "coveted bundlers from McCain and the other front-runners, attracting significant interest from Bush's Pioneers and Rangers-- donors who proved capable of tapping vast personal networks for hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions."

Yeah, yeah... McCain's dead meat. Bury the stinking corpse already and let the Republicans get on with their attempt to find someone who isn't perceived as the next Bush. Yesterday John Edwards pointed out that Giuliani is probably the most Bush-like of the candidates. "If Mayor Giuliani believes that what President Bush has done is good, and wants to embrace it and run a campaign for the Presidency saying, 'I will give you four more years of what this president has given you,' then he’s allowed to do that. He’ll never be elected President of the United States, but he’s allowed to do that."

But how will Americans even know he's doing that? As Krugman pointed out so eloquently this morning, the corporate mass media cannot be trusted to cover even the most basic and essential points in these elections. Forget that in the last debate Romney blatantly lied about why Bush invaded Iraq-- either because he's deceitful or because he's ignorant; the media was more interested in joke candidate Tommy Thompson's gaffe about Reagan's date of birth. Is this of any consequence? Well, in 2000 "George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies-- for example, when he declared of his tax cut that 'the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.' That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted. But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes-- failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency."