Republicans Desperate For New Leadership But... Gary Sinise?

A new generation of Republican leadership?

The GOP is so desperate for a fresh new face-- especially with patience for Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney, the party's top spokesmen, growing extremely thin-- that they'll take almost anything. Earlier today Chris Cillizza put forward dull party operative Mitch Daniels, a former Eli Lilly corporate hack, who managed to overcome the handicap of having best arrested and jailed for drug use (just pot), went on to become the spectacularly failed OMB director for Bush and is currently the Governor of Indiana, famous as a state producing particularly undistinguished governors from both sides of the aisle (apart from territorial Whig governor William Henry Harrison, appointed by President John Adams).

Cillizza, a long time Daniels booster, was smitten with Daniels' condemnation of Baby Boomers recently. It was a thinly-vieled-- he makes a gratuitous attack on Obama as a way of showing his right-wing bona fides to Limbaugh-- condemnation of the Bush Regime, which he was part of, and of the Republican Party.

"As a group, we have been self-centered, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and all too often just plain selfish."... Daniels went on to offer a sweeping indictment of his own generation's financial and moral selfishness, concluding: "It's been a blast; good luck cleaning up after us."

Keep lookin'.

Yesterday Roland reminded me when the California Republican Party had settled on low-grade hustler (and thug), Mike Carona, dubbed by the Republican-owned media "America's Sheriff," as the future of the party. He would be Arnold Schwarzenegger's political heir. And as Republicans became less and less happy with Schwarzenegger-- and then all but wrote him out of the party entirely-- they couldn't wait for Carona to take over. Indicted on federal corruption charges and convicted for witness tampering, he is currently serving five and a half years in prison.

Earlier Republican wunderkind Ted Bundy was seen as a rising star in the GOP. His political mentor, 3-time Governor and one-term U.S. Senator Dan Evans (R-WA), frequent also-ran in the Republican vice-presidential sweeps, appointed him to the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee. At the time he was a habitual petty thief. In 1973 he moved up and became assistant to Ross Davis, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. A year later young women started disappearing wherever Bundy was-- Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Florida-- and after years in prison the once rising star of the GOP was electrocuted early in 1989, as a huge nonpartisan crowd outside the prison cheered.

More recently, it looked like Joe the Plumber would be the salvation of the GOP-- until he quit the party in disgust-- only to be followed by a Miss America runner-up and sore loser, Carrie Prejean, who tickled the GOP's fancy by embarking on a career of gay-bashing-for-Jesus. It was then discovered she had lied about having been a soft core porn model and is no longer participating in any Miss California events.

With RNC Chair Michael Steele disqualifying Mitt Romney as too flippy-floppy and too Mormon for Republicans and with Dick Cheney writing the most popular Republican in the country, Colin Powell, out of the party, the GOP is desperate to find an acceptable leader.

And desperation has led to... Gary Sinise? Who? Don't ask me; I don't get out much. I just know of a smarmy, wormy-looking actor named Gary Sinise who had a part in Forrest Gump and then played George Wallace on TV, but they couldn't mean him. Could they? Maybe it's a plot to make Sarah Palin look good.