Avarice, Incompetence, Lies: how the GOP hopefuls stack up

I said recently that no field of Republican presidential candidates scares me across the board quite like this bunch of turds.

Unfettered, Remorseless Greed: A report from this morning suggests that Mitt Romney leads the field. In addition to being worth "as much as $247 million," (more than every other presidential candidates combined) an LA Times article suggests that he got it the old-fashioned way: exploitation. Unlike our current 'MBA president,' however, Mitt is much more than just a non-failure in the business world. He's a dick.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney [recently] divested from companies doing business in Iran, but he still holds stock in an oil company that does business in Sudan -- where the government is accused of sponsoring genocide -- his financial disclosure report filed Monday shows.

Mitt Romney: will sell holdings in brutal, totalitarian regimes-- but only if it will cost him votes.

I solemnly swear that experience will teach me nothing: There could be a good reason Rudy Giuliani bailed out of the Iraq Study Group in favor of motivational speaking. Besides his eagerness to pimp his 9/11 prominence into big sacks of money, I mean. His team of foreign policy 'experts' are considered more hawkish and more ideological in their neoconservatism than Bush's. In other words, careful consideration and pragmatic solutions are the last thing he cares about.

Earlier this month, Giuliani named Podhoretz a senior adviser on his foreign-policy team. (“Yep. It’s official,” the Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote. “The bombing begins in five minutes.”) The addition of Podhoretz to the team was a dramatic political gesture by Giuliani, coming at a moment when the neoconservative agenda has been broadly discredited, and blamed for a misbegotten war. Podhoretz is so untempered a neocon that he makes Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s former Deputy Defense Secretary, and a key architect of the Iraq invasion, seem almost a moderate realist.

Podhoretz joins, among others on the foreign-policy team, the conservative Middle East scholar Martin Kramer and Charles Hill, a Hoover fellow and one of the instructors in the Grand Strategy seminar at Yale. It is Hill’s thesis that the Islamic terrorists (“Islamofascists,” in Podhoretz’s term) are at war with the international system that has ordered the world since the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648.

Hooray! Four more years of the delusional idiocy that's brought us failure in Iraq and failure in Afghanistan-- but not in bringing al Qaeda to justice.

The 'Man of the People' Award: This is given to the candidate most effective at duping Americans into thinking that he's a middle-class, down-home kinda guy. It'd be too easy to give it to everyone, if appropriate. There's Mitt with his calculating "win in Massachusetts then trash it across the nation" strategy. Rudy, who made a fortune trading on his "I'm a hero of 9/11" status-- in spite of the fact that he has earned the eternal enmity of those who actually performed heroic acts in the aftermath.

The award really should go to Fred Thompson, for a number of reasons. The fact that the closest he's gotten to military service is wearing a uniform in B-movies (a la 'The Gipper' and 'The Governator'). There's his recent self-comparison to George Washington in not running for another term-- so that he could be a Beltway prostitute. There's his history of being chauffered to campaign events, only to drive the last half-mile or so in a pickup planted nearby.