Tuesday, December 20, 2011

VICE: Nobody Likes You, Jon Huntsman

Beaten down by years of feckless centrist candidates with no interest in the working class, Democratic voters turn to increasingly bizarre outlets for signs of rescue. Seemingly since 2000, they've annually flirted with some new Republican hopeful — a mythic, "Reasonable One" — whose bipartisan appeal will somehow unite the country and deliver... the same sort of feckless centrist anti-working-class policies they despise from their own candidates. Maybe it's the bad-boy stigma of it all. "Sure, he's going to fuck me, but he's so cool. He won't even pretend like he was that interested in it afterward!"

Jon Hunstman stands ahead of the other candidates as this election's Reasonable One, and somehow makes the exercise in anticipating disappointment even dumber than normal. After all, there is no Reasonable One in the modern Republican Party: an ideologically intolerant and rabid base ensures the instant punishment of the weak, the compromisers, the humanely tolerant. Worse, even if Huntsman — the aw shucks, regular guy, son-of-a-billionaire — were to govern exactly as he likes and not while fearing the teaparty lash, he's still not "The Reasonable One."

Lastly, he doesn't even have the decency to be ruggedly indifferent and overpowering. When America goes to bed with and gets used by the wrong guy, we want someone to make us feel like it was our fault afterward. Huntsman is the sort of person who'd apologize so much about having an early meeting that we'd all just beg him to leave.

Click Jon's pic below to be taken to the Vice article...


...and see for yourself what all this has to do with two porn stars and Newt Gingrich.