CT Blue

Sometimes, methinks, folks in the leftmost portion of the blogosphere take things just a little too seriously.

Yesterday, in the grand tradition of John Kerry, Bill Richardson tried to make a joke. In the grand tradition of present day politicans of all stripes, he failed miserably. Richardson was in Iowa, and, seeking to curry favor with his audience, tried to justify Iowa’s undeserved place in the presidential nominating process. Since neither logic nor reason justifies Iowa’s privileged place, only two entities are left to to blame, neither one of which can defend themselves these days. Per Richardson:

“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary,”

Now there are two possibilities here. Richardson either really believes that Iowa comes first by constitutional mandate and the will of God, or he does not. If the first, then he is almost as deranged as George Bush, who believes even more bizarre things about both God and the Constitution, and thinks God talks to him to boot. If, on the other hand, Richardson does not believe these assertions, then he was attempting, as his campaign now claims, to do something that all Democrats should attempt with extreme trepidation: tell a joke.

I incline, indeed I positively avalanche, toward the latter conclusion. On a scale of 1 to 10, the joke is minus 10 funny, about par for the course for politicians these days, but that doesn’t diminish his mens rea (the word is apt, it was a crime against humour) one bit. Nonetheless it appear that even the mighty Kos feels that it is an example of pandering and some appear to think that Richardson was serious.

If it was a pander it was of the harmless sort, so over the top that it is practically a parody of pandering. In fact, that might very well be what he was intending to do, he just couldn’t pull it off. In any event, this isn’t the sort of thing we should pile on one of our candidates about. It’s bad enough that the media often run with these things, as they did when they crucified Kerry for telling a Bush is stupid joke. There’s no need for us to inflate a story that’s essentially meaningless. Stupid statements, when uttered by Republicans, are usually ignored (e.g., Mitt Romney’s assertion that his five sons were doing the equivalent of Iraq service by working on his campaign), while those from Democrats often have a long shelf life. There’s no need for us to add fuel to the fire.