So did adaher.
I saw Christie goes first. The first drop-outs tend to be the ones who people actually expected to do well, not the ones who understood they were long shots right from the beginning. Then again, I predicted that Christie would be first to drop and I was wrong, so who knows. Also, now that I think about it, Perry was only expected to do well in 2012. He’s been considered a long shot for the last four years. So maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about.
Welp, time to prepare for the rain of toads, I guess.
Perry is delusional thinking that he could be President. He just isn’t smart enough. But it seems that Republican voters hate smart people. All the smart ones are in the single digits. Jindal and Bush have some intellectual heft. Cruz is smart but has spectacularly bad judgement. When was the last time you heard anything about Rand Paul. The only reason Ben Carson is doing well is the strength of the evangelical vote in Iowa. They never pick winners anyway unless it is a landslide.
I heard Perry’s speech and it was such a joke. He was listing states that don’t have “freedom” like California and Washington and New York, all of which are doing really well, and his examples of “Free” states, which he wants more of are Louisiana and South Carolina, which are in the toilet. I’m surprised he was wise enough not to include Kansas and Wisconsin.
Poor Rick. He brought Stupid to a Crazy fight.
(stole that from a Wonkette commenter. Too good not to share.)
I wonder if there are odds on how soon he stops wearing those ridiculous glasses. He no longer has a reason to feign intelligence, does he?
Jindal and Cruz and Carson enjoyed educations at some of the finest universities in the US and England: Oxford and Yale, Princeton and Brown, Harvard and Michigan. Not stupid men.
Dr. Carson is a bizarre naif. Cruz and Jindal are clearly evil…Faustian connivers seeking to gain political power by abusing their knowledge and intelligence to swindle the ignorant.
I’ve never seen any evidence for JEB! having any intellectual heft; just a famous name and connections to the party elite. What am I missing?
He (Perry) certainly was the most handsome of the candidates though. In 2012 I thought he had a chance based basically only on his looks and the fact that he’s from Texas. Seemed like a better looking version of GWB. Folksy and somewhat stupid southerner.
My friend had a theory that Santorum would be the pick in 2016 based on statistics that if I remember correctly showed that the runner up in the GOP was always (or almost always) picked as the nominee the second time round. Anyone have any info about that?
JEB! was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduated magna cum laude, and got his B.A. in 2 1/2 years. I’m not saying he should be named philosopher king, but he did better in college than I did.
Ah. Didn’t know that.
I wonder where THAT came from…Babs’s genes? Didn’t Poppy and Dubya stumble through Yale as legacies with Gentleman’s Cs?
He’s also an entitled rich-kid who has never known want or worked to feed himself a day in his life.
I’ve known smart rich folk who simply don’t understand an awful lot of how the world works. They can be functionally stupid in a lot of ways.
Take Romney in the last election, saying, Hey, shop around for college loans. Consider asking your parents for the money! as a solution for rising college costs.
A person of average intellect from a middle-class family would easily understand why that’s stupid. But a genuinely smart Romney can’t. Couple that narrow view of reality with ideological blinders and a genuine belief in nonsense economics, and, a stick rather than carrot view of social issues, and you get a guy who’s wrong pretty much all the time.
And speaking of being wrong, do we have to remind many here that many of those ivy leaguers also go for creationism, bigotry and climate change denial?
One could make a point that they are only pandering to the base, but so far in the history of many of those “luminaries” I have seen very few high level Republican politicians admit later in life that what they did in the past was pandering or that they were wrong. I do think that we have to realize that they are not smart enough to avoid being infected by the ignorant sources of their base. Their education was not enough to prevent them from breaking bad.
Pssst… See post 10 above.
I’m surprised at how cattily Jindal acts. Can you imagine Obama saying something like this?
“A broken clock is right once a day.”-Rick Perry. 
Unfortunately this is the perception of what one has to do today to remain a relevant candidate for the Republican nomination. They’re a bunch of children; children and miscreants.
I said Perry would stick it out through at least two kiddie tables. Guess I was off by a week!
Perry’s withdrawal announcement was gracious and in complete sentences. I wonder who wrote it for him?
He thought the glasses would make him look like a mild-mannered policy wonk, but everybody still recognized him as Stupidman.