Des Moines: The fringe's giant leap for mankind

IN MY CONTINUING effort to monitor giant leaps for mankind, I think you should know about the latest gathering of GOP presidential hopefuls in Des Moines. That's the capital of Iowa and serves nicely in the heart of the state as a Sharia-free zone for another round of the show up-and-tell fringe politics of Michele, Newt, Haley, Herman et al. With the state's potential game-changing caucuses on the line next year, only Sarah Palin would get away with ignoring the ultra-conservative forum over the week end hosted by Iowa's thought-free congressman Steve King.

Some of the tone recalled the days when you could get a very nice bedside lamp with Top Value stamps; in the current version of Republican politics, the first test of any candidate is whether he or she subscribes to King's reliance on Judeo-Christian Family Values to pull a country of majority Christians out of its economic depths. Steve King says it better to his audience than I can:

"If we get the culture right, the economy will be right eventually.

Meantime, Newt Gingrich, who has been spreading like crabgrass these days , rose to the podium with more assaults on lefties and the president. Armed with his own mathematical proofs, Newt bellowed: "There is a huge difference between Obama and the left and 80 pct. of the American people." Of course, you never know what American people Newt is hanging out with. Some observers had hoped that he he would satsifactorily explain the huge difference between supporting a no-fly zone in Libya one day and rejecting it the next.

Haley Barbour joined others in promising that tax cuts would produce jobs (unfortunately not for the armies of workers laid off because of shrinking budgets). That audience-friendly proposal is much like the first line of a classic poem without a follow-up line.

But back to values. Michele Bachmann, whose head has become a revolving turret that nails every moving object in Lib-land, told her cheering crowd: "It is the character and the values of our people - that's why I am so confident in our people in 2012".

That is a summary of what we can expect for nearly two years. I confess that I'm never sure what values these people are talking about. But I promise to let you know after I turn on the Top Value bedside lamp and open a book. The lamp is now in the realm of heirlooms. Can't say that the giant leap for mankind in Des Moines produced anything of that lasting value

PS. Oops. Did I forget to mention prexy hopeful Herman Cain's economic dialectic? Or John Bolton's hawkish remedies for Iran? You didn't miss a thing.