Will anyone take her as a VP candidate?

[Posted by Karl]

George W. Bush has enough to answer for without hanging Mitt Romney around his neck.  Yet that’s a major theme of Erick Erickson’s rambling and occasionally incoherent post-Iowa rant:

The reason this Republican primary season is so chaotic is because George W. Bush failed to have a successor. Had President Bush had a Vice President to run for President, Bush would have undoubtedly made different policy decisions, but even aside from that there would have been an ascertainable front runner coming from the Bush administration to win or lose.

Because there was not such a thing and because the GOP likes orderly processes, we had to go back to 2000 and dredge up John McCain.

The Republican field was unable to reboot because we had no logical successor coming out of the White House to either win or lose. We went back to McCain and have had to work our way back through unresolved issues from 2000. And now, when the field should be rebooted, we’re having to deal with Mitt Romney who should have been displaced by an heir in 2008 and instead, because the 2008 season did not reboot the crop of candidates, is now the guy three quarters of the GOP does not want who is about to be the nominee.

Our process is chaotic because Bush left us no heir to win or to be rejected through a cathartic process of locking in gains or moving on from Bush. Yes, this one is Bush’s fault.

Erickson identifies with the tea party, but is he or the tea party really upset that big-spending, “compassionate” King George II did not provide a the line of sucession?  Of course not, which is why Erickson ends up complaining “Bush left us no heir to win or to be rejected.”  However, had Bush offered up a RINO Veep as common foe to true conservatives, wouldn’t that Veep have had even greater institutional advantages and been even more difficult to defeat than John McCain or Mitt Romney? (more…)

Mitt by eight votes.

Eight.

Wow.

Yesterday’s post about Rick Santorum’s child that died had a comment from reader Leviticus that I think deserves to be read by everyone:

Santorum’s wife gave birth to a child. When she did (and, to my mind, even before she did), Santorum’s other children had a baby brother.

When that baby died, the other children lost their baby brother. What were the Santorums to do? Pretend that the other children never had a baby brother? No. The kids might not have understood at the time, but they would eventually; and, young as they were, they had a stake in the matter, a right to know.

The alternative – the only really acceptable alternative – was to tell them that a child had lived and breathed as their brother, to memorialize him. But it would be difficult to communicate that message to young child with mere words. So, they brought his body home; the words became unnecessary.

Those children will always remember their brother; and thoughts of the mystery, sanctity, tragedy, and brevity of human life will be indelibly stamped on their consciousness – a trait sorely lacking in many modern men and women. What bothers the most calloused members of the pro-choice crowd is the intuitive (though ever unacknowledged) realization that some people really do feel love for a child that they don’t know, for the “simple” reason that it was their own, however briefly – that some people really do respect and realize how sacred that bond is, and that they… don’t.

Well said.