Let me finish tonight with this:
The fight for the Republican presidential nomination has begun to look like those old movie scenes in The Tale of Two Cities. It's the French Revolution where every week the angry crowd calls for the beheading of yet another mistrusted leader.
Consider the "reign of terror" of these past months. Remember how Donald Trump led the polls a few months back by spreading the word that the President of the United States wasn't even born here? Then it was Tim Pawlenty who was going to be the one who found common ground for the tea party and the mainstream. Both gone!
The revolutionaries grow in fury. The hunt continues for traitors in their midst. Yesterday's leader is today's suspect. Governor Perry is suddenly the one being surrounded and questioned. Did he give girls shots to keep them from getting cancer? Did he give in-state tuition to young people whose parents brought them into the country illegally? Did he say a bigger, higher wall wasn't the solution? "Treasonous!" barks one of his accusers.
Is anyone "right" enough to be safe in this angry crowd? Is anyone secure from the charge that he is not sufficiently right or that he lacks the stuff to throw Obama from the White House? I have to say, I have never witnessed such a crackle of enthusiasm for executing people as I heard at the Reagan Library debate last week. I recalled it last night when I heard the clap of applause when Ron Paul said he'd let someone die if they failed to pony up for health insurance.
This is a tough crowd, an angry crowd. The only question now is whether this Tea Party-driven movement wants to run one of their own or is so angry at Obama, so determined to whisk him from the White House, that they're willing to have as their candidate someone who, while he's long had his heart set on the White House, would never in a million years have shown up at one of their meetings.