by Patrick Appel
Contra Chait, Douthat remains skeptical:
Romney remains a weak frontrunner, to be sure — weak enough that I was sure he was a dead man walking a year ago. But the candidate who beats him has to peel off some of his moderate-establishment support as well as mobilizing Tea Party voters, and such a candidate hasn’t yet emerged. It might — might — be Rick Perry, but it isn’t Michele Bachmann.
In other Michele Bachmann news, her signing an anti-pornography and anti-gay pledge has put her extremism on display. Alyssa Rosenberg's perspective:
Equating pornography with human trafficking, prostitution, or infanticide suggests that Bachmann doesn’t know very much about any of those things, or much about the sex lives of actual Americans (particularly those she claims to represent). And if Bachmann interpreted that pledge as a mandate to seek a governmental ban of pornography and pornography broadly defined (rather than, you know, folks doing the work to keep kids away from material they don’t want them to access), it would be a demonstration of what startlingly low value Bachmann places on the First Amendment. “All forms of pornography” can be interpreted to include a lot of art and popular culture. None of this is surprising, I think, but it’s not minor. And it merits pointing out and pushing back against.
Jim Burroway focuses on the anti-gay language.
The Dish 