A embarassment of wretched

Trying to keep my fangirl, Charles P. Pierce's posts to a minimum but this is the most brilliant description of Mitt Romney I've seen yet and needs to be archived here.

On Friday, Mitt Romney, the Republican frontrunner and a man who could be mugged for his wallet through the mail, and a man of such iron will that he wrote a book called No Apologies in which he changed positions on several issues between the hardcover and paperback editions, went before the Koch Brothers hobby-horse Americans for Prosperity banquet and bravely promised to do everything he could not to do anything he bravely promised to do when he was running in any of the several other political campaigns that have kept him from ever being "a professional politician." Specifically, he signed on to Paul Ryan's toss-Grampa-to-the-jackals voucher approach to Medicare. Ryan was thrilled to death. Not his death, of course, but the death of a lot of old people who'll be thrown onto the market of the single most disgusting industry in America that doesn't involve deepwater drilling.

The rest of the GOP field doesn't escape Charles' piercing wisdom and wit and neither does the Democratic party.

Instead, the Democratic party has failed utterly in its duty to the country to force the Republicans to regain their sanity or die as a political entity. It has failed utterly even to try. What we see now in the Republican primary field is a result of that failure. It's bad enough that the Republicans will pay no price for embarrassing themselves this way. There's no reason why the entire country should.

But pay we will because our legislative branch has devolved from a body of governance to an exclusive country club where the dues are paid in corporate cronyism and its legal tender is based on favors from friends and extortion from enemies. Which has always been true, but at this point the business of the people no longer registers on the scale.

Nobody inside the club really wants to change it, because -- profit.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]