It's way better then a catfight.
Update: Glen Beck and Mormon Jesus are neck and neck!
Gather round in a circle kids! It's a certified, no kidding, old-fashioned wingnut fight! Hot on the heels of the Red State denunciation of suspiciously loafer-wearing Charlie Crist (He totally made out with Obama on the dance floor at Bill's Filling Station! For Realz!) comes the primary pile-on against Utah's own Bob "wet lips" Bennett.
Now, Robert Foster Bennett is pretty much a cypher. He inherited the job from his Senator daddy, as well as thanks to being the grandson of one former Mormon prophet and married to the granddaughter of another. He's the bland, boring Utah equivalent of a later-generation Rockefeller or a Kennedy, someone who embodies the "to the manor born" lack of gumption and empathy. His career, such as it is, has mostly consisted of touching all the Mormon power bases; he worked for Howard Hughes's Mormon mafia, helped manage the Osmonds, and was the CEO of Franklin Quest, the maker of bought-then-never-used notebooks sold as "time management systems".
In the Senate, he's been little more then a water carrier for big business and an opponent of environmental protection. Sixteen years up on Capitol Hill and he's hardly left a mark. But Bennett, like many folks of his genteel station in life, has little use for the wingnut populist passions that really tighten the butt muscles of the Republican "base". Bennett doesn't hate Mexicans enough, because cheap immigrant labor is favored by his buddies in Big Ag. When the banking system was on the verge of collapse last fall, he did the responsible thing and voted to, well, keep it from collapsing. The only issues that really seem to get his anemic blood pumping is the Department of the Interior trying to responsibly manage Utah's amazing, heart-stopping, unique wilderness (he's against anything that might get in the way of resource extraction) and repealing the inheritance tax that effects the richest one percent of Americans. These really aren't issues that matter to the average trailer park rabbit ears Fox viewer and Glen Beck enthusiast. On April fifteenth, the tea baggers bagged Bennett hard. I bet he still has a headache.
Enter the Primary Thunderdome! On the left, we have Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, another pasty middle-aged white Mormon guy whose main qualifications for office are the successful prosecution of one of Utah's thousands of polygamists (albeit an important one) and, well, generally not being Bob Bennett. He's rounding up the votes of the conservative caucuses! We know this how? Last night, Shurtleff accidentally Twittered his plans. Seriously:
"I'm announcing I'm running at 12," Shurtleff wrote in part of a series of garbled messages, called tweets on the digital networking system.
In another he said he would have "all of the legislative conservative causcus (sic) and other senators and representatives there endorsing me. Time to rock and roll!"
He'll be in a three way against another fellow, crazy-eyed Provo businessman Tim Bridgewater, who is best known as a former venture capital partner of Neil Bush's. No, I did not make that up. Tim Bridgewater is one degree of separation from a Thai prostitute. Well, at least one.
Anyhow, what we have on our hands here is a good old-fashioned Wingnut Fight! Who can pander the hardest to the tiniest sliver of underemployed "party activists"? Who can best slag their opponent and ruin everyone's chances in the general election? Who's going to personally, with their own hands, strangle a gay muslim mexican abortionist tax collector?
Gather round in a circle kids. The bell just rang, school's out, and there's gonna be a rumble in the parking lot!