I’ve said this a couple times, but I caught Pawlenty on The Daily Show, and I was not impressed. Stewart was pressing him on whether, essentially, the Tea Party/Fox rhetoric was plugged into reality or not, and Pawlenty just did a little side-step, over, and over and over.

I realize that politicians cannot normally be as plain-talking as I would like them to be, but in order to get my respect, much less my vote, right now, a Republican is going to have to be able to at least indicate that he’s aware that the President is not a scheming Marxist, and that the right-wing fringe is currently running very crazy. Repeating over and over ‘well, the liberals said mean stuff about Bush’ will not cut it.

(Especially when the mean stuff the liberals said about Bush is starting to be dwarfed by the mean stuff the TPers are saying about Bush.)