The Florida Senate race has gotten some national attention the past few days -- two of the Republican challengers to incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson got endorsements from people who used to be running for president.
Republican George Lemieux received an endorsement from Herman Cain over the weekend, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Cain said we need "people who understand that it's time that we stop shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and start solving stuff." GOP challenger Connie Mack responded by carting out an endorsement from Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Bachmann called Mack a "steadfast fighter for freedom" and said "senators like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul need other like-minded conservatives in the Senate to stop the liberals from tearing down our nation."
Well, you heard the lady -- vote for Connie Mack or your nation will be torn down.
But Bachmann has said a lot of things, as has Cain -- and if the primary campaign trail had made them look good, the two of them might have lasted a bit longer on it. Instead, the information disseminated about them during the race is much more likely to leave you wondering why anyone would want their endorsement at all.
Cain, while successful in both business and lady-touching, proved himself to be disastrously vapid on matters of foreign policy, offering only a "national security" page on his website that said absolutely nothing to indicate the man had ever even looked at a map. He essentially said it didn't make sense for a president to know the leaders of countries unless he was going there. Then, when Cain did look at a map, he translated it into a ridiculous Fisher Price overview of international relations that broke down entire regions into "friend" or "adversarial regime."
Bachmann, on the other hand, didn't have a pizza chain to jump-start her political career -- she made it into the limelight by flinging hate and fear like a caged monkey flinging turds of faulty logic and homophobia: She said Terri Schiavo was "healthy" when she died, for example, and she estimated a presidential trip to India was going to cost the same per day as the war in Afghanistan.
She also fought as a state senator to teach creationism in public schools, saying that "in some ways, to believe in evolution is almost like a following, a cult following" and asked, according to a local paper, "Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being?"
Once she got into Congress, she tried to shoot down efforts to limit carbon emissions by going on the House floor and taking the very clever and spectacularly incorrect stance that carbon dioxide is "a harmless gas" because it "is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth."
In short, Connie Mack got endorsed by a dunce, a charlatan so out of touch with reality that she can stare facts in the face and say "no thanks" without a hint of irony. Lemieux got endorsed by a guy who has never held public office and, when given the chance, proved himself to be utterly unqualified.
When it comes down to it, it's a news story because people with big names are talking about a primary race in Florida. But why, when we're given the opinions of famous people with so little intellectual credibility, should we care?
