Nicknames for dickheads

Gail Collins has a column in The New York Times on Republican candidates and their (stupid) names:

Our question for today is: How do the potential Republican presidential nominees stack up on Libya? Also, who has the best name? It has come to our attention that the most likely candidates at this point are Newt, Mitt, and T-Paw. A country with a president named Barack is obviously willing to go with the flow on these matters. Still, the lineup for the Republican debates is going to sound like a wrestling tag-team match.
I love this subject! Perhaps if we talk about it long enough I will get a chance to point out once again that Representative Connie Mack of Florida, who surprised everyone by announcing Friday that he would not run for Senator Bill Nelson’s seat in 2012, is actually named Cornelius Harvey McGillicuddy IV.
Okay, about Libya. Earlier this month, Newton “Newt” Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News that, if he was in charge of the country, the first thing he would do about Libya would be to “exercise a no-fly zone this evening.”
Then President Obama made exactly that decision. Newt must have been thrilled! “I would not have intervened,” he told Matt Lauer on the Today show.
Cynics might suspect that Gingrich’s only real principle is to be opposed to whatever Obama is doing. But give him a break. The man has spent years as a television talking head, a job that puts a premium on having lots and lots of strong opinions, even if they are the exact opposite of the ones you were floating the day before. This is totally different from the duty of presidential candidate, which is to say the exact same thing over and over with an enthusiasm that suggests you just thought of the idea that very minute.
Timothy “T-Paw” Pawlenty, told a Vanderbilt student television reporter this week that the Libyan situation was “a very complex matter” with no easy answers available. He’s also posted a rant on his Facebook page about the White House’s failure to “use all tools at its disposal to pressure el-Qaddafi to stop the violence and to step down.” So possibly not all that complicated after all. Pawlenty is perhaps the closest thing we have now to a major declared Republican candidate. These days you don’t just throw your hat in the ring. You put the hat on a coat rack in the general vicinity of the ring, and then you have your supporters move the coat rack closer and closer, until it is finally time to take the hat down, put it right next to the ring, and wait for a strong gust of wind.
In a big news moment this week, the Pawlenty campaign released a stirring video filled with shots of smiling workers, Ronald Reagan, farmers harvesting wheat, flags, and golden retrievers in which T-Paw talks about taking back America and then, to a triumphant swell of music, concludes: “That’s why today, I’m announcing the creation of an exploratory committee.”
But back to Libya. Willard “Mitt” Romney supports the current mission, except for the part where it’s run by Barack Obama. Mitt told a conservative radio host this week that the president is weak because of “his fundamental disbelief in American exceptionalism.” This is part of a widespread Republican theory that simply believing that our country is a great and unique nation is not enough unless you also run around the world publicly pointing out to our allies that we are way, way better than they are. This fatal flaw, Romney said, has left Obama “tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced.” The worst thing you can have when you’re working on diplomacy is nuance. Also, perhaps I should point out that Romney was named after J. Willard Marriott, the hotel guy. And that he once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.
Haley “Haley” Barbour has been much less enthusiastic about the whole intervention idea than people like Romney. Ditto for Representative Michele (“I don’t have a nickname, but I do have a funny spelling”) Bachmann. Double ditto for Representative Ronald “Ron” Paul, who may run for president again this season. And his son, Senator Randal “Rand” Paul, who may jump in himself if Dad doesn’t.
If we get a Paul, I hope it’s Rand, who sort of stole my heart at a recent Senate hearing on energy-efficiency standards, in which he blasted an Energy Department official, saying: “You don’t care about the consumer, really. Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house and I blame you.”
However, I do not think we need to dwell on the Libya positions of this last bunch yet. There’s a limit to how much time you want to devote to remote possibilities. At minimum, they should be willing to do what Newt did and hold a press conference to announce the formation of an exploratory committee and then fail to actually announce it. Demand commitment. Otherwise, you will wind up like me, facing the terrible prospect of having to read three books by Mike Huckabee for no reason whatsoever.