That’s not to say that I agree with everything he says, or that he’s my first choice to be the next president, but given the candidates we have now and the current chances for success of each of them, we really only have two credible choices on the republican side: Romney or Perry.

Cain is not credible. His 999 plan is almost comical. Gingrich doesn’t have enough support or money because he has some negatives, Santorum is too extreme, Bachmann is a joke (I sometimes can’t even believe the things she says are actually coming out of her mouth), Paul is unelectable because he’s too uncompromising, Huntsman is a good candidate, but doesn’t have the support at this point to break into the top tier.

It’s possible that things could change in the next few months, but it’s not likely. Given the choice between Perry and Romney, I’ll take Romney any day.

Look, it’s not just me, many analysts agree that the tea partiers in congress were directly responsible for the acrimony and gridlock that led to the credit downgrade. You may not want to lay it all on them but they are the only new factor in the equation, everything else existed before and no downgrade ever happened before.

But you go right ahead and blame… let’s see, who is it exactly you blame? Oh, yeah, everyone! That makes a lot of sense.

The fact is, it had never happened before, then the tea partiers get into congress and create a situation where a crucial financial vote is held hostage to their extremist demands. That’s why the credit downgrade happened. But don’t believe me, read what Standard and Poors said. You know, the agency that issued the downgrade? You think they might have some idea why they did it?

Must someone be a right-wing crackpot to have these beliefs? Do these opinions make one an anti-Mormon?

If you read the post and the comments you should know the answer to these questions: no and no.

What if the tea party is merely a strategy for splitting the Republican vote so that Obama can serve another four years?

Even if that’s not the strategy, it’s doing a great job of acheiving it anyway.

I don’t think we need to be afraid to join things other than the Church. Your local Rotary club or Chamber of Commerce is perfectly safe, for example. But you might want to be leery of anything with the name Gadianton in it.

And how can a movement that is not a party be named the Tea Party? That doesn’t make sense to me. It suggests to my mind that someone is manipulating the language to influence my thinking. What if the tea party is merely a strategy for splitting the Republican vote so that Obama can serve another four years?

What I do not know vastly outweighs what I do know. My ignorance is almost complete. Hence, I do not join factions and parties other than the Church. If I did, I would probably end up making a bigger fool of myself than I already have by joining something that is not what it seems to be.

What I mean is, we may have had ignorant political leaders at times, but they were ignorant by circumstance, they didn’t embrace ignorance as an article of faith the way the Tea Partiers do. You basically can’t be a Tea Partier if you accept the scientific consensus on evolution and man-caused global warming. And you also have to reject the vast majority of economists as well. That’s willful ignorance, and it has no place in our political leadership.