PUPPETMASTERS MANQUE

Atrios writes:

I actually don't think think the Perry "brain freeze" was any big deal, but apparently our liberal media will deliver an automatic apologia anytime a right wing idiot can't tie his shoes.

Um, I dunno. The link is to a New York Times article about brain freezes by the paper's health blogger, not a political writer. The point of the article is that, heck, everybody gets brain freezes! It's a typical Times pop-science take on a news item.

But I know what Atrios is getting at -- it does look as if Perry's being protected by the some in the press.

Yet I think if anything is at work, it's not a desire to bend over backwards for a right-wing buffoon -- it's a desire to bend over backwards for the media's current designated anti-Romney. The press desperately wants an anti-Romney because a primary fight pulls in more eyeballs than no primary fight. And the press now wants the anti-Romney to be Perry because his campaign rakes in big money (which is thrilling to insider journalists) and is run by veteran political hacks the insider journalists know personally. He (unlike, say, Herman Cain) is the right kind of anti-Romney. He and his people are fellow insiders.

The insiders would have been happy if Jon Huntsman could have been the anti-Romney, or Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan, because they all play by the insiders' rules. The insiders would have really been happy if Haley Barbour could have been the anti-Romney. (Hey, let's you and me go get a drank!) But of the available options, Perry was the best. And the insiders can't quite bear the notion that they can't even have him.

****

And now a song for Rick: