Pun Salad

What's the lowdown in Phonytown?

Although Hillary maintains her commanding lead, there were major moves in the standings. Ron Paul has zoomed past Edwards into second place. In a week where most candidates lost hits, he picked up 91,000! And Rudy Giuliani plummeted from fifth all the way down to eighth place. Back to where he was ten days ago. It's a funny old world.

The results continue to be impacted, like a wisdom tooth, by the ongoing discussion of Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" remark. And many candidates picked up hits from a recent George Will column which (among many other things) bemoaned the phoniness of pandering in favor of ethanol in Iowa:

Suppose Iowa did not have crucial presidential nominating caucuses. Or suppose it had them but its crucial crop were, say, broccoli rather than corn. Would the federal government still be, well, rigging the system to create a phony "market" to satisfy a specious "demand" for mandatory and subsidized ethanol? No, but it probably would be mandating broccoli at every meal.

His phony laugh is much better than Hillary Clinton's, and he certainly can fake cell phone interruptions more entertainingly than Rudy Giuliani.

With Mr. Colbert announcing his phony candidacy on Tuesday night, amid a flurry of red, white and blue balloons on the set of his TV show, he may not have realized that he is, in fact, everything conservative voters are looking for.

With MSNBC, CNN and Fox News running pieces yesterday about the viability of Mr. Colbert winning a primary in South Carolina, the only state he says he's running in for now, conservatives have finally found a candidate who is good enough at pretending to be a conservative to actually win the nomination.