Eight Votes (Updated)

That's the "commanding lead" that Romney had over Santorum in the Iowa caucuses. From NYT:

The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House. With 99 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney, whose views represent the polar sides of the party, each had 24.6 percent.

And the runners-up are Santorum and Paul. Tell you anything about the Republican party?

Santorum believes in big government, especially in your bedroom.* Ron Paul believes in the same thing at the state level. (I have yet to encounter a "libertarian" who can explain to me why it's OK for state governments to pass discriminatory laws but not OK for the federal government to defend those discriminated against. I keep getting mumbles about the 9th and 10th Amendments -- it's like they never read the first eight.)

Of course, there's no telling what Romney believes, not that it should matter -- I really don't want anyone governing on the basis of what they believe.

The rest of the primary season should be a hoot.

Update:

* Santorum seems to lack any ability to self-edit, and his thinking is so deranged that he can't put together an intelligible sentence. Look at his stance on welfare:

At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” [...]

His rationalization for the comment is even better:

Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called, um, what was it? ‘Waiting for Superman,’ which was about black children and so I don’t know whether it was in response and I was talking about that,” he said. The movie actually portrays students of several races.

And the statistics are even more telling:

Race
--------------
White 38.8%
Black 37.2
Hispanic 17.8
Asian 2.8
Other 3.4

Racist, much?

And there's enough out there about Paul's attitudes that I don't think I need to go into it.