Karl Rove, along with the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal, are concerned that the GOP will nominate an unelectable whackjob for President.

Really, Karl? You spent your career catering to teh crazee and conditioning voters to respond to a whole symphony of dog whistles. And the worldview you helped create out of sound bytes and hysteria has now been so internalized by many Republican voters that it’s all they will respond to. So what’s the problem, Karl?

You used to be able to play the whackjobs like a fiddle. You’d signal the fringies with winks and nods while keeping up a sane, rational facade for the rest of the public. But now the Frankenstein’s monster has escaped from the laboratory; the Terminator is out of control.

Cliff Schecter wrote,

Towards the beginning of the original Terminator film, Kyle Reese, who has come back to the past to save Sarah Connor – whose spawn will save mankind – lets her know what she’s facing in her new cybernetic stalker. “Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Substitute “Tea Party” for “Terminator” and “U.S. Government” for “you,” and with the exception of “fear” (which I’d argue is what drives them), this pretty much sums up the story of the 60-odd birdbrain Birchers who have rebranded themselves Tea Partiers and brought more crazy than Kanye West to the House of Representatives.

Steve M. wrote, “I love it that Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul scored nearly 30% of the vote each in the Ames straw poll and the result is that we’re told it’s now a two-person race — Perry vs. Romney.” That”s because Everyone Knows the GOP establishment isn’t going to let Bachmann or Paul get the nomination. That’s how the GOP primary process works. There’s some primary theater, and somehow the guy the establishment had already settled on gets to win.

What will the establishment do to get the process back in hand? I doubt editorials in the Wall Street Journal will do it.

The more I look at Rick Perry, the more he seems to have all the worse attributes of George W. Bush on steroids.

He’s already running on a “Texas Miracle,” which is that his state somehow escaped the worst of the recession. In 2000, George W. Bush ran on a “Texas Miracle” also, which was that education reforms that went forward during his administration — which I dimly remember he had actually opposed, but I may be confused about that — had resulted in miraculous improvements in test scores and dropout rates. You might remember that these miraculous results came about because school principals were strongly incentivized to report phony numbers.

Well, something like that is going on with Perry’s Texas Miracle. It is true that Texas has had stronger job growth than other states in recent years. But it has had stronger population growth as well, which means its employment rate remains high. Its unemployment rate in June 2011 was 8.2, which means it has the 26th lowest unemployment rate of all the states, or pretty much exactly average.

At the same time, Texas has very high poverty rates compared to other states. The most recent data I found was for 2009, but at that time 17.2 percent of the population of Texas lived below poverty level, giving it the 9th largest population in poverty in the nation. Wages are low in Texas; in his column today Krugman says almost 10 percent of Texans are earning minimum wage or less. And have I mentioned lately than a quarter of Texas citizens have no health insurance?

Gov. Perry says lots of businesses are moving to Texas, and there’s some truth to that. Texas offers cheap land, cheap labor, and minimal regulation. It’s like having a third world country here in our own backyard. So much more convenient than Bangladesh!

And under Gov. Perry, Texas promises to become even more competitive. Thanks to a whopping budget shortfall and politicians’ aversion to raising taxes, teachers are being laid off by the truckload. As the education level of the state declines, Texas is poised to become the number one supplier of domestic and agricultural migrant workers in America! Hey, who needs Mexico?

Update: From Steve Benen:

I’d add, by the way, that Texas has also benefited from state government spending that’s risen “faster than inflation and population growth,” and spending in Texas increased even more under Perry than under his predecessor, George W. Bush. Perry has also taken on more state debt at a pace that eclipses the national government, “paying for much of [Texas’] expansion with borrowed money.”

The only thing we don’t know he would do as much as or even worse than Dubya is start wars.