Pawlenty Officially In the Race for President; Also Officially Should Not Be President

[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty officially announced his candidacy for president today, and promised to run a revolutionary campaign in which he will only tell voters the truth.

"In my campaign, I'm going to take a different approach. I am going to tell you the truth. The truth is Washington D.C.'s broken," Pawlenty said. "It's time for new leadership. It's time for a new approach. And, it's time for America's president – and anyone who wants to be president – to look you in the eye and tell you the truth."

Yawn etc. First of all, that sounds like a garbage club remix of Obama's 2008 "bring change to Washington" shtick and McCain's 20008 "straight-talk" shtick. Get your own bullshit talking points, Pawlenty!

Secondly, everyone knows that Republican politicking depends on exclusively telling lies, and even granting that Pawlenty might be trying for some sort of meta lie-telling by promising to truth-tell, this is weak sauce.

"Even I am wishing I had eyes so I could roll them!"—The Invisible Hand.

Anyway, Pawlenty's running, barrrrrrf, and let us all take a moment to remember that he is not only a bigot, a craven dirtbag, a transphobic jackass, an anti-choice dipshit, and a privileged fuckneck, among other fine qualities, but he is also the sort of unethical colossus who will agree to grant a pardon to a convicted sex offender so his wife could open a childcare center in the same house in which he allegedly sexually abused his daughter more than 250 times.

But Pawlenty was "heartsick" about it, and realizes in retrospect that granting a pardon to Jeremy Giefer "was probably not a good idea."

Let me go on record now with my controversial position that anyone who can only tell in hindsight that pardoning a convicted sex offender for the purposes of opening a childcare facility is too stupid to be president.