The culling has begun

I see the inevitable thinning of the herd of Presidential hopefuls has begun. It's a little early this time around -- usually it takes a dismal showing the Iowa caucuses for a would-be nominee to recognize he or she doesn't have the proverbial snowball's chance in Hell of getting to the White House (except on a guided tour), but then again the public fantasizing and open campaigning began way too soon. A few campaign cycles ago folks like Rick Perry and Scott Walker would have remained in the rumored to be running category until there was snow on the ground. They might quietly cruise around Iowa or New Hampshire, glad-handing the locals and making their ambitions plain, but the national media wouldn't be in a frenzy this far in advance of anything substantive happening. Hopefuls had more time for dreaming, for doing behind the scenes fund-raising, forming exploratory committees, and generally figuring out if they had a shot at it before having to step visibly on to a national stage.

Not this year. Thanks to the news media, if one can refer to Fox and CNN that way, the occupants of the clown car found themselves forced to appear in a format where the public was able to do side-by-side comparisons. Granted, one can't be 100% certain that those side-by-side comparisons were responsible for Rick Perry bailing out last week or Scott Walker hanging it up yesterday. Then again, Scott Walker went into the process with high poll numbers and a lot of blathering about him being the presumptive nominee -- not long ago he was viewed as a stronger candidate than "Jeb" Bush or Marco Rubio. Two appearances on the debate stage and his poll numbers plummeted to where he's now at a statistical zero. Not good. One can only assume his fundamental unlikeability came shining through because he certainly didn't say anything dumber or stranger than any of the other candidates.His poll numbers dropped, and I have a hunch he got an unpleasant phone call from one of the Koch brothers letting him know they'd decided to go shopping for a more electable puppet.

So who's going to be next? I'm not going to speculate. I have trouble remembering who all is in the Republican clown car at the moment, let alone whose campaign might be floundering.