Paying any amount of attention to just the last 24 hours would give any normal person a near-heart attack at the wholesale foolishness.

Right now, the US is the midst of two sex scandals — one is horrible beyond comprehension, though, way-familiar, and the other has evolved into nasty and much-creepy political football that creates such a non-presidential aura it’s frightening.

And US peoples are lock-stepped with a Will Roger’s quip: An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.
Americans are still blissfully unenlightened.

(Illustration found here).

And as far as that pure-crazed crowd of GOP presidential hopefuls it’s not pretty.
This last post on The Dish‘s live blog of the debate last night said it all:

At this point, I have begun to really lose it watching this crew.
There are only two faintly plausible, credible presidents up there, both Mormons.
The rest is beyond an embarrassment, and at this moment in history, the sheer paucity of that talent is alarming.
Did anyone up there give you confidence he or she could actually lead the world countering this metastasizing debt and unemployment crisis?
At best, there were noises about removing burdensome regulation on businesses and a simpler tax code.
But who up there could actually bring that about?

Not a one, nobody, zippo.

The GOP for the US is a massive waste of time.
The live-blog at Daily Kos: What a weird boring debate. The two things that I’ll remember: Herman Cain getting lustily cheered by the audience when he talked about sexual harassment, and Rick Perry drawing a complete blank on the third agency of government that he would seek to eliminate.
Cain is one dumb-ass, but he’s also become way-more creepy.
Out of his sour mouth last night — he called Nancy Pelosi, “Princess Nancy.”
What a dick — (sorry, bad sexist analogy).

In a compelling commentary on both Cain’s bullshit, and that of Penn State coach Joe Paterno, way-involved in the other sex scandal, Mary Mitchell with the Chicago Sun-Times compares the two sets of ugly.
Paterno was fired yesterday.
Mitchell writes:

The revelation that Paterno, an icon in the sport of college football, had knowledge that his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was allegedly sexually abusing boys should have been devastating to the students at Penn State.
These students should have been shocked that their hero did not call police when he learned that a former assistant coach was taking sexual advantage of troubled boys enrolled in a sports program.
Instead of lamenting the callous act, the students held a pep rally outside the coach’s house.
It was a disgusting display.
…
Similar to the Paterno situation, the scandal enveloping Herman Cain affirms that the more things change the more things stay the same.
Given the seriousness of the accusations swirling around him, you’d think Cain’s support would have eroded significantly.
Because when the second blond, white woman stepped forward with lurid details of his alleged sexual harassment, even his staunchest supporters must have realized that Cain doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of snagging the GOP presidential nomination.
All he can do now is make a bad situation worse.
So far, four women — two of them anonymous — have accused Cain of sexually harassing them in the 1990s.
Yet volunteers are still trying to convince voters that the charges leveled against the candidate are bogus.
One claim could have been passed off as bogus. But four? Not a chance.
Even so, on Tuesday afternoon, Cain held a press conference and boldly declared that his getting out of the race “ain’t going to happen.”
Let me say right here I don’t believe a word Cain has said about the allegations, because I’ve walked in his accusers’ heels.
I understand why women are reluctant to complain about men who step over the line: They don’t want to be whiners.
They don’t want to cause any trouble.
They need their jobs.

Cain is still calling the charges/accusations “unfounded” and he don’t appreciate being tried in the “court of public opinion” — what is a presidential race, asshole?
In a scenario right out of the Roman Catholic playbook — football is more important than young people put in terrible, terrible harm’s way.

The title of this particular post this morning comes from The Economist‘s then-live blog of the GOP debate and an illustration of Perry’s loss of words/brain matter: Perry’s senior moment seemed like accidental seppuku.
The word ‘seppuku‘ is ritual suicide by disembowelment formerly practiced by Japanese samurai, the act mostly called by Westerners as hara-kiri.
Perry accidentally gutted his presidential chance, all that’s left now is for him to crawl off somewhere and die.

The US is very-much in a similar situation.
Due to circumstances way-beyond the control of the average Joe on the street (the 99 percent?), this country is like Wile E. Coyote who’s charged way-over the cliff in pursuit of the Roadrunner only to discover he’s standing on nothing but air — then after the realization, pop, zap and a long fall.
We’ve committed ritual suicide, but don’t yet know it.