Restructuring the "Dynamic Duo"

Yesterday I suggested that House Republican from Minnesota Michelle Bachmann had turned my "dynamic duo of demagoguery," Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, into an "unholy trinity." While I think that it is dangerous to assume that someone like Newt will fade into the background, it's beginning to look like there is still a "dynamic duo" but that it has been restructured around Palin and Bachman. I would like to cite for support an article by Jim O'Neill from this past Tuesday that begins with the following paragraph:

Several readers have informed me that they would like to see a Palin/Bachmann ticket in 2012, and this article is an attempt to take an informal survey, to access how popular such a sentiment is.

O'Neill's posted biographical statement (at the bottom of his article) is, to say the least, interesting:

Born in June of 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jim O’Neill proudly served in the U.S. Navy from 1970-1974 in both UDT-21 (Underwater Demolition Team) and SEAL Team Two. A member of MENSA, he worked as a commercial diver in the waters off Scotland, India, and the United States. In 1998 while attending the University of South Florida as a journalism student, O’Neill won “First Place” in the “Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii AEJMC Research in Journalism Ethics Award. The annual contest was set up by Carol Burnett with the money she won from successfully suing the National Enquirer for libel.

The article appeared on the Canada Free Press Web site, whose connection with Canada seems to be as questionable as its slogan:

…Because without America there is no Free World

Whether or not this is some extreme outlier of opinion or the beginning of a groundswell, O'Neill's article was picked up by Gary, one of the active participants on Yahoo! Buzz; and, since he installed a pointer to it twelve hours ago, it has received 171 "Buzz up!" votes. Apparently Yahoo! has decided to move beyond its unscientific approach to polling by turning the vox populi concept of democracy into a popularity contest based, probably, on the American Idol model. As they probably still like to say, "The Internet changes everything;" but, in terms of how politics does its thing, the tools may be different but the practices is clearly the same-old-same-old.