After insisting that the Republican Party totally digs chicks—and caterpillars—the new election strategy appears to be writing off women entirely so Mitt Romney can instead try to shore up his base by saying "God" a lot and endorsing the wingiest of wingnut politicians and palling around with self-appointed arbiters of whom exactly Jesus hates and how much.

Because the Republican Party still can't quite bring itself to rally around its candidate—despite the insistence of Mitt and Ann Romney that the party would be united following its convention—the most unlikable presidential candidate ever spent some quality time on Friday with Rep. Steve King and professional Bible-humper Pat Robertson. That would be the same Pat Robertson who thinks feminists caused 9/11, gays cause hurricanes, marriage vows are null and void if your wife gets a disease, and women who don't want their husbands to cheat on them should make themselves "as attractive as possible and don't hassle him about it."

So you can see why Romney would want Robertson's endorsement to help him with his own party. And don't expect Romney to suddenly distance himself from his new best friend, just because Robertson had some not-very-friendly-to-women advice for a caller who's at his wit's end about his uppity wife, whom he can't just divorce because, you know, "Scripture":

Well, you could become a Muslim and you could beat her. [...] This man’s got to stand up to her and he can’t let her get away with this stuff. I don’t think we condone wife-beating these days but something has got to be done.

Mitt Romney should condemn such remarks and distance himself from Pat Robertson. He should, but he won't. He needs the support of the Republicans who nod along enthusiastically to this kind of garbage, and since polling has shown for months and months and months that Republicans are not going to get the lady voters demographic, no matter how many times Ann Romney says she loves women, the Romney campaign has apparently calculated that it's better off forgetting about women entirely, instead embracing Pat Robertson and his extremism in the hopes it will bring out all the misogynists and racists and homophobes to make up the difference.

Not that it will help; as Sen. Lindsey Graham observed in August, the Republican Party isn't "generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

Oh well. Even as Republicans acknowledge they don't have enough angry white dudes to make up for all the demographics the party has written off, that won't stop them from continuing to appeal to angry white dudes. Because that dwindling demographic really is all they have left.

(Via)