SuperPAC Man in a Say-Anything Society

Faced with an unlikely quotation of his from the past, Norman Mailer denied it saying, “I couldn’t have said that, it’s not within the range of my character.”

That would be a quaint response in today’s political world where SuperPAC blowhards with barrels of money are unleashed by Citizens United to say anything they want without taking responsibility for it.

Meet Joe Ricketts, the latest candidate for that old Monty Python title of rich twit of the year. An “up-by-the bootstraps billionaire” who decided to become “a player in the 2012 election,” Ricketts has set a new speed record for public stupidity by agreeing to and then backing off a $10 million ad campaign “linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.,” which immediately drew “waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world.”

Since the Supreme Court decided corporations are people, the parameters of America as a say-anything society have expanded to encompass some odd specimens. Describing Ricketts, an anonymous business associate says, “Half the time he’s a Libertarian and half the time he’s Rush Limbaugh.”

Ricketts’ public embarrassment was only accidental, following a leak of the Jeremiah Wright proposal, but how many more are in his pipeline and those of other anonymous would-be 2012 players?

Norman Mailer was famously the author of “Advertisements for Myself.” What would he make of this new crop of self-seekers bankrolling “Advertisements Against Obama” but refusing to take personal responsibility for them?

At least in his own first commercial, Mitt Romney lays out what he would do in office under his own name.