Mitt Romney's editorial in USAToday is absurd on many levels, but it's a shrewd political move for a guy who wants to pull the Tea Party away from Sarah Palin's grip. Among the more ridiculous things he says:

In this, as in so many other arenas of government policy, unemployment insurance has many unintended effects. The indisputable fact is that unemployment benefits, despite a web of regulations, actually serve to discourage some individuals from taking jobs, especially when the benefits extend across years.

Let me translate: The unemployed are lazy, on-the-dole idiots who won't work as janitors at McDonald's. I refer him to Susie Madrak's elegant and passionate retort as evidence of how wrong he is.

In order to twist his way out of the pickle he's in, he suggests "individual unemployment savings accounts". No, really. He does.

To remedy such problems we need a very different model, perhaps establishing individual unemployment savings accounts over which employees would exercise direct control when they lose their jobs, or putting in place financial incentives for employers to hire and train the long-term unemployed.

Let me see if I have this right. In order to prevent government spending on the unemployed he is proposing...government spending in the form of tax incentives? And this will somehow save money how? Of course it won't and he knows that, but it plays like a waltz with the Tea Party who is all about individual responsibility and the like.

There's more nonsense there, but you get the idea. In order to be viable, Romney will have to run sharply right to cut Sarah Palin and her fans off. He will likely succeed. He will present himself in 2012 as an intelligent, well-spoken candidate and possibly co-opt the faith community in an effort to minimize his Mormonism, which hurt him badly in the 2008 election. He will count on sustained Tea Party anger, mostly whipped into a frenzy by the likes of Judson Phillips, FreedomWorks, and the architects of manufactured outrage as a basis for snagging media minutes and sound bites.

And if he is elected, he will disappoint them all while doing enough harm to this nation that it may not be reparable.