The 2012 GOP Primary is *Still* With Us. Really.

It strikes me as singularly weird that I'm doing another post regarding the reverb on the 2012 GOP primary and I'm still not talking about TX Gov. Perry's post-indictment chances or the low-level Mitt Romney chatter (Reihan Salam makes a few strong points, but Charles Pierce comedically upends them) . But no, I'm back mentioning this strange little grubby palm-greasing in Ioway. Because it still has ripples, somehow.

Call me a cynic, a skeptic, and a grump, but all the same, I just saw the volte face of Sorenson from Bachmann to Paul as a kind of estimation of their comparative electable merits. Ron Paul has a more or less coherent political message, and Michele Bachmann is not a great maker of coherent statements. End of story?--nope.

Now, to be completely real, until 2012, there was no reason for me to know who the hell Kent Sorenson even is. But it looks like, if you are big in the GOP in Iowa, you kind of are a big deal in getting a presidential primary campaign started, judging from what he seemed to have got out of the deal. (Ya know, before anyone looked into it.)

OpenSecrets Blog has learned that FBI agents have been interviewing a slew of witnesses connected to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and grand jury subpoenas have been issued for email records from campaign officials. And in addition to payments to a Maryland video company that were routed to Sorenson in exchange for his endorsement, OpenSecrets has identified an additional suspicious payment by Paul’s campaign that may be linked to a $25,000 check to Sorenson from a jewelry store connected to a Paul operative.

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An earlier Iowa Senate Ethics Committee investigation found that a Maryland documentary film company called ICT Inc. had paid Sorenson $73,000 in a series of transactions through early 2012. As first reported by OpenSecrets Blog last week, the Paul campaign sent ICT $82,375 in payments that almost exactly match payments to Sorenson. Sorenson’s plea agreement acknowledges that he took payments from a campaign, made to him through a film production company, in exchange for changing his endorsement.

So, like, who the heck is Kent Sorenson, why aren't I an Iowa Republican, and how do I get started pulling down the mad dollars? All unanswered questions, I'm sure, probably having a lot to do with my need to be close to proper pizzerias, and something to do with FDR, but all that aside, this kind of does impact 2014, since for some reason this has resulted in Ron Paul's grandson-in-law departing the Mitch McConnell campaign that he was so overtly pleased with being a part of. Who knows if this casts a pall over a future Rand Paul 2016 bid (not that people have such great attention spans) or stops any Bachmann chatter, hm? (or does even more bad things to the futures of La Bachmann or Rand Paul's pere.)

But to me, it kind of looks like there is one hell of a lot of influence to be peddled out in those Iowa cornfields. And weirdly enough, my man Rick Santorum, who practically made Iowa his home from 2011 on, never greased anybody. Oh and won Iowa, by the way. For all the good it did him. Politics is my hobby, to be sure--this I don't get. It still seems weird either campaign would have risked being caught up in something kind of dishonest just for a quick push-start. How was that worth it?