Pig-manure lagoons and social conservatives pig-manure-huffing lunatics:

The lead-off contest for its next presidential nomination—an event that has played a vital role in winnowing GOP fields since 1980—will be utterly dominated by voters with ravenous appetites for attacks on gays, Muslims, President Obama's "otherness" and godless liberalism in general.

No wonder Politico reports that Michele Bachmann was the big winner at Saturday night's conference, where she drew loud cheers for declaring, "We’ve been told we need a truce on social issues and I would highly disagree with that because social conservatism is fiscal conservatism" (even if the a straw poll at the event was won by Herman Cain, who is now pledging to appoint a Muslim-free cabinet, the better to prevent creeping Sharia).

And no wonder some pundits are seriously discussing the possibility that Bachmann might win next winter's caucuses.

Amazingly conservative voters in Iowa used to be a bulwark against the worst impulses of the GOP's rightwing. As Steve Kornacki points out in his piece in Salon: in 1980 Iowa GOP caucus voters picked George H. W. Bush over St. Ronald Reagan. This year they're likely to go for Bachman or Santorum or Huckabee—that is, for a deranged, Sharia-fearing, assfucking-obessing social conservative with no chance in a general election.

So there's a problem with Iowa. But it looks like it's a problem for them.