While surfing the internet last night during the Fox News/Google Republican President Campaign Debate, I noticed that, besides Romney and Perry, the one name Conservatives on the web kept bringing up was someone who has not even entered the race…yet.

During the debate, Romney refudiated Perry on Social Security,  Perry showed that he is clueless about Conservatives’ opinion on illegal immigration, by defending his pro-Dream Act stance:

If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state [ILLEGALLY] for no other reason than that they’ve been brought their through no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society. I think that’s what Texans wanted to do. Out of 181 members of the Texas legislature when this issue came up [there were] only four dissenting votes. This was a state issue. Texas voted on it. And I still support it today.

However, after last night’s dog and pony show was over, there was still one voice that a lot of Conservative Americans were anxious to hear from.

By now you’re saying:

Oh, HER.  C’mon, KJ.  She can’t win.  She’s been savaged by everyone from Saturday Night Live to the Elite of the Republican Party.  Why, if she got in, she wouldn’t stand a chance and we would wind up with 4 more years of Obama.  She would probably hunt moose on the White House lawn.  Besides, she sounds funny.

Well, as someone born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee and living in Northwest Mississippi, I resemble that remark.

More to the point:  If she’s as worthless as her detractors claim that she is, why is she the subject of so much heated conjecture and  phony, gut-wrenching concern?

By now, you’ve heard of Joe McGuiniss’ new book The Rogue:  Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, written by a talentless hack, who was so desperate to get dirt on Palin and her family, that he rented the house next door to her.  In his tawdry book, he claims, among other things,  that Palin had an affair with [now professional] basketball player Glenn Rice.

Well, yesterday, Andrew Breitbart, on his website, bigjournalism.com, told us the real story:

The awful launch week for the over-hyped, expected bestseller The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by controversial author Joe McGinniss, just got worse. Much worse.

After a week of universally scathing pans from the reflexively anti-Palin establishment media, McGinniss now faces the fight of his literary life: the accusation that he seems to have knowingly submitted a book to his publisher, Crown/Random House, that was filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

In the email below [featured here], sent in January of 2011, McGinniss reveals that his manuscript, then under legal review at Crown/Random House, could not prove its most headline-grabbing allegations. And yet, many of these “salacious stories” that lacked “proof” (in McGinniss’s own words) ended up in the book, and on televisions everywhere during the author’s current media tour … without proper sourcing, and without any apparent new evidence to support them.

McGinniss’s panicked state is evidenced by the identity of the recipient to whom he sent his email of distress. Jesse Griffin was the author of an obscure, low-rent, and now-defunct anti-Palin blog that obsessed over Trig Palin’s maternity–claiming, without any evidence, that Sarah Palin was not Trig’s mother.

Was Random House aware that its prized author was making a desperate overtime bid to save face? And if so, why did it allow him to come forth with most of those tawdry accusations without proof or proper sourcing?

This would not be the first time McGinniss has found himself in trouble over accusations of unethical journalism. In 1987, McGinniss agreed to pay $325,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the convicted murderer who was the subject of McGinniss’s book Fatal Vision. He has also admitted to having surreptitiously distributed a competitor’s manuscript about Palin that was handed to him by his own publisher. The leak allegedly damaged the commercial viability of that book.

In 2003, Random House released a larger-than-life, massive bestseller by James Frey entitled A Million Little Pieces. Later, it was revealed that the book was a fantastical literary hoax that made its way past some of the highest-paid and most respected editors and lawyers in the literary world. Doubleday/Random House felt compelled to offer full refunds to those who had bought the book.

Has history repeated itself?

Mr. McGinniss has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to call you back, Mr. Breitbart.

In  light of last night’s debate, let’s step back a moment and look at the two front runners among the declared Republican Presidential Candidates:

1.  Mitt Romney – Never saw an aisle he did not want to reach across.  Has flip-flipped on major issues so many times, fish out of water are embarrassed for him.  RINO extraordinaire, he showed up with four Secret Service agents at Corky’s Barbeque Restaurant in Memphis on Tuesday afternoon this week, after a Republican Fundraiser, so he could appear “down-home”.

2.  Texas Governor Rick Perry – Never saw the child of an illegal immigrant whom he did not want to reward.  Is more of a Conservative than Romney, but, then again, so is Joe Lieberman.

So, there you have it.  As of this moment, either Mitt Romney or Gov. Rick Perry will be the Republican Nominee.

Unfortunately, as Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) quipped in Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World:

One must always choose between the lesser of two weevils.

It sure would be nice to have another choice.