Breaking: DeMint Leading Greene

The first polling is out in the hotly contested South Carolina Senate race and incumbant gay bashing religious fanatic Republican Jim DeMint has a narrow lead over regular guy Alvin Greene.  If you call 37 points narrow.  But that still means 21% of voters plan to vote for Greene over DeMint, and that's from a Rasmussen poll and everybody knows they skew Republican, right?  I'll bet Alvin's really only 33 or 34 points behind.  You can totally do it Alvin!  That is, unless that July 12 court date for a felony obscenity charge doesn't go well.  That could be a real game changer. 

The whole Alvin Greene saga is beyond bizarre, even by Palmetto State standards.  He is an unemployed veteran who lives with his dad outside Manning.  He's represented by the public defender after being charged with disseminating obscene materials, which implies that he is indigent.  Yet, he waltzed into the SC Democratic Party headquarters, handed them a check for $10,400.00 and got himself on the ballot for the United States Senate primary.  And he won.  He won big.  His opponent, Victor Rawl, is a former judge, State Representative, and Charleston County Council member with incredible academic credentials (OK, my academic credentials) and Greene beat him with 60% of the vote.  That means that 60% of SC Democrats had no idea who either candidate was and just voted for the first guy.  Or maybe they thought he was Al Green.  Hey, do you have a better theory? 

If you've seen any of the Alvin Greene interviews, he doesn't seem like the sharpest guy.  In fact, I'd go out on a limb and call him slow.  I'm not the only one who thinks so.  Gawker's Adrian Chen found an old Army colleague of Greene's who described him as "not all there mentally." 

"During the first couple of weeks of working with him, myself and most everyone else noticed that he wasn't all there mentally. Whenever he was given a simple task such as filling a temporary hand receipt it would never get done, mainly because he didn't know how to fill one out. And this is the most fundamental part of the job."

He goes on to opine that it's quite possible that the $10,400.00 filing fee was Greene's own money.  He lived simply while in the military and could have saved that much cash.  Maybe.  That still leaves unanswered the question why would he spend all that money to run for the Senate?