This was how Rachel Maddow opened her Tuesday show: she dimmed the lights of her set, put on a pair of black sunglasses, and sat down in front of a conga drum to recite these jagged, stream-of-consciousness lines of Beat poetry:
"Never raises his voice
but seldom takes no for an answer
not in it for the balloons
the world needs new
America needs fresh
the past didn't work
wedon'tneedthat"
Maddow quickly explained to her puzzled viewers what was going on: she was reading from one of Jon Huntsman's strange new campaign advertisements. Huntsman, the former Utah governor and Ambassador to China who recently threw his hat into the GOP 2012 ring, has been running a string of fairly abstract spots that have left Maddow befuddled and delighted in just about equal measure.
She revealed that her show had contacted William Shatner to see if he could read from the campaign ad, but he wasn't available, leaving Maddow to do it herself.
"Was this mistranslated from some other language?" she wondered, adding that a large part of her really loved the full-on oddity of Huntsman's recent moves.
"I just personally believe in American weirdness so much that it almost occludes my view of Jon Huntsman's right-wing politics," she said.
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