by Alex Wagner 

For several weeks now, the writer’s room at Saturday Night Live has been given the gift of a Republican Party so comedically inept that the jokes have practically written themselves.

The governor of Texas, who after weeks of endless commentary about increased domestic production of oil and gas, could not remember that yes, the Department of Energy exists and yes, he would like to shut it down.

The pizza magnate who can speak with greater fluency regarding a pepperoni strategy than he can cobble together a cohesive sentence about the Middle East.

Said Cain in an interview with GQ, “We don’t just throw stuff on there. We actually test. Do you have too much sausage? Too much beef? Because we want to balance the flavor out. It’s more scientifically developed than it might appear.”\On Libya, meanwhile, Cain could only offer, “Got all this stuff twirling around in my head.”

These candidates are not serious.

More to the point, we cannot be a serious country, able to tackle serious problems, if we continue to consider such comedians as presidential candidates.

After all, the line between comedy and tragedy is in many cases indistinguishable.