“You have to hand it to Anna Wintour at Vogue. She knows how to pick them,” Paul Rahe writes at Ricochet:

Last March, as you may remember, I drew attention in a post entitled Tyranny’s Allure to the fact that she had done a lavish spread entitled Asma al-Assad: Rose of the Desert complete with a puff piece on Asma and her husband Bashar al-Assad and that she had had timed it perfectly – on the eve of the butchery in Syria that continues to this day.

And now, Wintour may be the only person on the planet with an advanced case of Huntsman-mania! To give Huntsman the John, Paul, George and Ringo treatment, Wintour comissioned a profile of Huntsman written by Jacob Weisberg of the Washington Post-owned Slate, complete with photos by Rolling Stone veteran Annie Leibovitz. And as a service to her readers, as Rahe writes, “On the off-chance that readers of Vogue entertain a bias against Mormons, Weisberg stokes their bigotry, then tells them not to worry. Huntsman is not really one of those people. He is not the genuine article like Mitt Romney. He is more like a cafeteria Catholic.” (Do Vogue readers lose much sleep over Harry Reid’s faith?)

Rahe believes that the political brain-trust at Vogue is playing a slightly more nuanced strategy with Huntsman than simply trying to make him the one Republican that their readers can trust. “It amounts to a hint that Barack Obama might profit from ditching Joe Biden and putting Jon Huntsman on the ticket,” Rahe writes. Or barring that…

I very much doubt that electing a Republican President is what Weisberg really has in mind. He suspects, as I suspect, that Huntsman is positioning himself to bolt from the party and denounce the eventual nominee as an extremist. Why else would someone – who can think of no grounds on which to criticize the incumbent – run for the office he holds?

As we mentioned in the previous post, former Republican presidents are always treated by the MSM with a Strange New Respect they never received from journalists while running, or in office. And as the second coming of Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords, Huntsman will recieve similar hosannas from the legacy media. But outside of the Sunday talk shows, and the back pages of Vogue, will anyone care?