Ted Cruz may be the most loathsome serious Presidential candidate of our time, and Marco Rubio seems a bullshit artist who reportedly has a lot of skeletons rattling around in his closet, but this pair of jokers outmaneuvered Donald Trump on many levels in Iowa. That’s because he’s a dummkopf in general and particularly in regard to politics. Arrogant people lacking in self-awareness almost always also lack attention to detail.

Having entered the race on a whim because he hoped to masturbate to donuts in the Lincoln bedroom, Trump then received an avalanche of attention for his vicious and biased remarks, propelling his whole idiot campaign. Now, even though he’s not been completely ejected from the clown-car process thanks to sheer odiousness of his fellow candidates, Trump’s flailing wildly. Here’s what the man who compared Ben Carson to a child molester had to say post-Hawkeye State:

[Trump] added that a mailer in Iowa sent by Cruz’s campaign that revealed neighbors’ voting participation was malicious: “He insulted Ben Carson by doing what he did to Ben Carson. That was a disgrace…. He’s a man of insult.”•

In a rare moment of clarity, the blockhead who managed to bankrupt a casino acknowledged that he screwed the pooch in Iowa. From Kia Makarechi at Vanity Fair:

The post-Iowa reckoning continued Wednesday morning, with Donald Trump speed-dialing into MSNBC’s Morning Joe for an awkward postmortem. Trump, who has been the Republican presidential poll-leader for months, placed second in the Iowa caucuses Monday night, three percentage points behind Ted Cruz.

To hear Trump tell it, the loss was easily preventable. The only problem? He has no idea how to run a campaign.

“I think we could have used a better ground game, a term I wasn’t even familiar with,” Trump said. “You know, when you hear ‘ground game,’ you say what the hell is that? Now I’m familiar with it. But, you know, I think in retrospect we should have had a better ground game. I would have funded a better ground game, but people told me our ground game was fine. And by most standards it was.”

Cruz’s campaign has been openly gloating about how it used advanced data modeling to invent positions for the candidate that would resonate with Iowa voters. Did you know that the Senator from Texas has strong views on Iowa’s fireworks ban? Neither did the Senator from Texas, until someone on his analytics team identified the ban as an issue that could sway some Iowan hearts and minds.•