Hey, lookee here! Guess who just realized he has no freaking chance of becoming President? Tim Pawlenty, that’s who (h/t The Hill):

Outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty didn’t even hesitate.

“Yes,” he answered when asked by the News Tribune editorial board this week whether, after the Republicans took control of the Minnesota Legislature in the Nov. 2 election, he wished he had run for another term.

“If I would have known then what I know now,” the Republican lamented, and “given what I’ve been through and hoped to accomplish, but that (the DFL-controlled Legislature) blocked. But you can’t predict the future. And of course, I made my decision after the 2008 election when President Obama and the Democrats swept everything. I looked at that and (decided against) having to go over there and ram heads with (DFL Sen. Larry) Pogemiller and (DFL Rep. Margaret Anderson) Kelliher and their like. (There was a) high probability of that. Hindsight is 20/20.”

Well, bull-shit, Gutshot. You let us know right after you won re-election in 2006 that you didn’t give a shit about the state anymore (if you ever did). Once you had the re-election locked up, your every waking hour was spent sucking up to NeoConfederates and Tea Party Republicans in Alabama and elsewhere, trying to show them you could follow the GOP’s Southern Strategy better than Mark Sanford or Mike Huckabee, showing you could out-Tenther the Tenthers.

And you know what? We don’t give a shit about you. That’s the other reason you didn’t run for a third term, you sleazy little mullet-headed asswipe. From March of this year:

The latest numbers, courtesy of a new SurveyUSA poll of 500 Minnesotans, find Pawlenty’s job approval rating at just 42 percent, with 52 percent disapproving.

This marks the lowest approval rating ever for Pawlenty, according to a Smart Politics analysis of more than 70 similarly-worded non-partisan public opinion polls dating back to the onset of his first term in office in 2003, including more than 50 polls conducted by SurveyUSA since Spring 2005.

One has to go back four and one-half years to find the previous low-water mark for Pawlenty – a 43 percent approval rating for the Governor in a July 2005 SurveyUSA poll of 600 Minnesotans.

And do you know why we hate you, Gutshot? It’s because we all know you fricking deserted us the second you thought it was safe to do so:

However, once the rumors of Pawlenty’s national political ambitions really began to take hold in 2009, Pawlenty’s approval numbers began to drop and never quite recovered… since his announcement that he would not seek a third term in June 2009, the Governor’s average approval rating has fallen to 47.0 percent across five polls, with a net approval rating of -2.6 points.

And you can forget about us voting for you for President, dipwad:

A vast majority of those [Minnesotans] polled by SurveyUSA last week stated they did not think Pawlenty should run for president – by a 63 percent to 28 percent margin.

Face it, Gutshot. You’re done. You will never rise above the level of a two-term governor who was only effectively around for one term. You just don’t want to admit it — instead, you pretend that you could have won re-election, and hope that every single person in the local press has the attention span of a goldfish and so has forgot about your shitty polling numbers. Run along now and go see if maybe your former buddy and law partner Eric Magnuson might hire you over at Briggs and Morgan, if you beg nicely enough.