I'm trying not to laugh because it only encourages him. But it seems that our own wacky Tom Tancredo got just under 14 percent of the vote at the Iowa Straw Poll - to finish in fourth place.

If you can bring yourself to laugh at this point, it must mean you don't own property near any of the more prominent Islamic holy sites.

Actually, I'm not sure what it means that Tancredo could finish fourth in any presidential polling - even a carnival/Republican fund-raiser like Ames - but I'm sure it can't be good.

The worst thing is that, in the heat of a presidential race, Tancredo has begun to out-Tancredo himself. I wasn't sure it was possible.

But, as I said, the Tancredistas are only encouraging him. Or maybe you missed the musical entertainment/minstrel show he hired for the day at Ames.(More on that later.)

Yes, it was a weak field, with three of the national candidates scared off, including tough-guy Rudy Giuliani, who did, however, campaign in Iowa last week and still got only about 1 percent of the vote.

Yes, the event drew about 9,000 fewer voters than it did when George Bush won eight years ago.

But still, Tancredo got 14 percent of those who showed up in the Iowa heat. And it will be left to historians to explain it.

The headline out of Ames was that Mitt Romney won. Of course, he won. Put that in the same category as Tiger Woods winning the PGA. Romney spent millions on ensuring victory. He won because he had the buses and the ads and the paid advocates and the money to bring in the participants at $35 a pop. And who there was going to beat him?

The other headline was Mike Huckabee finishing second. Of course, someone had to finish second. Unlike Romney, Huckabee had no money. According to USA Today, Huckabee's spending translated into about $58 a vote - whereas Romney's was somewhere between $441 and $1,000 a vote.

A Baptist minister turned politician, Huckabee compared his finish to a miracle involving loaves and fishes. It seems like finishing second can make you giddy, which must be why his fans started chanting, "First tier. First tier." His finish might also have scared the, uh, hellfire out of slow-moving Fred Thompson, who's supposed to officially announce his bid next month. I think Thompson, who was supposed to fill a void that Huckabee wants to fill, was the biggest loser at Ames, even without showing up. In showbiz, they say that timing is everything. In politics, it's more than everything.

Romney won the vote. But there's winning and there's winning. Although he took 32 percent of the total, he got fewer votes than Huckabee and Sam Brownback combined. That's not exactly major league competition. It's closer to Class A. If the Democrats would take the time between debates for their own straw poll, this would be like Barack Obama as the only front-runner in the race and still not getting as many votes as, say, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd combined.

Let's just say that Republicans didn't come out of Ames with what you'd call a surge.

Not that Tancredo noticed. According to ace Rocky reporter/blogger M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Tancredo told his supporters, "We're blasting off!"

That's the least of it.

There used to be some kind of line that even Tancredo wouldn't cross. When he made his original comment about bombing Mecca, he said it was just a hypothetical - and implied we shouldn't take it too seriously. But this time, Tancredo was ready to make it the linchpin of his foreign policy. He threw in Medina for good measure - while explaining how the threat to bomb holy sites would deter the kinds of people who flew the planes on 9/11. He didn't mention what it might mean to the other 1 billion-plus nonterrorist Muslims.

As I've noted before, Tancredo is not a serious man. But I don't expect him to be. It's the 14 percent that worries me.

It's the 14 percent who said, "Oh, he wants to bomb Mecca. Let's vote to put this guy's finger on the nuclear button."

When Tancredo made his first bomb-the-holy-sites suggestion, I compared it to his 30-seconds-over-Mecca moment for a guy who didn't make the fight himself when he had the opportunity. At Ames, he apparently had even more tough-guy rhetoric for the crowd.

He spoke of Danny Dietz, the Littleton Navy SEAL and Navy Cross winner, who was killed in Afghanistan. Tancredo said he died because of too restrictive rules of engagement. "When I am president, I will never, ever, ever send anyone into harm's way with a CYA memo drafted by a Pentagon lawyer," he said. "The only rule of engagement I'm going to have in a Tancredo administration is this: We win, you lose!"

The crowd went nuts, of course. I wasn't there, but you don't have to be there to know it's a crowd of people tired of hearing about losing in Iraq and apparently worried about Islamic foot baths being installed in a Michigan college and who can't get enough of Tancredo on Lou Dobbs. Tancredo wins, we lose.

Still, President Tancredo? Even from 14 percent of Republican activists, maybe suffering from too much sun?

Timothy Noah of Slate, the online magazine, looked at the Tancredo phenomenon and decided Tancredo was "the biggest fool in the presidential race."

Slate is, of course, part of the liberal media conspiracy. But check this out from Byron York, the conservative writer from the conservative National Review Online, who was at Ames and from whose blog I got the Danny Dietz quotes.

Here's his description of the musical-comedy quartet Tancredo had at Ames:

"There were two guys dressed like cowboys, one like a hayseed, and - make of this what you will - one in a poncho, a big red sombrero and a wide Frito Bandito mustache."

Indeed, make of this what you will. Make of it what you will that on the door of a Tancredo field office in Iowa, there's a sign that keeps a running total of the number of deaths caused by "illegal aliens" and the number of children molested by them since 9/11.

The child-molesting number, by the way, was 17,576. The numbers, are, of course, not worth the crayon they're written with - but they are on the office door of an actual presidential candidate.

And on Wonkette's blog, they put up this headline: "Terrorist Mexican Child Molesters in Post-911 Surge!"

I told you not to laugh.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.

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