The second half of this segment has to be one of the more humorous things I've seen on the Rachel Maddow Show in a while. After asking whether Mitt Romney has just decided to say the hell with pretending like he's some sort of "man of the people" and embraced his inner Thurston Howell III, she and Eugene Robinson took to pondering which of the other characters from that show we might see our current crop of Republican presidential candidates cast as.

For anyone not old enough to have watched the series, Thurston Howell III was the extremely wealthy stereotypical Northeastern millionaire from Gilligan's Island. During the first part of the segment, Rachel laid out what we've seen from Romney on the campaign trail so far, like criticizing President Obama for not already having a jobs plan and being late to the game with that; and then announcing he's going to come out with his own jobs plan on the same day.

While trying to paint himself as some man of the people, he went before a group of unemployed voters in Florida and got lots of cringes and uncomfortable laughs when he said “I'm also unemployed.” As Rachel noted, yes, Mitt Romney is unemployed – an unemployed multimillionaire private equity executive running for President.

Then we have Mittens in Iowa saying that “corporations are people, my friend.” Then after trying to pivot and attack President Obama for vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, we found out that Romney was going to Martha's Vineyard as well to campaign at the same time. And then going straight from Martha's Vineyard, to the Hamptons.

Rachel seemed to think that Mitt Romney is now just embracing the “zillionaire thing” and apparently the staff of the Rachel Maddow show has decided to call Romney's latest campaign strategy “going for the full Thurston.” Here's what she offered up as proof of that theory.

As she noted, the Romney campaign has not decided that the “corporations are people” thing might turn out to be a good campaign ad. It's also no secret that the Romney family has decided to nearly quadruple their beach side mansion in San Diego, but apparently they're not worried about any bad PR from that either. And as she noted, they decided to correct The Washington Post to make sure they knew his net worth was between $190 and $250 million instead of just guessing how rich he is. And then we have them basically bragging about stealing Wall Street donors from President Obama, and one of his donors being quoted as saying “It's not healthy for rich people to feel maligned.”

I think Rachal may be onto something here with what strategy their campaign is taking, but I have a hard time imagining it will work for them if her theory is true. And I don't see how Romney's years as a vulture capitalist ever turns out to be a plus for him in the general election.

Rachel and her guest Eugene Robinson followed up by asking if Mitt Romney is Thurston Howell III, which members of our current GOP presidential primary contenders might fit the cast of Gilligan's Island. I'll let everyone here decide whether you agree on who might fit what role or not, but I found the discussion fairly humorous as I said earlier in the post.

I await the perpetual carping and victim card playing if either Palin or Bachmann hears about this and decides that the scary lesbian woman on MSNBC and the scary black guy who writes for The Washington Post were being mean to them instead of admitting they were just having a bit of fun taking the whole Gilligan's Island theme a little further than just applying it to Mitt Romney.