Super Tuesday Predictions

Wolf Blitzer can't stop trimming his beard in anticipation.

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The closest thing we’ve got to a national primary. The kind of day Karl Rove and George Stephanopoulos have wet dreams about. The moment we finally find out just how ambivalent Americans feel about Mitt Romney. It’s Super Tuesday! Follow our state-by-state guide for a comprehensive examination of how these 10 states will select their 2012 Republican nominee.

OHIO
I’ll be honest. Most of my knowledge regarding the state of Ohio comes from either Bristol Bacchus or Cleveland jokes. But if this state thought that it would be a good idea to induct the Beastie Boys and Neil Diamond into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, then I’m not sure how well I can trust the judgment of its citizens. The race between Santorum and Romney might be more unpredictable than a LeBron James televised announcement, but I think Romney pulls ahead after he is quoted at a campaign stop admitting that, like LeBron, he’s working on an autobiography but just can’t come up with a title.

GEORGIA
At the time of me writing this post, the New York Times has already called Georgia in favor of Gingrich with less than 1% of the polls reporting. Which is a relief, as it saves me the time of having to come up with jokes about Sherman’s March to the Sea, Coca-Cola, peaches, or how the 76 delegates up for grabs seems like a remarkably similar figure to what I assume the ex-Congressman’s BMI looks like.

OMG guyzzz y doesnt nybody lyke me??!?

TENNESSEE
Just once I want to see Mitt down a fifth of Jack, stumble through the electric slide at a Nashville honky tonk, drunk dial Tipper Gore, and finish the night sobbing outside of Graceland. I think if he can pull all four off before the polls close, he might have a fighting chance is stealing this Southern state from Gingrich. At least as much of a fighting chance as Johnston and Beauregard had at the Battle of Shiloh.

ALASKA
After ringing endorsements from Balto and Jewel, Ron Paul carries the Alaska primary by appealing to voters’ enthusiasm for legalized weed to help get through the winter and increase appreciation for the Northern Lights. Rumors abound that Gingrich promised to “drill baby drill” Sarah Palin if he was victorious, but are dismissed by Newt as a smear campaign invented by the devious liberal media hell-bent on distracting the American people from the real issues at stake in this election.

MASSACHUSETTS
In a surprise upset, Governor Romney arrives in a time machine from 2003 to defeat the current conservative incarnation of Mitt. The 2003 Romney also extols on the virtues of comprehensive health care, the success of the invasion of Iraq, and the musical brilliance of Evanescence.

IDAHO
What’s bland, white, and favored by many Irish Catholics? The Republican Party! Also, potatoes. Seeing that Idaho has a lot of both, I predict that a bland white Republican will win the Idaho caucus. Or maybe just a really fat potato dressed in a suit that many voters mistake for Newt Gingrich.

NORTH DAKOTA
North Dakota sucks so much, it’s developed an inferiority complex towards its neighbor to the South whose main claims to fame include a palace made of corn and a brief cameo appearance in North by Northwest. The state’s main exports are natural gas, lonesome prairie wind, tumbleweed, and depression. Even the nuclear missile silos left as soon as humanly possible. Like my seventh-grade self at the middle school dance, North Dakota’s willing to devote itself entirely to the first poor soul who shows it a shred of interest. All Romney has to do is show up and call North Dakota within the next three days to seal the deal.*

Pyrotechnics would really bolster his campaign stops

OKLAHOMA
The official rock song of Oklahoma is “Do You Realize??” by The Flaming Lips, which is pretty awesome until you imagine every citizen in the state singing “Everyone you know one day will die!,” and that the closest competition to The Flaming Lips for this prestigious title was the All-American Rejects’ “Move Along.” This, along with the fact that Oklahomans couldn’t come up with anything more original for their actual state song than fucking Rodgers and Hammerstein means that this state is bound to go for Ron Paul.

VERMONT
So long as the citizens of Vermont can find enough time to vote in between their busy schedule of wearing flannel, tapping for maple syrup, and not showering, I bet they go with the pride and joy of the Northeast, Scott Brown.

VIRGINIA
Considering Rick Santorum’s penchant for desperately holding on to socially conservative values that went out of vogue in the 1960s, the former Senator’s statement that Chief Justice Warren’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia “makes me want to spew some sort of vile amalgamation of vomit, semen, feces, and bile out of every orifice possible,” provides the essential vitriol necessary to win this key swing state despite not even making it on the ballot.

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*Imagine, if you will, the charming Mitt Romney sauntering up to North Dakota, standing in the corner looking forlornly at all the cool kids being courted by swarthy Super PACs, and asking it to slow dance with him while Jessica Simpson’s “Take My Breath Away” plays in the background. I bet North Dakota would immediately take Romney home to Fargo and let him frack her all night.

Newt Gingrich, South Carolina, and the Abortion of My Career in Political Commentary

And I don't think I want to. Except for understanding your disproportionate ability to get laid.

The GOP primaries are like Chicago weather: completely, utterly, and insanely unpredictable.* Just when you think you understand the day-to-day realities of winter in Chicago, BAM!! Thunderstorm in January. Just when you think you’ve figured out the winner of the GOP nomination, BOOM! Newt wins South Carolina.

I mean, what the fuck, Newt? I thought we were done. I really did. I thought Silly Time was over and it was time for some Real Talk with Obama and Romney (or at the very least, an Al Green-themed The Voice-style sing-off). Not so fast. But I guess I should’ve seen this coming.

Here is a Facebook status I wrote a few months ago, when Newt Gingrich was polling in first place while his opponents floundered, as Herman Cain struggled to fight rape charges and Rick Perry struggled to remember things and Mitt Romney struggled to be interesting: “Newt Gingrich is in first place. That’s it. It’s all a farce. Let’s stop pretending that all of this is real. I throw up my hands.”

Newt polling in first was to the GOP race what Sam and Frodo reaching the end of the Shire was for LOTR. We were now farther from political sanity than we had ever been before, and there was no telling where we would be swept off to next.

Google his name. GOOGLE IT!!!

Two months later, Rick Santorum won Iowa.

Rick Santorum! His name has been successfully Google-bombed and EVERYBODY KNOWS IT and he still won Iowa!

I underestimated the GOP. And not in a “wow I underestimated how good this Nutella milkshake from Fran’s would be” kind of way. Oh no. It was a “the 1984 Portland Trail Blazers underestimated Michael Jordan so much they decided to draft Sam Bowie instead of him” kind of underestimation. Half of me understood that the Newt poll meant the Brotherhood of Dada had dragged us into an alternate universe where ‘politics’ was synonymous with ‘freakshow’ and words lost their meaning and anything was possible…but half of me kept thinking that every crazy development (“oops,” Herman Cain’s Pokémon obsession, Ron Paul’s status as the voice of reason) was the zenith of absurdity, that there remained no further depths to which we could plunge.

But you best believe Newt Gingrich always had an answer for me. Once again, for the record, in case you were too busy this weekend dancing to polka music or playing cards with guys who have the Teen Titans tattooed on their arm to hear about it, Newt won South Carolina! Once more for the record: aaaaahhhhhhhhh!

Is this year’s GOP race the result of some twisted alternate earth they dragged us into?

My last article was not only a celebration of the ridiculous hilarity of the GOP campaign, but also an elegy for that craziness, which I thought was about to vanish in a cloud of sanity. I thought Mitt finally had this all locked up after winning New Hampshire, and I was sure we were finally transitioning from Perry-Bachmann-Cain-Paul-Gingrich to Romney-Obama, to real political debates between two sane candidates. But then Newt charged back to metaphorically punch me in the mouth and remind me that America isn’t going to stop being a hot dysfunctional mess anytime soon.

My possible career in political commentary hasn’t even started and I’m already thinking of quitting forever. I just cannot wrap my head around Newt Gingrich. Can anybody? If you thought Rick Santorum was vulnerable to a casual Google search, try taking Newt’s name for a virtual walk some time. Newt probably has his closet bolted shut with a chair against the door and that still isn’t enough to keep the skeletons in. There is absolutely no possible way that Newt can win the GOP nomination, much less the presidency. But if this campaign has taught us anything, it’s that the possible is impossible and up is down and America is fucked up. In the real world, Newt could never win. But I don’t think we even live in the real world anymore.

Newt

My sense of surprise is utterly gone. For the rest of eternity I will believe any story, any event that involves the GOP. Nothing is too nonsensical for a party where Newt Gingrich is a viable candidate. I probably won’t even bat an eye when Bristol Palin wins the Iowa caucuses in four years and becomes the favorite to win the GOP nomination. The Republican Party has moved beyond my paltry comprehension ability.

I think I’m just gonna have to stick to the fiery anti-coffee invective. I can’t do this anymore.

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*And for those of you scoring at home, “Chicago weather” is the third thing I’ve compared the GOP primaries to during my career. The list also includes Doctor Who and NBC’s Thursday night sitcom lineup.

Things That Rock: Republicans

Good to see you again. Sorry that it’s been so long since I last made you laugh, but I’ve had a tumultuous couple of weeks. You see, ever since I stole away from my monastery in the middle of the night (no, that ‘Brother’ in my name isn’t random) armed only with a box of tagalongs Peanut Butter Patties and a pair of hook swords, I have been mercilessly pursued by a cadre of cyborg zombie ninjas hell-bent on forcing me back to the monastery where I would be forced to eat beets and contemplate Godel Escher Bach alongside the other monks for the rest of eternity. Hell no. But now that I’m safely holed up in a top-secret bunker located miles beneath Ayers Rock, I’m free to write another article!

I'll miss this woman.

Luckily for all you raging optimists, this one is about something that’s awesome, as opposed to something that’s terrible. Even better, it’s about a ‘diamond in the rough’ sort of awesomeness that can be hard to appreciate if you take it too seriously.* In other words: this year’s Republican presidential primaries.

The GOP candidates (or as I like to call them, Mitt & Friends) have been so ubiquitous in our culture these last few months that I’m sure your mind was assailed with a flood of images and quotes and feelings as soon as you saw those words. Maybe they’ve made you angry or sad or scared for the future of America. But hell, they were entertaining, weren’t they?

Yes they were. Especially once it became clear that turds like Michele Bachmann had no chance of making the cut, it was fun to kick back and watch Rick Perry metaphorically poop himself on live TV or listen to Herman Cain quote the Pokemon movie after his past as a serial rapist was revealed.

Here’s how I parlayed the possible terror of these primaries into something enjoyable: Imagine you went in for a routine dentist checkup. You expect it to be as routine and uneventful as it always is when you go in for these appointments every four years, but surprise! Your dentist finds deep rot in some of your teeth. A root canal’s the only thing for it. Shit, you’ve got a nonrefundable one-way ticket to of the most infamously painful procedures ever conceived by doctors. Begin the nervous freakout.

What else to say about the awesomeness of the GOP primaries?

That root canal diagnosis (and the crippling fear that accompanied it on your part) was Bachmann winning the Ames Straw Poll, or perhaps Perry’s entry into the campaign as a veritable behemoth of money and charisma and prayer, plus former pizza CEO Herman Cain making the cover of Newsweek as the candidate to beat. Former pizza CEO! It sure looked like America was headed for an extremely painful procedure, wasn’t it?

But then a few days later, after you’ve spent several sleepless nights tossing and turning over your fate, you get a call from your dentist. He forgot to tell you: they’re going to knock you out for all of it. You won’t feel a thing. And painkillers being what they are these days, you’ll be right as rain within 24 hours.

For me, that brow-wiping ‘wheeeeeeeeeeew’ moment was the poll, one of the first after Cain and Perry and Bachmann had risen and fallen in the ratings like the figures on a merry go round (only if those figures were stupid clowns instead of the usual beautiful horses), that showed Newt Gingrich in first place. NEWT GINGRICH! FIRST PLACE! Good God, this man once impeached a president for infidelity while cheating on his second wife with a woman who ended up becoming his third wife, and later explained his extramarital affairs by saying that they were “partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country.” Yes! And he was in first place to be the Republican candidate for president! I had been almost scared to laugh at the primaries up to this point, like meeting a guy at a party who keeps nonsensically rambling about Clarence Thomas, only you don’t laugh because you can’t tell if he’s joking or drunk. But now Newt Gingrich was in first place! Turns out that guy was drunk and joking! Commence laughter!**

In a gold-in-the-sand kind of way, or perhaps in a we’ll-knock-you-out-for-the-entire-procedure kind of way, that subtle change in viewing the GOP primaries completely transforms the experience from frightening to hilarious. Once you don’t have to worry about finding a house in Canada (my personal Bachmann contingency plan), you can enjoy these video compilations of classic Bachmann quotes (complete with music!) and laugh at the complete absurdity of the existence of ‘classic Bachmann quotes.’ Once you don’t have to watch professional people seriously debate the 9-9-9 tax plan, you can enjoy the ceaseless stream of ridiculousness that is Herman Cain. Once Rick Santorum wins second place in the Iowa caucuses and opens the door to all sorts of Twitter-ready remarks about how Santorum is being spread in Iowa, it’s nothing but joy.

The man loves to get some tail.

I loved these primaries. From a comedy standpoint, there really was nothing better. How can you not love a primary campaign that spawned a website devoted to showcasing animals with Newt Gingrich?

Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to be stuck with Romney vs. Obama for the next few months, two rational, intelligent, and capable men locked in learned debate. Being the heinous renegade monk that I am, I don’t really know what ‘learned debate’ means, but I’m guessing there will be fewer Pokemon quotes involved. I don’t know what I’m going to do for reality TV entertainment. I mean, maybe you can sit through an episode of the Steven Tyler American Idol, but I certainly can’t. But then again, you’re probably a better person than I am, as evidenced by the fact that you’re not currently on the lam from a cadre of cyborg zombie ninjas.

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*Much like the cinematography of Wayne’s World 2.
**And the systematic destruction of any shred of decency that remained in Fran’s.

What the People Want

Looks like the Republican Presidential Primary might get a little more interesting. No, Ronald Reagan did not recently rise from the dead. And, unfortunately, rumors that front-runner Mitt Romney is preparing to battle Jon Huntsman in The Thunderdome have been proven woefully false. But during a speech in Charleston, S.C., Candidate Michele Bachmann made a stunning announcement that is sure to rock the American political world. According to Michele Bachmann,

“They want to see two girls come together and have a mud wrestling fight,” the Minnesota congresswoman said. “And I’m… going to give it to ‘em.”

[editor’s note: some content removed from quotation to help facilitate the fantasies of 13-year-old pundits everywhere]

We can only begin to fathom how amazing such a battle royale would be. In fact, our crack team of graphic designers have been hard at work trying to give our readers an accurate depiction of what said mud wrestling would look like, and have produced a preliminary sketch to whet one’s appetite. Our prediction? The melee turns ugly when The Alaska Disasta’ accuses The North Star of lacking proper political experience, and ends in a draw to allow both politicians enough time to prepare their next prodigiously absurd comment for the press.

Man, this tea party sure did escalate quickly...

[POLITICO]