Dump the Trump

The Republican presidential nomination process is like a toilet overflowing with backed-up sewage. Things just seem to lurch from ridiculous to horribly awful. Part circus freak show, part media shitstorm from hell, this political Theatre of the Damned is like a really unfunny caricature of what a nominating process would be if all the participants were dangerously mentally ill, addicted to meth, and completely and utterly without morals or any redeeming value whatsoever.

In retrospect it seems that Tim Pawlenty made the best move ever when he bailed out of this revolving crapfest early, only because he was as boring as white bread with mayonnaise and nobody liked him at all. He has since become a full-time pimp for Romney, but even that is a huge step up from associating with the likes of Batshit Bachmann and Rick Santoilet, even though Pawlenty is blatantly campaigning for the vice-president spot on the ticket, should Romney be nominated.

These past couple of months have seen the spectacular flame-out of Rick Perry, governor of Texas and once regarded as a shoo-in for the nomination. An astonishingly unqualified and incompetent candidate, his callousness and limitless stupidity rapidly became too apparent to ignore because of a series of jaw-dropping gaffes, flubs and misstatements. How anyone could even consider this simple-minded dolt as Oval Office material shows how degraded and corrupted the American political system has become. I said it before, but Perry has succeeded in what was universally regarded as an impossible task - making George W. Bush look good.

We also witnessed the equally-spectacular downfall of Herman Cain, a black conservative who seemed to revel gleefully in a level of arrogant stupidity usually reserved for politicians in the Deep South or the Arizona state legislature. I don't know if he really thought his faux-populist shtick of acting like jus'-plain-folks was going to catapult him into the White House, but he openly mocked and ridiculed things that any President would have to take seriously, as with his "Uz-Becky-Becky-Becky-Stan-Stan" comment. For a while, his poll numbers were inexplicably rising, but the media firestorm about his penchant for cheating on his wife and breaking his marriage vows (such is the Republican "family values" rule - do as I say, not as I do) will kind of serve as a pre-echo for what will happen to fellow candidate Newt Gingrich should he survive this process and make it to the general election.

There is nothing to be said about bottom-feeding, second-tier candidates Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santoilet that hasn't been said before, so I will skip over them and give them the attention they deserve, which is none at all. I will mention that Bachmann's latest mental health call-for-help is her statement about the Iraq war, saying that we should not pull our troops out after 8.5 bloody, hideously expensive years but instead stay there longer. I think the $800 billion that that ill-advised conflagration cost this country will haunt us for a much longer time than Bachmann will spend in a mental institution after she is inevitably committed.

The grandest media grandstand of all for this blathering smorgasbord of idiots, dopes, bigots and racists has been the debates, which amounts to a well-lit, televised, cautionary tale of what might happen if human evolution suddenly reversed itself several million years. The comparatively-sane John Huntsman and Ron Paul were also thrown into this toxic stew of ignorance, presumably for a sassy little splash of color.

The cast of ancillary supporting characters that came along with this pathetic parade of drones and morons is equally appalling. Sarah Palin had the national news media inexplicably enthralled for a while, waiting for her to say she's in the running for President. Luckily even a slatternly egomaniac like her realized that it would be pointless. Land whale and future Subway sandwich spokesblimp Chris Christie threatened to jump into the running, and the thought of him jumping anywhere is enough to send you running for the nearest earthquake shelter, but decided otherwise when he noted that every comedian in the country was dredging up every fat joke known to man and aiming them at him. Suprisingly, dimwitted amateur witch Christine O'Donnell appeared out of nowhere and endorsed Mitt Romney's candidacy, saying that she likes him "because he's been consistent since he changed his mind." I did NOT make that up.

But there is one person in this repellent, unsavory witches-brew of recessive genetics who has consistently proven over and over again that tacky, classless and boorish behavior knows no socioeconomic boundaries, and that is oafish, stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump. Whether he is beating the bushes with that tired, discredited birther nonsense or staging a publicity-stunt campaign for presidency himself, this roadkill-crested gargoyle has shown there is no depth too low for him to sink to in order to keep his name in the public eye. Feeding on self-promotion like a vampire feeds on Type O negative, Trump has shown a preternaturally creepy talent for turning one of his many ridiculous screw-ups into a publicity bonanza for himself and his obnoxious, flatulent image. The latest fiasco was to stage a Republican debate with Trump as moderator. When only two of the candidates agreed to show up and all the others refused, the "debate" was exposed for the absurd fraud that is was, and was canceled. Just how f**ked up do you have to be to make Michelle Bachmann think you're too crazy to deal with? I don't think there's a way to measure that.

This has got to be the weirdest, most bizarre and depressing nomination season in decades, and it shows no sign of dying down. Now, the flabby, pudgy-faced Newt Gingrich, him of the three wives, is having his turn at the top of the polls, but even Republican pundits expect him to start falling pretty darned soon. And for some unknown, damnable reason we have to be concerned with what a bunch of overweight, pasty-faced, religious-nutjob farmers in Iowa are thinking about as their January 3rd caucuses draw near. I mean, who gives two shits about what those idiots think? They are not even slightly representative of the American populace and their opinions should not even matter. All this points out how irretrievably wrecked and poisonous the American political system is. It's probably the worst possible way to pick the person to fill the most critically important job in the world.

Delicious Dilemma

I know I said I was going to stay away from political rants but sometimes they are just too good to pass up. As always, anything that makes Republicans look even more idiotic and loathsome than they naturally are makes me squeal and giggle like a Girl Scout who just sold all her cookies to the fat family down the street.

The 2012 Presidential election is still a year and a half away but the campaign is just getting started. The Democrats know who their nominee is going to be, so no issues there. All eyes are focused on the Republicans and their gaggle of potential candidates. And what a load of creepy, disgusting and appalling dirtbags they are. They range from the merely tiresome and eccentric, such as Texas Representative Ron Paul - who has been down this road a number of times and failed miserably, and will do so again - to really despicable, toxically ignorant buttheads like Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Pawlenty and just about everyone else in that sorry Theater of the Inbred that is the G.O.P.

Luckily the sun appears to be setting on a couple of the more misguided candidates. The nation was diverted, willingly or not, for a couple weeks by the sad, sorry sideshow of Donald Trump, egomaniac, narcissist par excellence, and stubby-fingered vulgarian who did what he does best, promote himself and his hair to anyone who will pay attention. He thought he had a winning issue with the "birther" controversy, until their intended target Barack Obama produced a valid Hawaii birth certificate for himself and permanently shut down that little cottage industry. Right afterward, all the gas went out of Trump's presidential bid, but not before he tried to take credit for everything from the birth certificate itself to the killing of Osama bin Laden. By that time the rest of the country wised up to what a charlatan and cheap huckster Trump is and has been merciless in their criticism and condemnation of him for wasting all our time with his bullshit. And rightfully so.

Newt Gingrich's ill-advised presidential bid was barely out of the gate when he stumbled and landed right on his Pillsbury-doughboy face. He made the unforgivable sin of criticizing Paul Ryan's Economic Plan/Welfare for the Super Rich on Meet The Press last Sunday. The Republicans are pinning all their hopes on Ryan's plan, and they know they absolutely need to get everyone in the G.O.P. on board with it. The Newtster must have missed that memo, because he called Ryan's plan "right-wing social engineering," among other things, and was immediately drop-kicked by nearly every Republican pundit around and taken to task in the harshest possible terms. His remarks were in direct contrast to Ronald Reagan's golden rule, "Thou shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans." Newter suddenly realized he stepped into a vast sea of manure of his own making, and clumsily tried to make amends by accusing the mainstream media of tripping him up with a deliberate "gotcha" question, but even Republican spin-meisters knows the only person who "got" Gingrich was himself. Watch his support and money dry up faster than the leathery skin of his weirdly robotic, bug-eyed wife.

So, who's left in this assortment of assholes, I mean, candidates? Mitt Romney, the apparent front-runner, has a huge amount of baggage he brought with him from his time as Governor of Massachusetts, where he put in place a universal health care system which was the model for Obama's health care reform package, something that Republicans absolutely love to hate and are trying to derail every way possible. Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania stepped on a land mine when he criticized John McCain for knowing nothing about enhanced interrogation, a.k.a. torture. I think McCain knows a little bit about torture, after five years of it when he was a Vietnam era P.O.W., and military service is an experience that Santorum has notably missed. It seems the G.O.P.'s best hope for the White House, Mike Huckabee, is happier being a much older, really ugly version of Ricki Lake on his own surreal, cringe-inducing talk show.

The B-listers on the G.O.P. side don't fare much better. Tim Pawlenty is universally regarded as terminally boring and bland. Current Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels is also regarded as profoundly charisma-challenged. Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson does not attend church, is pro-choice, and is in favor of legalizing marijuana, so he has zero chance with the drooling, knuckle-dragging evangelicals that dominate the early primaries. Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are holding up the batshit-crazy wing of the party. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is burdened with a southern accent, which automatically makes you sound stupid and retarded, so no thanks, I don't think so.

And then there are the Z-listers, people who think they can run as a Republican through some confluence of massive self-delusion and mental illness. These include the token black candidate Herman Cain - former CEO of Godfather Pizza, a real pre-requisite for the White House; former U.N. ambassador John Bolton - who is like some weird hybrid of Mark Twain and Charles Manson; gay-rights activist Fred Karger - HAHAHAHA!; career flight attendant Tom Miller - also HAHAHAHA!; and Houston businessman Vern Wuensche. This is the second go-round for ol' Vern, who campaigned in 2008 and came in tenth in Iowa and New Hampshire before bailing out. His campaign material makes the interesting assertion that "businesses which survive do so through the good decisions of those who run them and they are therefore exceptionally qualified for public office," which is, of course, a totally awesome thing to say.

So, for this field of potential office-seekers, which completely covers the whole range of qualities from "abysmal" to "vile" and back, their first test of electoral viability will be the Iowa caucuses. Set in the monochromatic, frozen wastes of Iowa in winter, the candidates must put on their best evangelical-Christian, Sunday-go-to-meetin' clothes and work hard to appeal to one of most homogenous, non-diverse, and non-representative populations in the entire country. Required to cozy up to mostly old, white, obese farmers and their bloated, bovine wives, the candidates will be elbowing each other out of the way to get to the extreme-conservative end of the political spectrum. And thus we have the delicious dilemma that I mentioned about half a million words ago - namely that the Republicans need to appeal to the far-right-wing-nutcase branch of the party to get through the primaries, and then have to back-track and refute everything they said and scramble to the political center to appeal to everyone else in the general election. You can be sure that the Democrats will be closely watching every bit of action in the early primaries and the attack ads will practically write themselves. The Republicans have clearly painted themselves into a political corner early on, by casting their lot with the ultra-conservative factions in this country and they will have a terrible time trying to get the independent voters they so desperately need in the general election.

And I will be watching their struggle with a huge amount of gleeful satisfaction.