Cold? Yah. Blizzard? Nah.
The weather wizards are proclaiming a blizzard warning for the Duke City and its environs, but Boreas seems to have pissed off somewhere. Maybe he’s stalking Cupid.
Anyway, we have maybe an inch of snow on the deck, and some flurries continue, but the wind speed is far short of double digits.
It is colder than relations between Mitt Romney and Ron Johnson, but they’re both as rich as Croesus so I’m sure they’ll get over it.
If this is Tuesday, then it must be another GOP primary, and the race between the sweater-vestmented reincarnation of Torquemada and a Terminator built on spec’ by a couple of laid-off Rambler mechanics has been too close to call.
But tonight there will be a winner and … a winner?
Rick Sanctimonious’ handlers are already on record as saying that they’ve won in Michigan and Arizona, regardless of whether their man actually wins.
Which he won’t — not in Arizona, anyway, where CNN called it for the RomneyBot 2012 before I finished my second beer this evening.
Michigan apparently remains up for grabs, in no small measure because anyone can play in the GOP primary there, and the Donks are queering the pitch by turning out for Frothy Mix, who has encouraged their participation against the RomneyBot 2012 via the irony of robocalls.
Some Donks think Torquemada v2.0 will be easier for the prez to flog in the general; others clearly have been driven completely insane by seeing these two wealthy honkies crisscrossing the state like gold-plated drones, each claiming to speak for the working man.
I probably won’t follow this nightmare to its conclusion this evening because there won’t be one. The Four Stooges will battle on through Super Tuesday at least, and there will be plenty of opportunity to bring the snark between now and then.
In the meantime, here’s the current occupant of the Oval Office addressing the United Auto Workers Annual Conference. Say what you will about the guy — he makes the rest of the applicants for the job look like the Deltas overestimating their popularity with Otis Day and the Knights in “Animal House.” *
* And yes, I know that the GOP lot are much more Omega Theta Pi than Delta Tau Chi. I was just reaching for the whole getting-your-privileged-ass-kicked thing.
• Late update: The nets have called Michigan for the RomneyBot as well. Gold-plated human-cyborg-relations droids everywhere cheer.
First off, though clearly one of these yahoos may become president, anyone who thinks one of them should be president needs a hole punched in his or her skull so that the bats may escape.
Jabba the Newt should be deported to Tatooine to keep all his ex-wives’ grandmothers company.
Rick Sphinctorum needs an enema. Preferably from Dan Savage. He sounds like Milton Waddams squeaking about his stapler.
Ron Paul is hereby awarded a “No-Class Warfare” T-shirt with goldbug cluster for shamelessly courting white supremacists, militias and survivalists with racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic newsletters and not having the sack to man up about having done it.
And the RomneyBot 2012 needs to be locked into a portable toilet at the U.S.-Mexico border and forced to listen to a replay of each and every lie he’s told while running for president, in both English and Spanish.
Finally, Wolf Blitzer should be welded into a 55-gallon drum full of tarantulas, scorpions and the vengeful ghost of Edward R. Murrow, then rolled off the stern of a garbage scow into the Marianas Trench, for that blindingly stupid fucking question about whose wife would make the best first lady.
The RomneyBot 2012 puts the squeeze on Newt.
These guys watch the Repuglican debates so you don’t have to:
• Charles P. Pierce: “(Newt) Gingrich’s political gifts are solely those of an arsonist. Challenged with the reality of what he’s always been, he will bluster and fume and light a dozen strawmen on fire, but he’ll never actually answer the damn question in a way that anyone with the intellect of an andiron would find to be adequate. Asked any kind of decent follow-up, and you can almost see his megalomania collide with his insecurities while he gropes for what comes next.”
• John Nichols: “Ron Paul and Rick Santorum took some pokes at the front-runners—indeed, Santorum got off a decent “there is no difference between President Obama and these two gentlemen” riff late in the debate. But neither of the other contenders stated the obvious: the leading contenders for the GOP nod embody everything that leads Americans to dismiss politicians as crooks.”
• Conor Friedersdorf: “Republican voters, who like the connotation of ‘conservative,’ say it’s a quality they prefer; revealed preference suggests what they actually want is an inconsistent right-leaning opportunist (George W. Bush, John McCain) who helps them evade certain kinds of cognitive dissonance (like hating deficit-financed government health care in theory and loving the budget-busting Medicare prescription-drug expansions in practice).”
And so on.
Meanwhile, the RomneyBot 2012 outputs some tax info and it ain’t pretty. None of his more than $42 million in income in 2010 and 2011 came from wages — it came from “a profusion of investments, as well as stock dividends and interest payments,” according to The Washington Post. And his tax rate last year? 13.9 percent. Ouch. That’s gotta sting. I tip better than that for bad service.
Notes Steve Benen: “(E)ven if Romney argues that he’s simply playing by the rules — taking advantage of existing tax loopholes to pay lower rates than much of the middle class — this doesn’t explain why Romney is eager to exacerbate issues on tax fairness with his tax plan that makes the problem worse.”
Steve adds: “Romney and his aides believe these materials should end the discussion. That’s backwards — the larger debate is just beginning.” Let’s hope so.
The more things change, etc.
So, dead heat between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in Iowa, eh? Guess nobody bothered to write in Haywood Jablomie, Jack Meehoff or I.P. Freeley.
Watching the food fight over the GOP pestilential nomination has been like watching a Coen Brothers treatment of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.” Or maybe a round of musical chairs with all the participants crazed on mescaline.
Mitt Romney keeps smiling because he owns all the chairs, the building in which they sit and the surrounding properties to boot. But that doesn’t make him any less a bag of runny owlshit that nobody’s buying as long as there’s anything else for sale.
The big cheese may eventually stand alone. All the smart money’s on it. But right now he’s doing a tango with Man-On-Dog Santorum, and he can’t be feeling too frothy about it.
Patrick O'Grady has been making stuff up since, well, forever. He started doing it for money in high school and didn't quit until he retired in 2022. (To be honest, if you waved enough Dead President Trading Cards at him, he might do it for money again.) Until then, this blog is his pro-bonehead work. For more on Your Humble Narrator, click the comic.
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