Let’s face it, this election season’s Republican primary is the biggest freak show the GOP has ever handed us. There isn’t a single candidate in the entire bunch that would make a good president of a chess club, much less the United States.
The Republican party has spent so much time trying to gather the votes of fringe lunatics and morally corrupt bigots, that a lot of this insanity is now just accepted policy.
Somehow we’ve ended up with a bunch of people running for the highest office who would probably benefit more from a shot of Thorazine and a comfy chair placed in front of a TV showing reruns of “Designing Women.”
The GOP has already had one candidate self-destruct. Herman Cain was a token attempt at showing that insanity is color-blind. Too bad he liked touching boobies that he wasn’t married to a little too much. It’s no big deal that he dropped out, though, because he didn’t have a chance in hell of winning.
Cain was CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, which was one of the largest chains of pizza restaurants in the world in the late 1970s and 80s. Domino’s delivered, Pizza Hut had great food; Godfather’s had game rooms.
Godfather’s pizza was pretty good, plus you could play a few rounds of Donkey Kong while waiting for your pie. Then Herman Cain was brought on as CEO. Dominos still delivers and Pizza Hut still has more or less great food, but Godfather’s is a brand you can now only buy in gas stations.
Newt Gingrich is another unabashed womanizer. He’s had so many affairs that he could be a one man Democratic National Convention. He was even pushing for Clinton’s impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal while having an affair himself. After being basically forced to resign from Congress by his fellow Republicans, we thought we were done with him, but he’s somehow come back from the dead.
Gingrich is corrupt and vile in every way that would matter to the bulk of the American population. But he’s also smart, sly, and pretty much the only candidate who could hold his own against Obama in a debate. Luckily, he’s also got so many skeletons in his closet that keep him completely unelectable, because otherwise we might have to change our nation’s motto to “Hide your kids, hide your wife.”
This season’s deck is stacked pretty high with the hyper-religious nutball candidates too. Easily the most forgettable of this lot is Rick Santorum.
Santorum once waged a one man war on the First Amendment trying to get creationism as a mandatory subject in schools and make homosexuality illegal. His views were so repugnant, that a strong effort was made to redefine “santorum” as a disgusting substance much like a politician. You’ll have to google it yourself, though, as it is too gross to publish here.
Then there’s Michele Bachmann, a woman who saw Sarah Palin and said, “I can be crazier than that!”
Bachmann thinks the U.S.A. should be a Christian dictatorship, a system called Dominionism. She confuses actors for serial killers, thinks Abraham Lincoln was a Founding Father, and would lose against a fifth grader in a quiz on civics and The Constitution.
Her crazy eyes even make her unnerving to look at. Never trust anyone who always shows the entire irises of their eyes. This is usually either a sign that they’re schizophrenic, or they’re a high school typing teacher.
I always thought Bachmann was the worst of the bunch, but then Rick Perry threw his too-tight cowboy hat into the ring.
Perry’s the poster boy for everything that’s wrong with our politicians. He used to be a Democrat until he started losing, so he changed all of his views, switched parties and rode the Republican train to Psychoville.
Perry is completely incapable of foresight and merely parrots things that he thinks will win him voters. He’s basically what George W. Bush would have been without Karl Rove and Dick Cheney handling him.
It looks like Perry may have sabotaged his campaign with a homophobic rant coupled with a factually incorrect callback to FOX News’ nonexistent wars on Christmas and Christianity in general. He claimed that kids aren’t allowed to pray in school or even celebrate Christmas. Loads of kids pray in school, especially before tests, but schools aren’t allowed to MAKE students pray. And kids celebrate Christmas in school so much, that by the first of December, they may as well be taught by Santa.
The end result is Perry now holds the record for the most disliked video on Youtube, and the internet is awash with Photoshopped pictures of him in drag.
Ron Paul is still holding on, mostly as a comedy option. He’ll start off with perfectly reasonable, Eisenhower-esque Republican views, and then take a detour into alien conspiracies, New World Orders, and reverting to the gold standard.
Paul doesn’t have a chance at winning the primary, but he’d be a Democratic kingmaker if he ran as a third party. The only reason he’s even running now is all the encouragement he got from the wacky “OMG so random” hipster support he got four years ago.
John Huntsman is also running.
Finally there’s Mitt Romney. He’s a likeable enough guy, but the GOP is such a cesspool that you can’t be a candidate without compromising your own ideas. He supported health care reform until it became a Democratic platform. Now he’s willing to throw all of those people whose lives he actually saved under the bus, simply to win the support of a bunch of morally questionable voters.
He used to support some more-or-less progressive economic ideas until the GOP’s official stance became anything that inconveniences a rich person is pure Marxism.
My opinion is that the GOP isn’t really interested in beating Obama in 2012. Otherwise they’d have to start taking responsibility for all of the damage they’ve done since 2009.
They’ve got a free ride, and the only thing they need to worry about is holding onto the House, which won’t be difficult. It’s obvious Romney will get the nomination, because he’s the least interesting of the candidates. And in modern America, the election process has gotten so screwed up, that people are more likely to vote for Snooki than a legitimate candidate.
