super duper tuesday

once again its been a while since i've posted. starting to sound like a broken record. here's my column from last week, at any rate.

CARPE DIEM 02-08-08

Ah, Super-Duper-Cali-Fragilisitic Tuesday. Watching the coverage makes me want to give myself a lobotomy with an ice pick and a ball-peen hammer, but I just can’t tear myself away.

There’s no shortage of whack-a-doo stories out there as pundits scramble to make sense of a completely mad day in a completely mad year for American politics. But even as the heavy-hitter media elites attempt to sift through the voluminous mounds of spin that the campaigns and their lackeys have left in steaming piles, they are also working hard to cover their own bets [read: asses] especially after the media debacle following the last round of primaries, when Clinton’s campaign was declared dead in the water.

Here are a few of the more off-the-map nutty storylines:

• Even though Obama raked in 562 delegates and 13 states Tuesday night, compared to Clinton’s 582 delegates and 8 states, the media declared the night a “disappointment” for the junior senator from Illinois. It seems that many pundits are scrambling to distance themselves from their love affair with Obama by now setting course 180 degrees away from him. Now it’s Obama who’s finished, washed-up, kaput. Here’s a headline from Wednesday’s Washington Post: “Obama Wave Wanes.”

It’s all over.

Only, it’s not.

Of course, given the recent hype surrounding his candidacy reaching epic, Kennedy-esque proportions—literally, in the sense that Ted Kennedy came out in support of him—any primary result not including a total and complete humiliation of Clinton at the polls could seem like a poor showing. The establishment hates that it’s not decided yet—and, really, hates that it’s not decided in favor of Clinton—because that means more days and weeks of uncomfortable questions about that very establishment, and what direction voters want the next president to take the country.

• Speaking of which, here’s a good one: Clinton advisor Mark Penn was quoted on the Talking Points Memo blog as claiming that Obama has become the “establishment candidate.” Apparently Penn reached that conclusion because of recent endorsements Obama has gotten, and is now attempting to both spin Clinton as an underdog, and undermine Obama’s outsider cachet. I guess Hillary’s eight years in the White House, seven years in the Senate after carpet-bagging to New York to get elected, K Street lobbyist connections, votes for more-stringent bankruptcy laws that favor credit card companies, supporting the Patriot Act, and, oh yeah, authorizing the Iraq war and all get wiped away the moment a nearly irrelevant Kennedy supports Obama.

• On the Republican side, John McCain won convincingly, putting away 511 delegates, compared with Romney’s 176 and Huckabee’s 147. Funny thing is, the Republicans don’t want him.

Huh? Well, lots of them anyway.

Even with that kind of widespread support for a war-hero Senator who—inexplicably—continues to speak of Iraq as if it were an overseas province of Empire America that we will occupy—inexplicably—for at least a century, many in the social conservative wing of the Republican big tent are denouncing McCain. Colorado’s own James Dobson stamped his little feet and said that he wouldn’t vote for McCain, because he’s “...convinced Senator McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are.”

He’s a closet librul, folks. Watch out he doesn’t give your daughters abortions or your sons The Gay.

What this apparently means is that the religious wing of right wing, which has enjoyed the fawning flirtations of every Republican nominee in recent memory, is finding itself without a suitor—and prom night is coming up soon.

It’s only going to get nuttier from here, folks. Strap in tight, and keep your hands inside the car at all times.

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