i hate it when madbrian makes me actually write something longer than a link intro

but since he asked...

what are your thoughts on the gop field?

i try not to think about it. it's still very early to me and my guy is still huntsman. i am a romantic optimist and i believe that the gop will realize that the only path to the white house lies with the independent vote that they ceded to barry in ought-eight (perhaps they listened to some numbnuts, dinglesh*ts, dumbf*ck poster who shall remain nameless who maintained that they could run francis the talking mule and win because the country was strill racist enough never to elect a kenyan muslim from indonesia with half a brain who was in fact a walking cyberpuppet created in a laboratory by bill ayers - a laboratory that he subsequntly blew up killing 7 innocent lab assistants). but if anyone has the ability to lose an election like this one it's the gop. for a by contestant breakdown, i copy and paste from a blog entry of mine from back on 6.16 (do forgive the caps)...

Mitt Romney - Mitt's had more positions than Sasha Grey. He's a manufactured candidate whose slick rich-boy ways alienate people and who cannot connect. He's the front-runner by default solely due to the weakness of the current bunch.

Michele Bachmann - She nuts. Pure and simple. Sarah Palin was and is a moron, but Michele's batsh*t crazy. If she's anywhere near the GOP ticket it guarantees Barry the independent vote he needs to win.

Tim Pawlenty - T-Paw's weaker than Superman wearing kryptonite
underwear and he's running a schizophrenic campaign of say one thing and then pretend he didn't because he wants so badly to be liked. Oh and there's that whole 5% growth for a decade insanity. C'mon. Again, charisma challenged.

Newt Gingrich - Newtie's a bomb thrower with a quarter million dollar bill at Tiffany and Co. And a wife who thinks that together they know better than everyone else. While ya need a healthy ego to win, Newt's got overkill. Add in the institutional negatives against him and his natural abrasiveness and you've got a candidate who will make Barry look like Reagan.

Herman Cain - Deep dish. Say no more. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. With no experience in governing he'll get destroyed as inexperienced. Plus loyalty tests for your own choices? Brill, Hermie, just Brill!

Ron Paul - Seriously? Do I need to actually cover this one? If you need that, you really ought to just stop following politics.

Allen West - Who?

Rick Santorum - Google Santorum and get back to me. Yeah, you get it now. Thanks for playing, Senator Man on Dog.

Gary Johnson - I will dub him candidate Gary U.S. Bonds from now on in an homage to a time when Chris Berman was funny.

Rick Perry - Dude's unpopular in Texas. In f*cking Texas! If you can't even get decent ratings as a Republican in Texas you need to hang that sh*t up.

Sarah Palin - She ain't running and even if she did it would be as a side-show. Well, she's already a side-show. Like the bearded lady or the sword swallower or the fire-eater or Joe Biden.

Chris Christie - Her has enough sense to stay as far as possible away from this, finish his work in Jersey and see if he can get on as Veep in 2016 with the incumbent Republican POTUS.

Marco Rubio - Not gonna happen. He's gonna finish his term.

Jeb Bush - He knows the country's not electing another Bush for a generation. For which he gives Dubya unconscionably hard fouls during pick-up basketball games in Kennebunkport.

the debt crisis?

everybody's playing more politics with this than an alderman appointment at tammany hall. nobody's gonna get what they want. everybody's gonna demonize the other side. neither side has any room at all to wiggle and they're both busy playing chicken and seeing how they can blame the other side to bother trying to find any real solutions. to start with, up the ss age and means-test it. close every single loophole that exists on incomes over $1.5 million and set a flat tax of 25% for them. lower the corporate tax rate to 20% and again close the loopholes. somebody do the math and see where that gets us. oh, and if they agree to that, raise the debt limit for a year so we can do this again next year. right before the election.

the newscorp scandal?

they got caught. let's not pretend that this hasn't been going on everywhere for years. but they got caught and they have the fortune now misfortune of being newscorp and hated by the majority of media organizations around the world so they are gonna take a bath in this. in the end, rupert will come out bloodied but unbroken. remember fitzmas, everybody? i think the bubbly is still waiting to be cracked on that one. the lesson? make sure everyone gets paid. everytime. ya wanna break the law, you can't really do it on the cheap and screw people over. what they did with that kid's phone was epically f*cked up, but rupert didn't do that nor did his editor. it porves that journalists are generally swine.

miss me? no? f*ck off.

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Updated On: 7/19/11 at 04:35 PM

Hi, papa.

So refreshing to hear from a right-leaning thinker who actually, you know, thinks.

Papa, do you think that Romney, were he to get through the "real Republican" trials of the primaries, would then be able to use the media obsession with seeing him as a "moderate, business leader" to effectively take the independent way in the manner you think would work for Huntsman?

Certainly he seems, slick, in all the ways that you describe and he has never seemed like the same "serious candidate" everyone always says he is.
But I tend to think that the "flip-flop" narrative, while usually problematic to the parties, is precisely what the "independents" do on the issues. So Romney could flip again, say he was doing "what needed to be done" and "engaging issue by issue" and maybe win them over?

Of course, he has that horrible, manufactured look to get over as well.

Are there no other legit dark horses out there, like an Arkansas governor type?

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Not only do we get papa, but it brought smarty-penguin out of the woodwork!

Papa must have failed critical thinking 101. Each of those candidates has much more experience than the current Teleprompter Reader that pretends to be President.

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Papa must have failed critical thinking 101. Each of those candidates has much more experience than the current Teleprompter Reader that pretends to be President

You might want to brush up on your own critical thinking skills Goth.

Which of the GOP candidates has actually been President? The answer of course is NONE. So, in the 2012 race, Obama will have more experience than any of them?

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Updated On: 7/21/11 at 05:32 PM

FYI, the items in your list aren't parallel, which--validity aside--makes your argument really hard to follow.

I was using the term extremely loosely. The way Goth uses the truth.

JAG, lay down your crackpipe and pick up a newspaper. Obama makes Jimmy Carter look good. Which part of the following don't you understand:

Goth, I can keep my crackpipe fired up...and still best you.

Changing the subject doesn't win the argument. You were criticizing Papa's critical thinking skills, and used the GOP candidates experience as an example as to why they should be considered better candidates than Obama. When it was pointed out to you that Obama will have been President for nearly 4 years by the time the elections roll around and have more experience than ANY of the candidates, you decide to pull a complete non-sequitur and come up with a list of what you perceive to be Obama's failures. Which still doesn't address your original conceit that the current list of candidates are more experienced than Obama, when they clearly aren't.

Nice try...but...epic fail.

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Sweet sh*t.

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You are missed Papa.

I actually kind of like John Huntsman - but of course he is not electable on the right.

"the GOP ticket might actually contain a loon like Bachmann or Perry"

I have no problem with that.