Iowa Caucases, And Reforms

Holy underwear!  Mitt Romney has just won the Iowa Caucasians, er, I mean, Caucuses, by eight votes!

I demand a recount! (Hee, hee!)

Bachmann's out.(Apparently, God was just kidding when he told her to run.)  Rick Perry is on life support.  Newt Gingrich is bitching like the limbless Black Night in Monty Python's "The Holy Grail."  It's a beautiful thing.

The two finalists?  You have Obamacare, Jr, Mitt "Holy Underwear" Romney, and the only legislator to have homosexual ass-juice named after him.

Oh, for those of you who actually DON'T watch Jon Stewart, let me teach you about the meaning of the word, "Santorum."  It began in 1996 when Rick Santorum first won election to the Senate, and garnered ire from gay activists everywhere as he fervently preached that he would, given the chance, repeal all gay marriage.  Okay, fine.  Then, around the time of 2001, with the "No Child Left Behind" bill pending (yeah, how'd that one work out for us?), Santorum was the guy who added an amendment to require the teaching of Intelligent Design.  Maybe I've got my chronology of events wrong, but it was way back then that I became aware that the gay & lesbian community had had enough of this clown, and engaged in the best act of name-calling since the "Pink Lady," Helen Gehegan-Douglas, tagged Richard Nixon as "Tricky Dick."

You see, that gross combination of cum, anal lube and well-churned shit that stains the sheets after two men have enjoyed an intimate night together, officially has a name -- and has for over a decade, now.  It's called "santorum," named after you-know-who!  And it's his unflinching religious-right-wing nonsense that earned him the title, and forever wrote him into the anals... excuse me, the annals, of history.

So Iowa has given us Mr. Shit, and Mr. Underwear.  Put them together and you have... well, you know.

Really, I'm driving towards a serious point with all this silly-talk.  Because Iowa has given us one brown-nose, and one brown-ass, and that makes me wonder:

WHY THE FUCK SHOULD IOWA HAVE ALL THE FUN?!

Or New Hampshire for that matter?  Why do these tiny little states, have such a big say?  Why does Iowa, which ranks 30th in population size, and New Hampshire, with only seven states with fewer people (including Alaska, Delaware, and Hawaii), get such a big say-so?  By the time the primaries reach states like Wisconsin, all but one or two candidates have dropped out!  Until Barack Obama came along, I really never got to vote for my #1 choice as president, and the tracks were littered with the corpses of all those I never got the chance to vote for.  Paul Tsongas, Lamarr Alexander, Arlen Specter, Dick Gephardt... the list of candidates denied to me -- and indeed all of us -- goes on and on.  It seems so unfair.  And that's because it so fucking IS!

So, if we're to concede that these corn-munchers and cape-codders have too much say-so, what can we do to fix it?  What can we do to give the rest of us a taste of the trillion-dollar advertising bombardment that makes us sick to our stomachs, and the inability to go to the grocery store without being glad-handed by some no-name we've never heard of?

Well, we could have the primaries be a national affair done all at once.  Certainly we have the technology.  But this pretty much guarantees that the candidates will spend nearly all their time in California, and maybe a little bit in New York and Texas.  No, having states do primaries one at a time at least guarantees that some of us common folks get to meet the candidates themselves, and this makes just as much sense today as it did back in the days before jet-planes and the Internet meant that candidates had to campaign by shoe-leather and soap-box.

So how about moving everything up?  Maybe we could have a January Bonanza?  A super-string of Super Tuesdays?  Again, this fails.  Because even with primary elections taking place at least as frequently as football games (and with just as much hype) you still have the front-running states having too much say, and the later-running states having masses of people eager and willing to vote for a candidate who (damn it all!) drops out just before primary day arrives.  It solves nothing.

So what are we to do?  It seems we have a choice of evils.  Let two or three states have too much power, or let two or three OTHER states have too much power.  What's a concerned voter to do?

Here's my solution:  LOTTERY!  Instead of Iowa and New Hampshire getting first crack EVERY SINGLE TIME, why don't we cycle the order of primaries for each state every time there's a presidential election?  We put a bunch of numbers in a basket, start it tumbling, turn on the vacuum cleaner, and the order that each  state's number rolls out (with each state's number being the order in which it joined the union, for example Wisconsin, the 30th state admitted, would be #30) is the order of state primaries.  So, every once in awhile, a state like Michigan, which has always been near-last, might get to be first!  And they'll get a taste of the mind-numbing responsibility of being unqualified judges of who gets to lead the nation.

Not perfect, no.  But way better than the stupid shit we currently have where Iowa always picks the person who seldom is the candidate, usually isn't qualified, and even less often the president.  I say, give it some thought!

Eric