Aquarian Weekly 2/13/08
REALITY CHECK

GOODBYE SUPER TUESDAY
Romney Bails/Madam Shoo-In & Master Barack Draw

After nearly half the country's states have weighed in on the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, only one party has managed to rubber-stamp a presumptive nominee, John McCain, whose right-wing obstinacy and an abject rejection from the south has all-but gained him a seat on the big ride. Next door, McCain's purported Secret Weapon, Mike Huckabee, swept through the Bible Belt and mercifully put the booby-prize, lesser-of-three-evils, flip-flop mess of a Romney campaign out of its misery. Meanwhile, the Democrats gear up for delegate deadlock and an ugly late-August convention battle in Denver.

With 2025 delegates needed for nomination, and the current trend of virtual splits in state wins and proportional delegate counts spread evenly, there are simply not enough primaries or caucuses left to allow Democratic voters to decide a candidate. According to party rules, this means Super Delegates or VIP's -- DNC officials, congressional Democrats, party fossils, and a confusing host of grass roots activists -- will rumble inside something called the Pepsi Center to anoint what could be the next president of the United States.

Under this unconscionably stupid system, forty percent of the delegate force rests in the beer-spit vagaries of 769 shady, back-scratching fat cats, which could, once and for all, sufficiently expose the corruption, cruelty, and down-right scamming of a two-party system that should have been abolished a century ago.

Time to add a new contestant to the time-honored axiom about things best not seen made: sausages, laws, and now, national party nominees.

The ultimate fates of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton will inevitably reside in this suspect exercise, much to the soon-to-be chagrin of a record number of voters, both new and old, who have stormed the polls for their candidates.

Most have stormed for Barack Obama, the first legitimate insurgent national party candidate since George McGovern. Backed by gusts of weirdly skewered polls (Zogby not only had him leading in every primary, but also "American Idol" and a perplexing Best Picture pool for the Oscars), showered with plaudits from slobbering press lackey's (most of these cable news' guys practically weep whenever a state is called for Hillary Clinton), an African American backlash (to the tune of a whopping 80 percent), and millions of motivated young voters (shattering turn-out records everywhere), Obama rolls on unhampered by party arrogance.

The reasons vary: Obama is new, damned good, but mostly, he ain't a Clinton; otherwise there was more than a fair chance he'd have been tossed into the scrapheap long before New Hampshire ala Gary Hart or Howard Dean.

Most important of all, Master Barack currently has more money than any presidential candidate in history, earning $32 million in January alone, most of it coming from the Internet in a staggering grass-roots windfall; a pipeline of funds tripling the dwindling Clinton campaign coffers, which needed a $5 mil loan from its candidate just to make it through Super Tuesday. It was a difficult spin for campaign head, Mark Penn, who told the Washington Post that the once-lauded money maverick, Terry McAuliffe had been dismissed on assignment to Hollywood Boulevard with tambourine and tattered hat in hand.

In the face of all of it, the Clinton Camp claimed victory on Super Tuesday based on lowered expectations and this increasingly redolent idea that she is suddenly the underdog, an act of deceit only exceeded by their candidate's goofy claim she won a Florida primary that was not contested by any candidate, including her, and didn't even count.

In quick response, The Obamians pointed to the new infusion of John Edwards' white-male votes in Georgia, stealing Connecticut, and a sweep of mid-west caucuses, all of it hollow victories in the shadow of the big-state stomping by Clinton in California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, despite Kennedy/Oprah muscle.

The final question for Democrats may be what all this "Change Agent", New era", "Yes, we can", spiritually-uplifting Obama miasma will mean in August when the insiders begin to buckle under the pressure of the Clinton Machine. Over a decade of favors rendered, deals struck, and cushy insider jobs will be on the line in Colorado. How do you think these Super Delegates get so fucking super; Excalibur emerging from a mystic lake?

However, there is always the anti-Clinton wing of this sleaze-bazaar raising up to slap a seal of approval on the new kid just to take down Madam Shoo-In and her nauseating Billary dynasty.

No matter how it's sliced, a sweeter summer treat for political junkies does not exist. When the bottom feeding is finished, it will make what happened in 2000 at the tip of the Florida peninsula look like your eighth grade civics class.

You want to make a difference this November on the Democratic side? You best find out the identities of these power-broking fuckers and come with serious cash donations, promises of eased government regulations, or six-figure job offers.

Don't forget to identify your candidate: Senator Rodham's all-woman, Latino-supported, lower-income, entrenched entitlement lifers, or Master Barack's youth-movement, black-centric, upper-middle class, highly-educated liberals.

On the other side of the fence, many Republicans, as divided and confused as their opponents, prepare to hold their noses and become belated McCainiacs. Humiliated and drained of millions of his own fortune, Mitt Romney, everyone's favorite counterfeit conservative, used his long-awaited C-PAC speech to declare himself a suspended dead man in the grand tradition of the 1960 Goldwater or 1976 Reagan bow-outs.

Romney's hackneyed "You'll be sorry" campaign eulogy in the holy name of ideological purity was so patently disingenuous it had the editorial department of the Wall Street Journal comparing it to the defiant Nuremburg babbling of Hermann Goering.

It was a bitter end to a solid five months of uninterrupted conservatism for Romney, who would just as soon become a Scientologist/PETA/NRA/Butthole Surfer next time around if it can gain him the White House. But you could hardly blame him. Finding a conservative who can get votes these days is like picking out a heterosexual designer in "Project Runway".

Fred Thompson and Ron Paul hardly set the political world aflame, Rudy Giuliani's tough-guy routine garnered only one more delegate than either of my cats, and now Romney, with an arms-length liberal record of pro-gay rights, pro-choice, et al, takes his steel testicles and slumps off into the sunset praying the Democrats obliterate the GOP this fall so he can be its savior four years hence.

Draping himself in rhetorical patriotic compost, the Billion Dollar Loser did his best to play martyr for a war-torn country in need of unity. Apparently not since Franklin Pierce's doomed Kansas-Nebraska Act hastened the confederacy, has quitting politics been such a noble act of national security.

The only remaining question for McCain and the party is what to do with Huckabee, who has whipped the religious fanatic base into what Doctor Hunter S. Thompson once described as "a Jesus-based rage" and can now hold up the south as a socio-fascist firewall for anyone harboring hopes of winning the White House from the Right.

McCain predominantly carried Democratic states (New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts) on Super Tuesday, and will have some work to do to secure the party's base, which he is sure to confront in the coming weeks -- the prospect of which has his staffers in mid-cringe. The last time McCain sucked up to the Right he was seen wearing a tunic at Bob Jones University baptizing the whores of Babylon with a used Strom Thurman staff.

Of course the old man could always tell these righteous has-beens to take a hike and continue to seduce the center/independent vote and pray to his chosen deity the Clintons are left standing come fall.

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