Fiorina’s pitch is that, as a woman, she can be mean to Hillary Clinton in a way that male GOP candidates cannot be, which suggests to me that she has not been paying attention to the GOP’s spiral into batshit misogyny. Neither of them has ever been elected to anything before, and neither of them are likely to be elected to anything any time soon. There are two ways to get elected president as your first elective office:
1. Put Richmond to the sword, and;
2. Successfully invade France.
Fiorina has not done either of those things, and neither has Carson. Unless a sad general with tear-stained cheeks has knelt before you and offered you his sword, you are not going to just waltz into the Oval Office on your first stab at getting elected to something. Carly Fiorina can turn all the computer companies she likes into smoking ruins, but it’s just not going to happen. And no matter how many brains Carson steals from the graveyard to assemble his perfect conservative monster, it’s not happening for him either.
In addition to demonstrating some degree of electoral competence by getting elected to some sort of starter office, the American electorate also prefers that their candidates not be complete assholes. There’s a certain base threshold of likeability that you have to cross. Did you ever apply for a job you didn’t get, and have to interact with some unpleasant jackass from HR? That’s basically Carly Fiorina. She’s every awful business person you ever met, condensed down into a super-dense collapsar of unlikeableness. She’s all of Mitt Romney’s problems polished to a high sheen, minus his baseline ability to at least get elected to something. Imagine, if you will, a Mitt Romney campaign in which ALL he did was insult Hillary Clinton, and talk about his ability to grind once prosperous companies into toxic dust. That’s good old Carly.
Fiorina is fine if you want inept off-message embittered grumbling, but your genuine crazy, you want Ben Carson. Remember that movie where Alec Baldwin played a know-it-all arrogant asshole doctor with delusions of godhood? That’s basically Ben Carson. He’s a cross between Ludwig von Mises, Victor Frankenstein, and Blacula. Indeed, not since the trailer for Blacula has there been such over-the-top crazy as Crazy Ben’s Crazy announcement video. There’s crazy lightning (maybe Carson can control the weather? I don’t know), a majestic CGI bridge to nowhere that looks like an out-take from True Lies, a dude with a soul patch, a steampunk toddler… It’s a stockfootagepalooza that looks like a powerpoint for some tech IPO with a bunch of blather about how our government sucks overdubbed onto it. Remember that scene in Blacula where the sun make him freak out? Obama is Ben Carson’s sun. He thinks Obama care is the worst thing since slavery, and that Obama is going to declare martial law and cancel the 2016 election. If he does, that would at least spare Carson some humiliation in the primaries.
While Ben Carson was controlling lightning with his mind, and Carly Fiorina was burning through defective HP hard drives at a prodigious rate trying to upload a campaign video that no one will watch, jocular gravy spokesman and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee announced that he, too, was running, at a gala event at the George “Goober” Lindsay Auditorium in Jasper, Alabama. The show was sponsored by Down South Brand Imitation Gravy Product (a division of Koch Industrial Petrochemicals), for which Huckabee is a spokesman. Huckabee, an old song and dance man best known before his political career for playing Gomer in the stage production of Gomer Pyle, gave a speech about how gay marriage is ruining America, and then sang his trademark number “Impossible Dream,” while the Down South Gravy Dancers pranced around, squirting viscous imitation gravy from suggestively large gravy boats. He closed, as he usually does, with “Long Way To Go,” from the Broadway production of “Smokey And The Bandit: The Musical,” while the Down Home Gravy Dancers, now clad in the tiniest of leather thongs, portrayed Bandit’s escape from Smokey via interpretive dance. It was perhaps the most homoerotic presidential campaign announcement since that thing Santorum did with those Greco-Roman wrestlers back in 2011.
The Iowa caucuses are a mere 32 weeks away. The presidential election is 76 weeks from now.
