politics

Presidential campaigns, like syphilis, proceed in stages. You have the primaries, where a variety of dysfunctional clowns jostle with each other for the fickle favor of Iowa’s pig-men and New Hampshire’s maple miners, and march from state to state in a colorful pander-circus. Eventually, though, candidates start dropping out in various degrees of misery and humiliation, and one of the candidates rounds up enough pig-men and hill-folk and rodeo-clowns to secure the nomination. Then, you enter the next stage, where the ex-candidates, fetid in loser-stink, endorse the presumptive nominee with various degrees of faux-enthusiasm. Often, this involves some sort of half-assed speech in a hotel ball room, and some awkward hand-shaking between the endorsing loser and the smarmy winner. This is where we are now, with listless also-rans glumly pretending to rally around America’s least-beloved millionaire man-bot. Dick Santorum dropped out last month, and this past week he completed the failure-ritual by endorsing his former rival. Continue reading →