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Boy, it isn't every day you get to write a headline like that! But those are the kinds of feelings Ted Cruz seems to bring out in everyone -- left, right, and center.
I thought the subject of how the war against the Islamic State is going in Iraq was worth an update today, because the Iraqi forces are on the brink of reclaiming a pretty impressive swath of the map. I should mention up front that for the purposes of this article, I'm going to largely ignore how the war is progressing in Syria, for no other reason than to keep things focused.
That really should be "Copulating Rodents, Batman!" for full effect. Or it should just come right out and use the original term being euphemized. But somehow we couldn't quite bring ourselves to use either one of those in our title today.
You'll have to excuse me sounding a little loopy, but we all tend to get that way in the brutal middle slog of the primary season. Around 30 states have voted on both sides, with no clear national winners yet. The delegate-counting has reached a frenzy, and you'd think every state would count at this point. The pollsters, however, obviously do not think this. I'll get to all of that in a moment, however, as the first thing I need to do is update my record.
No matter what the next primary election results show tomorrow night, one thing seems to be certain: we are in for a long slog of delegate-counting before either party's nominee is crowned. On the Republican side, this is leading to more and more desperation from the party's bigwigs, as they clutch at the thin straw of somehow yanking the nomination away from Donald Trump at their convention. All of this is going to take time to play out, but we're just going to leapfrog over it all for now and assume for the purpose of this conversation that Trump does emerge victorious as the Republican Party presidential nominee. Whether a third-party conservative challenge emerges or not, this means the next big question has to be who Trump is going to pick as his running mate. So buckle your seatbelts, because this is likely going to be just as bumpy a ride as the rest of the GOP nomination process has so far been.
It's been a wild and crazy week -- so much so, in fact, that we're going to start with a quote we never thought would become appropriate to use in a column about politics. It's from the movie Taken, where Liam Neeson's character utters the classic line: "Now's not the time for dick-measuring."
That title, of course, refers to the most recent Republican debate, where in a fit of frustration the caption writers at CNN just gave up and ran "Unintelligible yelling" as the caption. Yep, that about sums it up, doesn't it?
For those readers who weren't alive (or old enough) to experience the 1960s, this week we had somewhat of a history lesson, packaged as a Democratic debate. Now, part of why this happened is that the Democratic presidential campaign has entered into a "convince the minority voters" phase, since the upcoming two states to vote have a lot of Latino (Nevada) and African-American (South Carolina) voters. So there was quite a bit of attention spent on the Civil Rights era, which will continue right up to Super Tuesday, at the very least. We keep waiting for Bernie Sanders (or a moderator, for that matter) to bring up the term "Goldwater Girl" in a Hillary Clinton question, and last night would have been a dandy opportunity. But PBS held a much more "polite" debate, meaning lots of softball questions and ignoring any unseemly discomfort for the candidates (at least, for the most part).
That headline is a joke only bridge players will get, so our apologies to everyone else. It refers, of course, to last night's Republican presidential debate, which Donald Trump refused to participate in. But even with no Trump on the stage last night, he seems to have (once again) proved that political gravity simply doesn't apply to him. In fact, we have serious doubts that we'll see Trump at any future debates -- after all, if he can blow them off with impunity, why would he subject himself to them in the first place?
Honestly, how often is it that you get to write such a great headline? In a week that also included a Sarah Palin speech that dominated the news cycle (to say nothing of the late-night comic cycle), writing such snarky headlines is just icing on the cake, really. Good times... yes, good times indeed for Democrats watching the horrorshow that is the Republican presidential nomination process.