You'll have to forgive me for using such a lethal metaphor in that title, but I did not actually come up with the comparison myself -- that dubious honor goes to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. One month after he ended his own presidential bid, Graham addressed the question of which GOP frontrunner he could support, in pretty graphic fashion: "If you nominate Trump and Cruz I think you get the same outcome. Whether it's death by being shot or poisoning, does it really matter?"

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It's time to play the "predict the results" game again, folks. Today's primaries and caucuses weren't getting all that much attention as it was, and now with the Brussels bombing tragedy, they are going to get even less attention. But we've got to remain focused, so let's concentrate on the two parties' races for the presidential nominations, once again.

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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.

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That's a pretty ambitious subtitle, but we're not going to get to the deconstruction project until the talking points, we should warn everyone up front. And we could never hope to deconstruct all of the GOP's absurdities in one column, so we'll be focusing just on their all-over-the-map reasoning on why they're not going to do their constitutional jobs in the Senate on President Obama's Supreme Court nomination. So we'll have all that to look forward to. For now, let's quickly review the week just to see where things stand.

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George Orwell would be proud of Senate Republicans. Or maybe he wouldn't be "proud," but he certainly wouldn't be surprised. This is because he coined the word "doublethink," which is precisely what these Republicans are now revealing to the world. In fact, the Republican position is fast becoming "triplethink," an even more jaw-dropping feat of mental contortion.

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Although at the present time it's kind of hard to believe, there is a faction of the Republican Party which looks towards the future and sees some very problematic demographic shifts awaiting it. These forward-looking types tried to educate the rest of their party after they got shellacked in the 2012 presidential race, dissecting the festering corpse of Mitt Romney's campaign in an autopsy, and then issuing a post-mortem document pleading Republicans to begin instituting some basic changes. Mostly, these changes can be boiled down to: "Don't badmouth minorities so blatantly, because if you do so it is very hard to convince them to vote Republican." Also pointed out was the fact that young Americans are much more inclusive than the Republican Party as a whole, and losing an entire generation of voters is going to hurt for decades to come.

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Since we're all going to be busy tonight watching the next round of election returns come in, I'm not even going to attempt any political analysis today. Everything might change in a couple of hours, so why bother? Instead, I'm going to just toss out a wonky diversion for everyone to contemplate while we wait for West Podunk County to get its act together and get the damn numbers in to election central.

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It's time to play "guess the primary results" once again, boys and girls! Before we get to confidently (or not-so-confidently, in some cases) predicting tomorrow night's results, I have to first update my record from the last time around.

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Another week of presidential primary season has slouched by, which means we personally have been watching way too many debates and staying up way too late watching election results come in, once again. Well, actually, that last one was really just a taunt, since living on the Left Coast means we don't have to stay up nearly as late to find out what happened in Hawai'i as everyone to our east. Heh. Every once in a while, being three hours behind works to our advantage!

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The Republican presidential candidates are about to debate again, which is always entertaining for Democrats to watch (in horrified fashion, of course). The current state of the Republican race is that it has reached the point where loud voices are beginning to demand that both Marco Rubio and (to a lesser extent, at least so far) John Kasich bow out of the race. The logic is persuasive, to all but the candidates' inner circles: "You can't win the nomination, and your continued presence in the race is preventing our best shot at dethroning Donald Trump, so for the good of the party you should drop out." Look for this to be the one thing Trump and Ted Cruz agree on, tonight -- that Rubio and Kasich should just pack it up and go home. But while this argument is being made on the Republican side, for Democrats the argument just isn't going to be valid. Because the one thing Hillary Clinton cannot do is to call on Bernie Sanders to exit the race.

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