Welcome to the 200th Friday Talking Points column!

Because of this momentous occasion, we are going to present a special column today which takes a look backwards at this column's history. Because of this, the normal weekly Friday Talking Points and the awards we normally hand out will all get pre-empted. So if you're looking for an update on what is going on in the political world, you'll have to wait until next week, sorry about that. And if this sort of retrospective doesn't appeal to you, well, there's a whole internet out there waiting, I'm sure there's something better for you to read, somewhere else.

But before we even get to our review, we do have one piece of business which cannot wait, so we will quickly address it and move on. Washington state has a caucus tomorrow, although you'd barely know it from the national news media. This is due to two related reasons: Washington is on the West Coast, which is far, far away from the media centers of New York and Washington, D.C.; and many so-called "journalists" are barely even aware the state exists. Polling is likewise thin and not very prominent in the media.

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Normally, I don't write two of these "lightweight" articles in a row, so you'll have to excuse me for doing so today (following yesterday's amusing look backwards through twentieth-century American history). But I do have what I consider a valid excuse for this slacking off: I am spending a lot of time today (and tonight, and tomorrow) preparing.... (cue drumroll)... the 200th Volume of the "Friday Talking Points" column. Woo hoo! Since we're about to get picky about grammar here today, I can finally admit that the enumeration should really be identified as the "Issue" rather than "Volume," and had I been on top of such details from the beginning, I could have more conventionally marked the passage of the column's yearly anniversary (September 14) by restarting the odometer each year ("Volume 5, Issue 1" for instance). Since I wasn't that foresighted, we are where we are... one day away from watching that odometer turn over double-zeroes for only the second time.

But enough of this preliminary blather and shameless self-promotion. Let's move along to our pet grammatical peeve of the day. One wonders, when writing that previous sentence, whether that should be "grammatic" or "grammatical," but one is going to trust one's gut feeling on this matter, hope one's gut is correct, and press on. Ahem.

We are entering a phase of the Republican nominating process where the actual delegate counts are garnering more and more press attention. Because of this, the wonky details of the contests themselves -- be they caucus or primary -- are being scrutinized more closely than they (so far) have been.

Which brings us to our point: the phrase "winner take all" is just wrong. Many news and polling organizations have begun using this phrase to differentiate states which award all their delegates in one bloc to the winner of the state vote from states which apportion their delegates proportionally. But the phrase is seriously lacking an "s" in there, somewhere.

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[Note: This article is about a bit of sexism from America's past. It will quote sexist passages from days of yore, and deals with a subject that cannot escape the label of sexism. I say this up front, as a warning to readers, but it really is (and was) all in fun, so I hope most of you will take this in the spirit it is being offered.]

Leap Day has been around for over 2,000 years. At some point -- possibly as far back as Medieval times -- a European tradition emerged for this once-every-four-years event: it was the one day when women could propose marriage to men. In America, this got confused and conflated with Sadie Hawkins Day, which actually had its origins in the Lil' Abner comic strip (the original of which ran in November, not February). You can read about this long Leap Day tradition elsewhere, if you're interested in the larger history of the day.

But there's another Leap Day tradition in America, from a suburban Chicago city. Aurora, Illinois used to be famous for its Leap Day fun, when the unmarried women took over the town and arrested all the unmarried men for the "crime" of being a bachelor. Yes, you read that right.

The town's takeover was an orderly one, complete with an election for the one-day chance of any eligible woman to be mayor, police chief, or fire chief. Any single woman who didn't win the election for the top jobs still had the chance to participate, as police officers and doing other city jobs. Eligible men were arrested all day long, dragged to jail, and forced to pay a fine before they were let loose.

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It's that time once again, kiddies, when we gather 'round the virtual fireplace and throw a few darts at the wall to predict the outcome of today's Republican primary races. Feel free to join us here tonight as we sit back and watch the results come in!

First, let's review where we are in the "calling the winners" sweepstakes. Last to vote was Maine, which I am proud to say I called 3-for-3 correct. Woo hoo! I'd also like to publicly thank the ChrisWeigant.com Maine "man on the ground" (our "Maine man," in other words...) [...pause for audience to groan...] for assisting me with this pick, as (all kidding aside) his advice was spot-on.

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While everyone knew that the Republican primary candidates would all be displaying plenty of "Obama Derangement Syndrome" during the campaign, this week the rhetoric took a bizarre tangent which might be called "Apology Derangement Syndrome." The concept is not only laughable, it is easy to prove what rampant and stinking hypocrisy those espousing it are truly guilty of displaying.

First, the facts of this tempest in a teacup (at the Mad Hatter Tea Party which the GOP primary process has devolved into). In Afghanistan, a Koran was burned in a trash-burning pit. Details are sketchy, but at least one Koran (possibly others, possibly other Islamic religious books as well) was at least partially burned. Details have not been forthcoming from the military, but apparently someone in charge of the library for Afghani prisoners decided to take these books away from the prisoners, possibly because the prisoners were breaking the rules by either communicating (by writing in them) or spreading jihadi slogans. Whatever the reason, the person responsible ordered that the books be disposed of. Trash is commonly burned on the base, and nobody apparently thought twice about tossing the books on the "burn pile." When the people doing the actual trash-burning threw them on the fire, Afghan workers noticed and put a stop to it. Those are the facts, such as they are. The U.S. military is investigating the incident, so perhaps more solid details will emerge in the future.

President Barack Obama then did what any United States president would do in such a situation: he apologized to Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan.

The Republican candidates (who are not named "Ron Paul") saw this as a political hot button, and immediately denounced Obama's apology. Newt Gingrich was pithiest, calling Obama an "appeaser" and stating "It is Hamid Karzai who owes the American people an apology, not the other way around."

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"When the going gets weird," Hunter S. Thompson famously said, "the weird turn pro."

This quote has been running through my head all week. It's been such a weird week, in fact, that I even wrote a column praising a Mitt Romney campaign ad. Weirdness abounds, in other words. Well, I was really just wonkily praising the cars in the ad, but still....

Speaking of weirdness, we had what could be the final Republican presidential debate. In it, the three top Republican candidates explained how they were going to -- simultaneously, mind you -- both bring down the cost of gasoline and bomb Iran. This qualifies not just as weird but downright bizarre. I mean, how stupid do they think the American public is? Well, I suppose it's just the Republican primary electorate, but even so....

When the going gets weird, the weird run for president, apparently.

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A tectonic shift is in process in American politics, and while individual incidents occasionally draw attention, the larger continental drift is usually not in focus. Because Democrats have started winning the so-called "culture wars."

The culture wars (at least, the modern incantation of them) began roughly in the 1980s, with the rise of the Religious Right (or the Moral Majority, as they liked to call themselves back then). Since then, sometimes the battles are fought out in the open, and sometimes there is a lull in the fighting; but over and over again Republicans (mostly successfully) used "wedge issues" to divide the Democratic rank-and-file, and thereby win elections.

"Culture war" is a polite way of saying "war over sex," of course. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s generated a backlash, to put it another way, and we began calling this backlash the "culture wars." But all of these issues had one common thread -- sex. Gays were a big target. So is abortion. And now, increasingly, so is contraception.

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Watch out!
You might get what you're after.
-- Talking Heads, "Burning Down The House"

You might not know it from the extended bouts of hair-pulling-and-garment-rending anguish emanating from the Republican Party establishment these days (see: any recent GOP commentary by a party elder or deep thinker which uses the phrase "brokered convention"), but the Republican Party is getting exactly what they asked for. Not just asked for, in fact, but specifically planned on.

Ever since the 2008 presidential primary season, the Republican Party as a whole came down with a serious case of Democrat envy. The GOP took a look at their own primary process, and then they took a look at what had gone on between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and they decided they liked the Democratic plan better. Obama hadn't been destroyed by the months-long primary fight (as many at the time predicted), he was in fact toughened up by the experience and a better candidate when the general election started -- as a direct result of the long primary calendar. This is the root cause of the Republicans' envy.

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Well, OK, not really. But it did make for a good headline, didn't it?

Ahem.

Mitt Romney is making a few waves with a new ad, reportedly running in Michigan, which is titled "Growing Up." This was a natural move for him to make, since he did indeed grow up in Michigan. But the focus from the media has so far been on the wrong car -- at least as far as I am concerned. The news story is that the car "present-day" Mitt is driving around what I assume is a Michigan neighborhood is either a "bailout car" or (even worse, in Michigan) not actually made in America. I leave these squabbles to others. I also offer up a warning: if you do not care about this ad, or cars, then I would advise you to just stop reading now.

What I personally noticed from Mitt's new ad were the cars at the very beginning and at the very end of the ad. Four years ago, I actually contacted the Romney campaign, after seeing him on Jay Leno's show. Mitt told the story that his kids had bought him (as a surprise) a 1962 Rambler American. This is a "family joke" sort of present, because Mitt's father was also the father of the Rambler (having run American Motors Corporation at the time).

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George Washington, celebrated today by federal holiday, was (of course) our first president. When he died, the phrase which spread the country as part of the myth-making around Washington was: "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen."

While this may -- as a direct result of a very successful mythmaking campaign -- be almost universally true today, it was not when the flesh-and-blood man (not the myth) held office as the new nation's first "Chief Magistrate" (as it was referred to back then). Yes, even Washington had his media critics.

This was due to the emergence of what I call "proto-parties" in American politics. The first two parties went by various different names (such things were fluid, and usually not even capitalized back then). Washington became the head of the Federalists. Their opponents were originally called "Anti-Federalists" but preferred to be called "Republicans," and are now historically known as "Democratic-Republicans" (mostly to differentiate between them and today's Republican Party, which are not the same party). As one partisan newspaper helpfully defined: "it is not a question now between federalism and anti-federalism, but between republicanism and antirepublicanism." Such hair-splitting was common, because the entire concept of a political party was a fluid and changing thing, back then. True political parties quite simply did not exist -- there was no central party committee or other group, there was no corporate presence of a national party like a "head office," and there was no communications network for the party to discuss the "party line" on any issue.

What did exist, instead, were newspapers. The partisan press, in essence, were the party structure. All newspapers in America were able to mail each other copies of their papers for free (due to a special postal exemption), and "copyright" was unheard of for newspapers back then -- they all freely copied articles or quotes from each other with nary a thought of payment. Because of this, the newspapers constituted the best communication network in the country -- and they used it to define what the parties stood for.

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