Stupor Tuesday

Since November 2004 I've done a fairly good job ignoring political coverage on the cable news channels, but last night I weakened again. From 7:00-9:00 and 10:00-12:00, I was flipping between MSNBC and CNN to get the latest updates on the primaries. From 9-10 pm, I took a break to watch reruns of "The Rifleman" on Encore Westerns, which was definitely time better spent.

At one point, since both CNN and MSNBC were in commercial breaks, I turned on Fox News for a few minutes. Just my luck, the analyst for FNC was Karl Rove, the nastiest hermaphrodite ever to contaminate the civilized world with his presence. I was able to stomach about 45 seconds of Karl's wisdom before it became purgative.

By now, everybody knows that Stupor Tuesday was a huge anticlimax and settled nothing. Nobody threw a knockout punch, and nobody took one. Hillary and Barack will continue their waltz for at least a few more weeks, maybe into the summer. Huckabuck did well in cracker country, and won states that Willard really needed to buff his cred as The Next Reagan. The best story of the evening was the West Virginia convention, where The Huck and Walnuts joined hands to put a "doubleteam crackback Chinese gangfok" on Willard.

As Chris Matthews pointed out again and again, most of the Walnuts wins came in blue states that are not likely to go Repub in November. His share of the vote among Repubs identifying themselves as "Conservative to the brink of psychosis" is a tiny sliver, but he gets nearly all of the "A little conservative, but not carried away with it" voters.

The prevailing opinion among the RWers on the news shows last night was that Walnuts will need to sell himself to the psychoRepubs by making a bunch of promises about what he will and won't do as The Prez. If he'll utterly prostitute himself before them, they might hold their noses and vote for him, maybe. Plus, he needs to select a running mate that meets their criteria.

I don't have any doubts that Walnuts is capable of sucking up to the Limbaugh branch of the R party; he's been doing it enthusiastically since 2001. It seems like the risk he runs by pandering to the farout right is that he still wouldn't win enough of their hearts and minds for November, but could alienate his supporters in the middle of the road. I want to see how he handles that dilemma.

Added 11:06 pm on 02/12/08: In reply to the comment, I wish I could truthfully claim to have invented the "Walnuts" designation, but actually, I stole it from Wonkette.com. Thanks for reading.