The (Santo)Rum Diary

Continuing to observe the ongoing meta-phenomenon of the refs trying to troubleshoot this latest-and-greatest phase of Not Mittery. This is getting to be nothing short of hilarious.

Today I got stuck with one of the company cars without a CD player, and because I live in a radio wasteland where all five stations are owned by the same faceless programming conglomerate, and they all blow, I flipped to NPR, always a sure cure for driving insomnia.

Anyhoo, the topic was how Romney was, pardon the expression, in deep Mitt in his home state of Michigan, what with this upstart Santorum surging on him. Folks were encouraged to call in to explain why they were getting Rickrolled.

It was about as awesome as you might imagine. The callers sounded lucid enough, to be sure, but not one of them came close to adequately articulating exactly why their disaffection with Obama led them to believe that a pecksniffian sweater-vested goon who lost his Senate seat by 16 points would be the better choice.

One caller, a middle-aged man, actually said that if Santorum was not the GOP nominee, he'd vote for Obama(?!); the one thing he seemed sure of was his dislike for Romney. Another one, who sounded like a woman in her mid-twenties, said Rick was just a "stand-up guy", never quite getting the fact that Rick seems to think that the role of a woman is essentially that of a placid brood mare. But hey, whatever floats your boat, sweet cheeks -- you're the one that's going to have a tough go of controlling how your ladybits get attended to.

Electorally, you have to figure Obama's team are collectively creaming their Dockers right now. Because you now have the entire Gooper clown car pared down to the most white, uptight, and outtasite tools central casting could muster. Santorum is completely unelectable in the general election, whereas Romney, especially once he gets the money train rolling, is only probably unelectable, in that his only strategy is to convince the extra-chromosome base that they hate Obammy even more than they hate Romney. Usually not a winning strategy.

So if you're handicapping the election strategy for the Republicans, you have to figure that they're already starting to move toward down-ticket chances, since the top slot's more or less lost. (Although it would also be fun to handicap the prospective running mates for either of them. The possibilities are hilarious.)

And yes, I did catch Dave Mustaine's tepid "endorsement" of Santorum, somewhat decontextualized by Rolling Stone (quel surprise), and from which Mustaine has already started back-pedaling. (Brilliant comments at the AV, btw.)

To Mustaine's small credit, he did simply say that he wanted to see a Republican president, and after running down Paul, Romney, and Gingrich, more or less settled on Santorum as the only one left. To his utter detriment, Mustaine failed to articulate why a Republican in general, or Santorum in particular, would be preferable to Obama. Too bad, because TH1RT3EN is actually a very good, tight metal album, especially stacked up against the Metallica/Lou Reed abortion Lulu, which basically sounds like an old drunk guy wandered into a Metallica rehearsal and started babbling into the mike.

But Mustaine, who has long cultivated an image of being politically astute, made an ass of himself -- not by refusing to uphold the supposed voting expectations of artistes (which of course are completely null and void in the metal world -- they're as likely as not to be politically conservative, if not borderline fascist at times), but by failing to even partially explain his rationales. The only specific he could muster re Santorum was that Santorum briefly left the campaign trail to check on his sick daughter -- which, what, nobody else would have done?

Mustaine's reasoning is cognitively dissonant and largely inexplicable, which makes it at least consistent with the other attempts to explain support for Santorum. But then, the U.S. is a rapidly dilapidating gaggle of squawking, ungrateful dipshits who see no problem with cutting off the hand that helps them and rewarding the fuckers who burgled their futures.

Santorum has no chance, but he's just what his supporters deserve.