The Republican Debate

This is ungodly sad.

At the exact time when political candidates need the wind taken out of their sails, the writer's strike has wiped late-night comedy off the map. It's just not there anymore. And for someone who loved Colbert and Stewart even at the cost of a decent night's sleep, who relied on those pundits for reassurance that I wasn't the only one who thought about that stuff...I don't know. It just feels lonely.

Not that I think they ought to come back without getting their demands met. I'm not going to delve too deeply into the WGA strike in this post, but what they're asking for is eminently reasonable. For example, if a network shows a rerun of a show they wrote on TV, they get a small cut of the ad revenue. But if they stream that same show online (supported by banner-ad revenue) the writers get nothing. Theoretically, networks could stream the entirety of their programming online and would, under the current contract, be obligated to pay the people who wrote it nothing. Yeah, that sounds fair.

But apparently Mike Huckabee has decided he's going to take over in the absence of comedy writers. Let's be clear. I'm not voting for a Republican, especially him. He's a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-gay Southern Baptist minister, for God's sake. (No pun intended.) Short of being a paid spokesman for a conglomerate that sells oil, pharmaceuticals and cigarettes, he pretty much couldn't get any worse.

Except for the fact that Mike Huckabee is freakin' hilarious. If you didn't watch the YouTube Republican debate last night, you missed out on some pretty funny stuff. (A lot of people didn't watch the Republican debate for the same reason they won't watch their hometown teams play the New England Patriots; there's no sense in worrying about the roster when your squad's gonna get bulldozed anyway.)

Ummm, I keep comparing politics to the New England Patriots. I should probably dial that back a little.

Anyway, aside from the fact that Huckabee is nuts, he told some killer jokes last night. I'm sure they're all up on YouTube, so you're welcome to check them out. But the highlights were, in my opinion:

1) Jesus being too smart to run for public office
2) Hillary being a good candidate for the first rocket to Mars
3) Being willing to take his support from Log Cabin Republicans because in his position he needs "anybody and everybody I can get"
4) Mitt Romney's tryout for the Pro Bowl of being a dipshit.

I guess Huckabee can't really take credit for the last one, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The rest of the country is rapidly discovering what us Bay State residents (and expatriates) have known for the last ten years: Mitt Romney is a hypocritical neo-conservative goofball with just enough political acumen to leave everyone angry and divided without actually getting anything done.

Consider this: Mitt Romney was openly touting the benefits of sending people to Guantanamo last night and wouldn't condemn waterboarding, even to the face of John McCain, who got tortured for five years in a Vietnamese prison camp. His excuse was that he didn't want to discuss which methods we did or didn't use, as that'd help the enemy to prepare accordingly. A cop-out answer that was delivered poorly.

Giulani had some intentional humor that went over pretty well. Each candidate got to air one of their own videos, and Giuliani (apparently hitting back at the Biden comment that to make a Giuliani sentence, you just needed a noun, verb and 9/11) took credit for defeating King Kong and reducing the annual snowfall.

Even Ron Paul had a funny line. He said something to the effect of how he was "struggling to learn how to spend money" because he suddenly had a ton of it. I actually have a lot of respect for Dr. Paul, but kinda like the Yankees, the fans give the organization a bad name. Good Lord. All you need to do is mention Ron Paul somewhere on the interwebs, and if you dare call him a fringe candidate, your blog or MySpace page or Italian-recipe message board will get swamped in angry posts demanding that you "look at the data" and inevitably mentioning that he raised $4.2 million in one day.

They're right on one thing. He's not a fringe candidate anymore. But he's not going to win, either. The irritating thing about the Paul supporters is that they're using information that proves one thing (he's not a fringe candidate or a joke, he's got actual support) and trying to convince you that it actually proves something totally different (he's really gonna win.) They've been so busy trying to prove he's not fringe (successfully, in my opinion) that their data has far outpaced their new message (that he can win.)

Oh, man, I just said something not-quite-complimentary about Paul supporters. This blog is probably going to suffer a DDOS attack within about an hour. Look, guys, I respect your candidate and I don't think he's "fringe." He's got a clear and principled message. Just.....try to keep things in perspective, and easy on the Kool-Aid, okay?

Back to Huckabee: He didn't just crack me up at last night's debate. The guy has made repeated trips to the Colbert Report, and Colbert even made him promise that if Huckabee won, Colbert would be his VP. (Which was hilarious to think about last night, because Huckabee spent five minutes listing qualities he'd want in a VP and I kept thinking of how I would have no choice but to vote for them.)

But best of all has been Huckabee's Chuck Norris ad. I'll let you watch it and then spend a couple of minutes recovering from the laughter-induced seizure.

*pause*

Okay, you're probably back up off the floor now. I know it's not a good idea to vote for someone just because they're likable or funny. This isn't high school (although it does look like it occasionally, John Edwards.) And I know that having Mike Huckabee as President would basically be four years (no way he'd get re-elected) of President Ned Flanders.

If I suddenly woke up tomorrow and had Gregor Samsa'd into a flaming Republican, I'd wear out my PayPal account giving Huckabee money. As I don't see that happening anytime in this century, I'm going to stick with trying to decide between Edwards and Obama.

In closing, someone should remind the Cleveland Plain Dealer that it's not a good idea to eat the brownies at Dennis Kucinich's house, because they make you write articles like this.