Newt Gingrich is running yet another attack ad on Mitt Romney in South Carolina, this time simply throwing spaghetti at the wall: He's donated to Democrats, voted for a Democrat once, loves abortion, yadda yadda yadda. Also, Mitt Romney is John Kerry, in that they are both from Massachusetts, where the official language is French. Watch Mitt Romney speak French in 2002, like a fool.
The Republican presidential nominating contest is blowing wide open, as candidates move from the boring grassroots-organizing lowlands of Iowa and New Hampshire to the broader markets of South Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Colorado, and everywhere else. So we've compiled a list of collectibles that you — the resident, reporter, operative, thief, cad, provocateur, etc. — can procure for your beloved Gawker Political Desk in return for fair compensation. What are we looking for?
By now we're all very familiar with that one photo that Mitt Romney probably wants destroyed — the one where he and his buddies are erupting with cash money — since it appears in most anti-Romney campaign ads and articles and blog posts all the time. But what about this other one, which your Gawker Political Desk had not seen until yesterday?
Mitt Romney has had five or six years to formulate his response to a full onslaught on his record as corporate efficiency dweeb at Bain Capital, and here's what he's come up with: YOU PEOPLE ARE JEALOUS. Stop it. Go away!
Former Nixonite and coonskin cap-wearing sometime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has always been a racist relic who appealed mostly to those caveman-like Americans anxious for a return to the Andrew Jackson era. Always. There has never been a time, during his long career as a smiley pundit, in which he was not a racist. So. Although it's kind of nice that he's been suspended by MSNBC, it's the media equivalent of giving all the homeless people in your city a one-way bus ticket just as long as the Olympics are in town.
It's time to cover the results of the First Primary in the Nation, New Hampshire — that famous outlier among the Republican coalition that doesn't tell you much about anything! Mitt Romney is expected to win, but will he win by enough? That's how we're sucking you in tonight. If Mitt Romney doesn't get 52% of the vote, or let's say 100%, his campaign is over. Grab your assault rifle and poor a beer down your ear, as we watch — together.
With "nothing left to do" on the campaign trail, the Romneys went to the movies this afternoon, where Tagg demonstrated the worst way for a pale-eyed family to pose for a picture: In a dim theater in front of a camera with a flash, which will turn all of their perfect blue eyes into glowing orbs of horror.
Mitt Romney is going to win the New Hampshire primary tonight — but is he going to WIN it? See, it's no fun for political writers to simply declare a Mitt Romney victory a victory. What are we supposed to write about for the next year, if he just keeps winning every primary? Policy? Yeesh. And so Mitt Romney must contend with the "expectations game," in which folks with a vested interest in not seeing this primary season end sans hyperdrama come up with a random number that Romney must "hit" tonight, lest his campaign collapse entirely.
What does Chris Christie even mean when he waddles up to these New Hampshire hecklers — females, primarily — at a Mitt Romney event and tells them, "You know, something may go down tonight but it ain't gonna be jobs, sweetheart?" He's responding to their chants of "Christie kills jobs!" and "Mitt kills jobs!" So, we have three options.
Well it's about time that these losers got around to knocking the dickens out of Mitt Romney, that great labor liquidator of the shareholder value revolution. Everyone, right and left, is pointing and laughing the sad galoot over this clip, in which he says he likes firing people. No, scratch that: He says he likes "being able to fire people." What does he really say?
Rick Santorum says a lot of stuff ("I find it... remarkable for a black man to say, 'now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people'"), so it's easy for him to for forget the specifics. For example, did the candidate, speaking in Sioux City, Iowa, over the weekend, say, as quoted by NPR, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." Santorum is pretty sure that's not what he said. "I've looked at that quote, in fact I looked at the video," he told CNN's John King on Wednesday. "In fact, I'm pretty confident I didn't say black." Pretty confident! That's all we need. "I started to say a word and then sort of changed and it sort of, bleaugh, mumbled it," he explained. Yes, Rick: you started to say a word. That word was "black."
Let's direct our fury right now at the distant future people; the ones who were apparently too lazy to use their time machines to come and warn us in 2006, when useless Sen. Rick Santorum was losing his Senate seat by double digits, that we'd still be watching videos of this fucking guy whining about gay marriage six years later when he was a top-tier candidate for a presidential nomination! Then we could've just killed ourselves then and there instead of naively expecting any trace of human progress.
Okay, "stupid" isn't really the most nuanced way to describe this. It's also quite funny in its tactlessness, once you work through all the racism and vomit a few times. It shows clips of Jon Huntsman speaking Chinese, which everyone knows he speaks because he was the ambassador to China. There is also, what do you call it, "stock Chinese music" playing in the background. It notes that Huntsman has adopted two daughters from the East. None of this is congratulatory, however; it takes the more racist is Jon Huntsman the Manchurian candidate? path. Who made this wonder of wonders?
Newt Gingrich never got to complete his political career. He only lasted as Speaker of the House, a job he'd successfully wrangled after plotting his path for a psychotic 14 years, for a couple of terms, the latter half of which he spent as an incompetent figurehead. He was reprimanded and fined for ethics violations and forced out of power by the House Republican majority he'd brought to power for the first time in half a century.
Well here we are, first voting night of the presidential season, and CNN is already completely insane, playing with ludicrous pastel penis holograms while Wolf Blitzer meanders around looking for some anxious correspondent to appear on a garish outer space screen and say nothing. Only in Iowa!...?? Let's get this over with.
Today is that great quadrennial celebration in American democracy: The eve of the day that our political system can completely stop caring about Iowa for another few years, aside from delivering the annual Christmas card of billions of dollars in useless farm subsidies. The Iowa caucuses, however, must be dealt with first, as Republican caucus-goers prepare to crown either Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, or Ron Paul as their new Harvest King tonight. How did things go so wrong? Let's go back and relive the crucial moments of this Iowa campaign season, together, by looking at some funny pictures and making dumb jokes.
Before yesterday's Battle of Spartanburg—aka "another goddamn Republican presidential debate"—Michele Bachmann's campaign intercepted a terrible email from a CBS staffer stating that Bachmann wouldn't be asked as many questions as the other clownidates because she's polling at four percent and will lose. Vulgarity ensued.
By this time in the last presidential cycles, 14 candidates had declared their presidential runs. But this year, even though there's only one party with a primary field, zero have declared. What gives? The Internet demands entertainment!
