These would have been more entertaining picks as Romney’s running mate
Okay, jumping in with both feet here.
It really speaks to not only the Romney campaign’s complete ineptitude and lack of sense of drama and timing, but also the scarcity of faith in its own candidate, that they chose to make the VP announcement early on a Saturday morning. To be fair, Romney justified the apathy of his team, utterly boning the introduction of future porn parody subject Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), referring to him as “the next President of the United States.”
Holy screaming Jesus — introducing your sidekick as the man who will one day usurp you for the job you don’t even have yet is a truly mindboggling combination of arrogance and defeatism. Nerds, let me help you out: the following comparison isn’t exact, but that’s like pre-Sith Darth Plagueis getting Palpatine to cover for him while he takes a bathroom break during his shift as a Walmart greeter. My best, and by far least insane, guess is that the tiny alien inside the Romney man-suit spilled his coffee on the control panel.
Still, word quickly spread. I was cutting lime wedges before the restaurant opened for brunch when I got a text from my dad: “I guess y’all are proud of your native son Mr. Ryan this morning.” The man has a notoriously dry sense of humor, so trying to parse his jokes is sometimes akin to catching a mote of dust in your teeth during a windstorm.
This time, though, there was no mistaking his sarcasm, even through the cloudy veneer of a text message. That’s a one-punch KO variety of wry. To put that in perspective, if you punched Angelina Jolie that hard, one of Jon Voigt’s testicles would turn Democrat.
Anyway, I’m kind of let down. Sure, Paul Ryan is a special kind of deplorable — and believe me, I’m getting fury-wood just thinking about next week’s column — but he’s not crazy. As a pretty hard-line social conservative, he’s going to milk these Teabaggy lobotomy cases for every dollar they’re worth from now, straight on through a hilariously one-sided November loss, to his own 2016 campaign.
Speculation had run rampant these last few weeks concerning who the Romney team would pick — serious face, I’m surprised it wasn’t Marco Rubio — and Ryan has been met, barring the pre-scripted barbs hurled from both sides, with a resounding “meh” from the general public.
To my way of thinking (i.e. caffeine-addled and patchwork), Romney needed to throw Obama off his game to have any chance of winning. How do you do that? Obviously: picking a running mate so ill-advisedly insane that Sarah Palin double-takes. Obscure the air with nonsensical oratory and, maybe, recitations of the “Billy Madison” screenplay; plan attacks on the sub-crust-dwelling mole people, anything to make Obama and the media scramble.
Sadly, Romney went with the straight choice. Here, then, is a look at what might have gloriously been. Keep in mind, Paul Ryan does partially reflect elements of each of these, but we’re looking at these choices in terms of full-bore label embodiment. And I have, like, 500 words left to get through.
The Gift-to-Dems Pick: Michele Bachmann
Ever since Michele Bachmann was ousted from the GOP primary, she’s been relatively quiet. For sanity, that’s a good thing. For comedy, a real shame. Bachmann spent most of her campaign looking like someone stretched a skin mask over a dimestore skeleton, then imbued in the resulting beast all the most horrifying characteristics of country club moms, Holocaust deniers and popular girls in junior high. Though she and fellow crazy-pants Rick Santorum actually managed to be the voice of reason during one debate exchange — Romney and Perry talked about just outright attacking more countries, while Bachmann and Santorum had the good sense to know that, wait, you can’t just do that — she mostly spent the campaign accusing Obamacare of giving 12-year-old girls Alzheimer’s with autism shots or something. She’s like Jenny McCarthy, minus the credibility.
What It Would Have Meant: The alien spilled his coffee again.
The Awesome Pick: Herman Cain
Not gonna lie to you guys… I’ve sort of come around on Herman Cain. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still the worst kind of idiot — an obvious, unapologetic one — but he makes up for it with effortless charisma and bottomless entertainment value. When Cain first hit the scene, he reminded me a bit of Ted Johnson, an asshat of a local radio host whose show I produced when I manned the dials at WNR-something-something here in Augusta. He even wore a cowboy hat, unironically. But when Ted said infuriatingly crazy things — “Obama will mandate shariah law in our nation’s universities,” and Harry Potter being “insidious” for teaching kids witchcraft are two of my favorites — you could tell he meant it, because there was something wrong with his brain.
Herman Cain, though, may have been trolling us all this time. He’s since made a video of himself skeet-shooting rabbits against a backdrop of a storm happening inside of an American flag, somehow, and brilliantly mocked himself in a series of “Daily Show” sketches. He would have been exactly the distracting factor the Romney campaign needed to flabbergast the nation into disarray. I know I’m supposed to be against entitling morons and all that, but if someone doesn’t give this man a reality show, stat, then we’re all dead inside.
What It Would Have Meant: The alien knows my thoughts.
The Where-My-Brain-Went-Next Pick: Papa John
The Papa recently came out as a Romney supporter and, yes, I’m aware of the irony in that semantic phrasing. Apparently, something about Obamacare is going to drive up the price of their pizzas by about 14 cents apiece, which should be an outrage to no one but Hover-Round riders with American flag-print stretch-pants. Granted, Papa John’s is probably the best-tasting national chain pizza in the country, but that’s like describing syphilis as “itchy.” No less than the company boss himself recently hosted a fundraiser for Romney. The name-brand pizza was obviously on the menu, in the most insulting, pitiful example of blue-collar patronization since George W pretended to know what a rake is. I would say I’m boycotting Papa Johns, but I can only afford lentils as it is.
What It Would Have Meant: The alien has gone rogue.You Might Also Like:
Missed Opportunities
Tagged with: Herman Cain, John Ruffin, Marco Rubio, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan
Posted in Ruffin' It
Posted in Ruffin' It