Election predictions

Looks like the Republicans are about to take a good old-fashioned country ass-whipping in the midterms, not that it'll do much good. It would be wonderful if it could create a "teachable moment" for the GOP, but the damage that has already been done will take generations to undo; the only party that seems to have learned anything so far has been the Democrats, who seem to have finally figured out that running towards the economic center will get them elected in red states.

I am going to buck the conventional wisdom and say that the GOP will (barely) hold the House due to the most recent round of gerrymandering, but will lose the Senate. You didn't hear it here first, maybe, but I'm putting my stake in the ground.

You know, down in North Carolina, back in the day, we talked about the ABC's of conservative politics... abortion, blacks, and communism. Those were the three wedge issues that could always get the mouthbreathers to the polling place, pulling the lever you wanted them to pull.

With polite society no longer complaining about the "Negro Problem," and Eastern European communism dead and buried (and Asian communism morphing into something very like the mercantilism the Chinese practiced since they first got their act together as an Empire), what distracting wedge issues do we have left?

It doesn't roll as easily off the tongue, but it's Gay Marriage, Abortion (an oldie but a goodie, now in stealth/proxy mode as the Stem Cell Debate), and Terrorism. GMAT - hey, isn't that also the test that you take to get into MBA school? ;-)

I must admit that I have been following the Ted Haggard story with far more gleeful schadenfreude than I probably should. It is definitely not the Christian thing to do or feel, and I actually do kind of feel sorry for this hypocritical bastard's family.

The excuse he offered--"I bought the drugs, but didn't use them; I got a massage from a gay escort but there was no sex involved"--was as lame as anything I have ever heard, though.

I am essentially as vanilla a heterosexual as it is possible to be on the Kinsey scale.

But if I order up a "massage" incall from an ad in a gay publication, and I buy some meth to go with it, I am definitely expecting a Happy Ending and also planning to snort the meth first, I mean, Jesus Christ, pardon the expression, you know? I want my money's worth.