Rick Santorum And The Sweater Vest of Azkaban

Once more unto the primary breach, dear friends, once more, or close up the wall with our campaign staff dead!

William Shakespeare's ghost is going to kill me for that, I think...

When last we parted, Governor Mittens had salvaged the lead in the endless Republican nomination process by slaying the Fig Newton... er, the Newtron Bomb in Florida, and managing to get through Nevada relatively unscathed. Then Governor Mittens had himself something of a bad day.

It turns out party faithful in Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesota think better of He Whose Last Name Must Not Be Googled.

The editorial cartoonists of the world have been kept busy as of late on the whole circus, and so once again I present some of the best. When I first started gathering together pics for this one, Gingrich (aka Fig Newtons, aka The Newtron Bomb) had been busy savaging Governor Mittens at all opportunities. Oddly, he's been very, very quiet as of late. This is what happens when no one's paying attention to you anymore.

Maybe it's that people are offended by a family values candidate who by his very actions shows such disregard for the notion of marriage. Maybe it's that the angry old crank routine isn't connecting with voters. Maybe Fig Newtons is running out of campaign dough. At any rate, Fig Newtons has been having a lot of Newtron Bomb days lately, almost as if he's set to go off....

You could almost feel the bell tolling for the Newtron Bomb the moment he started talking about permanent bases on the moon, of all things....

It does appear that the Newtron Bomb has run itself completely out of steam after the South Carolina Anomaly (there's a blog title in that somewhere). One of two things shall happen: he'll either return to complete irrelevance from whence he came, only to return in November claiming that the election disaster would never have happened if he had been nominated, or... some unforeseen turn of events will give him a state victory and new life. We shall see.

Not that it's been an easy couple of weeks for Governor Mittens. His inability to grasp the way an ordinary person lives is hampering his campaign. So is his tendency to put his foot in his mouth.

And President Obama takes every word Governor Mittens gets wrong, and files it away for further use after the Republican convention. He must be pleased at how thoroughly the GOP is doing his job for him....

Governor Mittens even got the endorsement of Donald "The Windblown Combover Ego" Trump. You'd think he'd go out of his way to avoid being associated with that blowhard egomaniac waste of space who thinks the universe revolves around him. Governor Mittens, this is probably going to come back and bite you hard...

As mentioned, of course, Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado saw greater support among Republican voters for Rick Santorum, aka Sweater Vest, aka He Whose Last Name Must Not Be Googled. The Santorum Surprise has changed the nomination circus again, at least until momentum swings the other way again. It had better. No one can ever take seriously a guy with that last name, not after googling his name.

Oh, and Ron Paul is still in the running, but you'd have to dig deep to find any attention paid to the resident Crazy Old Man of the GOP....

It's been a long joke, this particular nomination process, with no shortage of bad jokes running for the chance to lose to President Obama in November. This is a bad thing for the party, which seems hellbent on committing political suicide. At the same time, it might be a good thing in the long term for the party. Purge the nutcases and wingnuts once and for all, rebuild, and come back again down the line.

May I make a suggestion to you Americans who are sitting on the fence about where to cast your vote?  Talli pointed this one out in the last blog, and so I present it to you. Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you the solution.

And finally, rumor has it that Sarah Palin is musing about stepping back into the GOP ring and making a run at the nomination. It seems in the World According To Sarah, if there's no clear nominee by the time of the convention, she may have to... step in, as she puts it. To this prospect, I can only offer up this picture as an expression of what I think of that....