GOP BASE HAS
YET TO DECIDE

By W.R. Hearst
Of the Board of Editors

WASHINGTON, D.C. – After months of hard campaigning, the white men vying for the Republican Presidential nomination have yet to solidify their appeal with the key elements of the Republican base.

While each candidate, with the exception of anti-war candidate Ron "Deathwish" Paul,  has appealed to one or more of the various constituencies that make up the Republican base, none of them has managed to appeal across the full spectrum of the one group that has loyally supported Republican candidates through thick and thin, war and peace, clear,  hold, build and surge: assholes.

According to experts at the Lieberman Center for Political Psychology at Yale University, named after one of the few prominent assholes in political life who is at least nominally not affiliated with the GOP, any Republican seeking his party's nomination must be assured of consistent support from white male assholes, who make up over 80% of Republican primary voters.

"It's not as easy as it seems," said Chuck Colson, who is the Podhoretz Fellow of Genital Persuasion at the Lieberman Center. "The Republican base is not a monolithic mass of assholes. Rather, many different varieties of asshole have cast their lot with the party of Lincoln, Harding and Nixon."  

Colson listed just a few of the key sub-categories of asshole in the Republican Party:

• Isolationist xenophobic know-nothings. "This group of assholes has long played an influential role in Republican politics for at least a century. Thanks to these flamers, the United States turned its back on the League of Nations, insuring its failure," Colson said. "This group starts to salivate at the mention of the word 'immigration.' Sen. McCain's inability to pander to these assholes has doomed his campaign."
  
  
• Racists. "These tend to be attracted to candidates who prattle racist code words, like tough on crime, death penalty and end welfare. However, no candidate has really reached out to this group," Colson commented.
  
  
• Neoconservative Likudnik warmongers. "This group has flocked to the Republican banner in recent years, as Democratic administrations have demonstrated their unwillingness to invade Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya or Lebanon," Colson said.  "None of the candidates has yet satisfied the blood thirst of assholes like John Bolton or Billy Kristol, so this band of assholes has yet to settle on a candidate, although they are attracted to Rudy Giuliani's reputation for firing first and aiming second."
  
  
• Greedy plutocrats. Colson explained: "These billionaires have quantified their political contributions in terms of rates of return: for each hundred thousand dollars in bundled contributions or payoffs to Jack Abramoff, they expect at least $500 thousand in tax cuts.  Bush rewarded his investors in conformity with the business plan, but among the current crop of candidates, only Utah favorite son Wilfred M. Romney seems to be their type of asshole: a man worth hundreds of millions who tells those less fortunate to him to 'tighten their belts.'"
  
  

• Intolerant Holy Rollers. "When you think of Republican assholes, these are the guys who come to mind," Colson said. "Sadly, most of them are dead, senescent or desperately trying to stuff themselves back into the closet. These assholes are worried that none of the front runners are as committed as they are to torturing those with different sexual preferences or beliefs about the status of the fetus."
  
  
• Vietnam bitter enders.  "These grizzled assholes believe that victory in Vietnam was snatched away by draft-dodgers [Like the President? – Ed.] after only 40,000 American deaths," explained Colson.  "They are eager to prevent a repeat of that experience in Iraq and figure they've got at least another 36,500 American soldiers to burn."
  
• Newt Gingrich.  "No one can stand him," Colson said.  "Just like me."

Asked to handicap the chances of the leading candidates, Colson smirked and said: "Giuliani probably has the edge with the neocon assholes and Romney appeals to his fellow plutocrats, but the gay-bashing Bible Belters have to look further into the Republican second tier, and even there there isn't one candidate who motivates them to say: 'He's my kind of intolerant asshole.'"

As for McCain, except for the Indochinese Lost Battalion, Colson said, "he can't solidify his support with any other group of asshole, even the Likudniks, who suspect that he really doesn't want to embroil America in four simultaneous unwinnable wars." So who would appeal to this group?  "If only we could get Joe Lieberman to admit that he's a Republican as well as an asshole, he'd clean up."