So I have actively curtailed my political musings during
this campaign season[i]. Amidst
all the endless 24 hour news cycle blathering and speculation, it all just
seemed so…redundant. However, as we near the final stretch, I think I have
thought the issues through enough to flex my prognostic abilities and offer up
a set of predictions for the 2012 election, the 2016 election, and continuing
trends in American politics.
American Politics –
Serious Business.(Images courtesy of Fark.com and Seattlepi.com, respectively).
The Predictions
1) If the Republicans win the 2012
election in part due to the storm suppressing voter turnout, Hurricane Sandy
will be “an act of God’s will against the heathen liberals and gays”. If they
lose, Sandy will be a “low pressure system cyclonic weather phenomenon”.
2) Third party candidates will blame
their loss on the major parties actively shutting them out and/or being
“afraid” to debate them[ii].
This will be akin to me saying that NBA players are actively working to keep me
out of the NBA because they’re afraid to play against me.
3) If the Republicans take the
popular vote but the Democrats take the electoral vote, expect the Republicans
to decry the electoral college and unleash their self-righteous fury in a
flurry of comments on abolishing it. Expect Democrats to smugly decry this as
an attack against the founding fathers, Repubs as poor losers, etc. Both
parties will desperately distance themselves from the polar opposite stances
they took the last time the popular/electoral vote was split in Bush/Gore.
4) Ron Paul will keep revolting to
distract us from his pot o’ gold, hidden at the end of a rainbow[iii].
5) Fox News and other Republican
outlets will virulently decry the President for taking too long to help storm
victims if the recovery doesn’t go well, or acting too quickly and being in it
for the politics if the recovery goes well. Democrats will lampoon Romney’s
slapdash relief efforts as political theater while mooning over pictures of
Obama posing on Jersey beaches.
6) If Obama wins by a small margin,
Republicans will talk about deep divisions and a lame duck president. If Romney
wins by an equally small margin, the election will be a unified “mandate” from
the people. And vice versa. Ad nauseam.
7) Donald Trump will continue to
question Obama’s birth certificate. Everyone will continue to question the provenance
of the Donald’s hairpiece.
8) Win or lose, Romney’s face will
remain stuck in creepy smile mode until his next scheduled maintenance/reboot.
Having used his yearly allotment of visible emotion, Obama’s future
presidential addresses will consist solely of reading from a phone book.
9) Bill Clinton will begin an epic
search for the fabled “binders full of women”.
10) Ann Coulter's existence will continue to revolve around saying outrageous
things to gullible people for money. She will continue to be the rule, and not
the exception, in that regard.
11) The losing Party will harangue the winning
party for not keeping their campaign promises…while they actively do everything
they can to obstruct the winning party from keeping their campaign promises.
12) Internet denizens will spend more
time arguing about the right solutions to problems than it would take for them
to volunteer and fix the problems, and thus make the arguments moot. If they
realize this, they will simply meta-argue about it.
13) The rent will still be too damn
high.
14) Oceania will always be allied with
Eurasia in our war with Eastasia. If Oceania is at war with Eurasia, it has always
been at war with Eurasia and Eastasia has always been our valued ally.
15) The post-apocalyptic 2016 election
will focus on securing the crucial zombie soccer mom vote.
16) Chris Christie will attract many
votes in 2016. That attraction will be primarily gravitational in nature.
17) Media bias will continue to be
rampant. It will also continue to favor neither blue or red, but green.
18) The line between entertainment and
news will blur to the point that John Stewart wins a Pultizer prize for
journalism, Sean Hannity wins an Emmy for Best Actor, and Brian Williams tours
the nation as the frontman for his funk group “The Brian Williams Experience”[iv].
19) Our outrage over a politican’s sex
scandal, malfeasance, or faux pas will be continue to be directly proportional
to whether that politician is from our party or the other guys.
20) 2016 will be the first inaugural
Googlection. Apple will secede from the Union, and hold their own iLection.
Though,
to be honest, this is all pretty much a veiled promotion for:
NOTES
[i] I
use this term much as I use it to describe actual seasons in Texas…i.e.
seemingly endless periods of unendurable atmosphere.
[ii]
Sadly, this is straight from the libertarian candidate’s ads.
[iii] Some
day, Ron Paul, some day I will get my hands on those lucky charms…
[iv]
Are you Briansperienced?
