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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

20 Political Predictions



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.

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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:
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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?

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