ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Because the WGA is not willing to lie down and give up their dream of fair compensation so that my boyfriend and I can have decent weeknight entertainment, tonight we decided that the only thing worth watching on TV was the Iowa caucus. Because his mom and sister live in the Des Moines area, we figured there was a remote chance we might see them on camera at one of the Democratic caucuses. The C-SPAN coverage of the Democratic caucus was nothing more than a live feed of a bunch of people milling around being yelled instructions at by a lady standing at a podium. It gives me a lot of faith in the political system to know that the nominees are being chosen based on an adult version of duck duck goose mixed with red rover. My boyfriend thinks that based on all the grouping, milling around, regrouping, and milling around, the Democratic caucus-goers were behaving like they were “possessed by the spirits of dead penguins”.

After a while we switched over to Fox to see their brightly colored graphs and animated commentary. “This is much less boring,” I said happily.

“It’s also much less realistic,” said my boyfriend.

I have decided to vote for Rudy Giuliani in the primaries. I don’t necessarily think that he will get the nomination, but I like him and will support him until the bitter end. In a lukewarm way. It’s hard for me to muster enough enthusiasm about the American political system to go at it any harder than that. Earlier this week I was reading some blog linked from some other blog, and the guy was complaining about how Giuliani was a sleaze and obviously couldn’t be trusted. I like Giuliani and I don’t give a shit what a sleaze he is. Paying for his extramarital affair with city money? Don’t care. Lying? All the other kids are doing it. Being obnoxious? Nine eleven. I like Giuliani because he does not care what I am doing with my life and because he doesn’t want to complicate all our lives with unfeasible, happy sounding social welfare programs. Yes, he’s a sleazeball and he looks like a zombie leprechaun. But I really couldn’t care less because, as my boyfriend put it, anybody who thinks their candidate isn’t sleazy is either deluding themselves about the sleaze or deluding themselves about them being electable.

Politically, Rudy “9-11″ Giuliani is the only candidate I can really endorse. I’m really much more of a Libertarian than anything. But I stay a registered Republican because I want to vote in primaries. And because I’m very lazy. My views are fairly simple. I’m a fiscal conservative. I think universal health coverage is a nice idea, but unfeasible. Since our existing public systems, such as Social Security, kind of suck as it is, I don’t really think we should turn one more thing over to the government to screw up. I would rather go with vouchers or assistance to help out the people who are somewhere in between: i.e. make too little to buy good private insurance and too much to get Medicare/Medicaid, rather than publicizing the whole mess. I’d prefer not to see health care go the direction of other socialized countries, where people who actually care about their health purchase private insurance and go to other countries to see physicians. So I can’t support all the left-wing extremists who want to make us socialist and mess with the free market and so on. But I’m also a social liberal. So I hate all the crazy right wing weirdos who want to give all of us a spinal tap of evangelical Christianity and who think that their collective personal moral outlook carries enough weight to dictate what other people do with themselves, their gay partners, their religious beliefs or lack thereof, and their unborn children.

The other thing in favor of Giuliani is that he has a funny ear just like Stephen Colbert. And I love Stephen Colbert. So it’s decided, then. I’m voting for America’s new mayor. Nine eleven.

Then if Mike Huckabee and the Jesus National Convention get the Republican nomination, I will vote for the Democratic candidate no matter what kind of shaved circus ape they may have come up with. Even if it’s Hillary. I have a plan.