I Smell a Rat

I ended my previous blog floating the possibility that Newt Gingrich had dealt a mortal blow to Mittens wihen he exposed the kinds of practices Romney was engaged in while running Bain, a venture capital firm that buys and sells businesses for investors' profit. But at that point Mittens had already won Iowa and was well on the way to winning in New Hampshire. He was also ahead by double digits in South Carolina, and it was said that if Romney wins again in South Carolina, three times lucky, he will have sewn up the nomination.

It was a bit of a shock, then, when I turned on the radio the other morning and heard that not Romney, but Rick Santorum had been declared the winner in Iowa, finishing ahead of Mittens by 34 points. O migod! I thought. ("It seems to me, I've heard this song before...") And then, big time, I smelled a rat. Barely out of the gate, Republicans had already messed with the voting results. My right-wing-coup tentacles were wriggling like there's no tomorrow. The Des Moines Register reported on that day that votes from eight precincts had gone permanently missing and would never be counted--"so the ultimate tally remains inconclusive." Mitt's rolling hoops as "the inevitable frontrunner" were no longer rolling.

The weird thing is, once the idea of "inconclusive" had been floated, nobody even flinched at the retraction. There was not a whiff of backlash, no accusations, no questions, no uproar. Not one single eyelid batted. Then, after no sign of any push-back from any direction, within two more days, Rick Santorum was simply declared the "real" winner in Iowa. Even then, not one eyebrow was lifted. Am I the only one who smells a rat and thinks what's happening is sinister? Or are my fellow Americans just too weary to care? Maybe Republican voters are so dissatisfied with their choices, they don't give a damn who wins or loses. They all suck royally, so what the hell?

Meanwhile it looks like Newt is mounting the engines in South Carolina. Instead of one frontrunner, by tomorrow we will have three--or none, depending on how you figure. Nobody gets to walk off yet with the prize though: the coveted nomination. Virgil and his airborne warriors are predicting that when Newt emerges as the victor in South Carolina, he will appear with a rooster and a small blonde, and they will all crow together. And, as someone remarked on the net about these ridiculous caucuses, it "kind of makes you reminisce about the America of our youth where the worst thing they threatened us with was global annihilation."