The Retardicans' Great Starch Hope

By: Thers at Firedoglake (BRILLIANT!)

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF WINGNUTTIA: Our candidate for president in 2012 will be a baked potato.

TEH LIBERALS: ...?

TPPoW: You heard us! We see the danger facing us in the Obama presidency as so powerful and so imminent that we demand a candidate who wants to devote time and speeches to fighting it in a very public way. That candidate is a baked potato. In fact, this baked potato right over here. ------>

TL: You're nominating a baked potato? What the hell are you talking about?

TPPoW: Ha! We knew that would drive you libtards crazy! Clearly, this potato has earned the eternal enmity of the liberal elite for the affront of who it is: a working-class, pro-life vegetable with decidedly red-state mores. Unlike you out-of-touch coastal elites with your pommes frites, the baked potato is from the real America -- these small towns that we get to visit, these wonderful little pockets of what we call the real America, the hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

TL: Are you on drugs? Who the hell is going to vote for a potato?

TPPoW: Stupid hippie. You're so deluded -- the potato is the natural leader of what we might call the "Country party" — the countless real Americans who are tired of being treated as clay!

TL: And instead want to be treated like vegetables?

TPPoW: Elitist! Clearly you're just terrified that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true!

TL. But a potato can't talk. How can it give speeches or interviews? Put it in front of a camera, and people aren't going to be saying any of that "Country party" shit, they'll be saying, "I'm not going to vote for a fucking baked potato."

TPPoW: You fail to understand that in the way this baked potato presents itself in conformance with the stereotype of the red-state simpleton, it is actually being deeply principled. Fool! America’s “Best And Brightest” — the media’s haughty personages, the college towns’ privileged residents, affimative action’s beneficiaries, the “mainstream” politicians who supported billions for bailouts and “stimuli,” the upscale folks who look down on the rest of us and upon themselves as saviors of the planet — these are the people who will make this baked potato into a political force by making it a symbol of everything they are not. They will do this despite the potato's lack of brilliance when it comes to communicating its ideas on the issues. Your use of curse words also proves that you are incapable of rational debate, so neener neener I win.

TL: Whatever. The point is, it's still a freakin' potato. It can't, like, communicate!

TPPoW: Says you! Actually, for all the media’s awe at President Obama’s mastery of social media, it is interesting to note that the baked potato is leading the way in online communications among Republicans. By a lot. It is using Facebook and Twitter to communicate its agenda and message directly to its constituencies. Its strength in this regard is obscured at the moment because that agenda and message is a mystery at present.

TL: That's because potatoes don't have agendas, even ones that fit on Twitter messages, dumbass.

TPPoW: Hah! Ad hominem! Ad potatum! Yet more indecent behavior from folks who are all to quick to play the "have you no decency" card when it suits them. Just goes to show, if you want to see really vicious vegetablism, go read the comments on Daily Kos.

TL: Come again?

TPPoW: Your attitude towards baked potatoes is obviously a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. It is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. It reveals the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

TL: Uh, not exactly. I think it just proves that if you run around saying a baked potato is the natural leader of your party and maybe the nation, people are going to make fun of you.

TPPoW: More hatred. Don't you see it? Don't you see that trying to destroy this baked potato is kind of like Ben Kenobi letting Darth Vader strike him down? Even if you succeed -- Ouch. It will hurt to know a vegetable you pride yourself on seeing as a hot side dish loaded with butter, sour cream, chives, and maybe bacon bits so thoroughly out-maneuvered you. You do see it, right?

TL: What I see is that you have it in your head that this baked potato somehow offends liberals, when, like, we just think it's stupid to pretend a vegetable can be president, even if you've pulled that shit off before.

TPPoW: Yeah, right. More likely it bugs you, deep down, that while the baked potato is at ease with its vegetableness, as well as its place in the workplace and at home, liberal potatoes, especially the liberal broads, convey a base insecurity in their feminine skin and crispy, slightly charred jackets.

TL: (Takes long pull of whiskey) Oh for fuck's sake. Starting tomorrow, I'm going on Atkins.