From Perry's 'oops', to Biden's 'big stick', via RuPaul and Lena Dunham, here are my highlights of this political crazy season
It's been the costliest election in American history and it sure feels like the longest. It has also been one of the weirdest. The GOP primary provided a mini-series' worth of clown-car exits and debates, Twitter gave celebrities the chance to make themselves seem as unself-aware and smug as pundits (and vice versa). YouTube gave the world the presidential candidate we deserved – Bronco Bama – and hashtags organized the terse poetry of the truly bored.
Here is a list of some things that actually – no, really, for serious – happened.
1. Lindsay Lohan live tweeted the foreign policy debate.
2. A bayonet company spokesman called Obama "ignorant" for joking that troops no longer need horses and bayonets "because troops still use bayonets".
3. Donald Trump promised Americans that "their president will become transparent." Not a reference to RNC magic tricks, he instead made a public appeal for Obama to turn over his college transcripts in exchange for Trump donating $5m to a charity of Obama's choice. This did not happen.
4. Rick Perry forgot the third government agency he wanted to eliminate.
5. Twitterers speculated over what incriminating material was in the "missing two minutes" somehow deleted from footage of Mitt Romney dismissing 47% of America.
Other Romney moments, many longer than two minutes: "I like being able to fire people," friendships with NASCAR team owners and football team owners, "corporations are people," "binders full of women", insulting London and:
"I'm running for office, for Pete's sake, I can't have illegals."
6. Bases on the moon: a thing Newt Gingrich proposed. "I think the moon primary would come late in the [campaign] season."
Twitter then gave the world @gingrichideas.
Newt's best idea, however, was to go to lots and lots of zoos.
Second best idea? This press release.
7. A supporter of GOP primary candidate Rick Santorum said on live television::
"Back in my days, [women] used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives."
(Note: the idea was that they held the tiny pills "between their knees", thus preventing … you get it.)
8. Political analyst Mark Halperin trolled Las Vegas diva Cher over Twitter. And it worked?
9. We debated "Muslim rage".
10. EASTWOODING.
11. Someone let Paul Ryan pose for pictures working out while wearing a backwards baseball cap – and those photos were on the internet.
12. Speculation about the sex life of a private citizen becomes international news.
13. Various Herman Cain things: his tax plan came from the video game Sim City, "Imagine there's no pizza", at the end of one of his best debate performances he quoted the theme song from Pokemon…
And, lest we forget, his campaign manager's "smoking man" ad.
14. Drag queen RuPaul chased Ron Paul around New Hampshire.
15. Amercia
16. Failed presidential candidate Thad McCotter made an even more failed TV pilot.
17. Palin said, with apparent seriousness, that Obama should "grow a big stick".
18. Joe Biden promised the country, with apparent seriousness, that Obama "has a big stick."
19. Not-very-popular presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Tweeted this about not-very-popular rock musician Captain Beefheart:
I wonder if a tweet where I admit how much I like Captain Beefheart will make the followers skyrocket even more!
20. Romney pushed various food items upon his traveling press:including pastry, Panera! "high end stuff" according to Romney, and beef jerky.
21. The Biden team locked a reporter in a closet.
22. Someone thought they could just switch some numbers around in poll results and call them "unskewed" and then people will believe them. It worked.
23. Hipsterish celebrity, Lena Dunham, cut an absurdist, but earnest, ad for Obama comparing voting to sex. It made conservatives mad.
24. Two legitimate candidates for the US Senate had to hold press conferences to clear up their ideas about how bad, and what the definition is, of rape.
25. Hillary Clinton became an icon of nonchalant competence.
26. Binder reviews on Amazon became a new comedy art form.
27. Rick Santorum argued repeatedly that marriage-marriage and gay-marriage were not the same, because:a napkin is not a paper towel, water is not beer, a cup of tea is not a basketball and a tree is not a car.
So that's clear.
28. We talked about transvaginal ultrasounds. A lot.
29. A reporter asked Mitt Romney, "What about your gaffes?" And it was a reasonable question.
30. Bronco Bama. We're tired, too, Abby, we're tired, too. 