Now that sometimes-Democrat Ben Chandler will no longer be in Washington to ignore and frustrate us damned dirty liberals in Lexington while he votes against Obama and most of what we believe in, we now have an invigorating choice to make:

Which Democrat will step up and crush Andy Barr — who will spend the next two years voting for an unpopular and extreme Tea Party agenda, to no legislative fruition thanks to Obama and the Democratic Senate — in 2014?

There are so many options, and they all sound well worth waiting through two years of Andy Barr’s irrelevance.

Do you want…

Crit Luallen?

Jim Gray?

Kathy Stein?

Alison Lundergan Grimes?

Ashley Judd?

David O’Neill?

Colmon Elridge?

Sannie Overly?

Matt Jones?

Let us know in the comments, including your thoughts on various strengths and weaknesses. Things are looking up, I swear.

“Undecided voters are cunts”—Mitt Romney, campaigning in Defiance, Ohio.

While I disagree with the tenor of Mr. Romney’s statement last week, and I certainly take issue with him referring to Jacksonville as “the biggest cold sore on the herpes infected cock that is Florida”, he does raise an interesting point.

Isn’t there something a little irritating about the undecided voter? It’s not just that they can’t decide. Although seriously, you can’t decide? Mitt Romney never stopped running since the last election and you need to hear his stump speech again over the weekend to piece it all together? Mitt Romney outsources jobs, invests his money in foreign banks, and the only thing he seems to like about America is that Jesus is from there. He got rich by firing people. Of course, Donald Trump likes him—he’s who Donald Trump aspires to be. If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that the only thing Republicans are good for is mispronouncing words in folksy ways and sucking off guys in airport bathrooms (Although had we known then what we know now, wouldn’t it be great if Bill Clinton responded to his impeachment by saying, “At least I was getting the blowjob.”) Barack Obama, on the other hand, saved the economy, sent Bin Laden to his virgins, and gave all American children health insurance. Against that, Mitt Romney puts up his crowning achievement: the time he made the 2002 Winter Games more profitable. Winter Olympics, massive layoffs, and dressage horses? Please. Give me basketball, real jobs, and terrorist killing. I think I’m getting sidetracked.

It’s not just that they can’t decide, it’s that they get rewarded for their indecision. We pretend they are the most finicky consumers, carefully poring over article after article before making up their mind, but we all know they just don’t give a shit. And that’s why it shames me to admit that I, your self-appointed life-coach, Ronnie Cottonpants, am an undecided voter.

No, not about the Presidential election. I tried to be open minded, but Mitt Romney lost my vote when he said that “If my dog was as ugly and hairy as the average North Carolina woman, I’d have never taken that bitch off the roof.” But I am undecided about a very important election. I can not decide who to vote for in the upcoming congressional election between Ben Chandler and Andy Barr.

I’m liberal, and I want to vote for Ben Chandler. Or rather, I want to want to vote for Ben Chandler. I want a Democratic Congressman, and I want to pull the Democratic lever with pride, but I can’t. He votes for the Republicans every single time, he is selling himself by promoting his “Conservative Principles”, and he is suing the fucking EPA for trying to protect Kentucky, the rural economy, and the health and safety of miners. The only reason I’ve heard to support him is that he has a “D” beside his name.

Don’t get me wrong—that “D” matters. I feel as confident giving conservative Democrats my vote as I do lending my phone and credit card to a meth-head, but I can handle a blue-dog if I need to. You have to swallow a lot of shit when you’re a liberal. That’s the price of admission, and it usually pays off, but I don’t know that I can do it now.

Listen, I’m the sort of liberal who won’t forgive Ralph Nader. As my father said of Mr. Nader, “It’s not like I hate the guy. It’s not like if his guts were on fire, I wouldn’t piss on him to put him out. I’m saying, if his guts were on fire, I would piss on him.” The Iraq War, the devastated economy, our crippling debt—all of that can be directly lain at Ralph Nader’s feet.  But that came at the expense of Al Gore, a man who, while a little conservative for my tastes in some areas, I think is brilliant and a capable leader. This is about Ben Chandler.

I won’t vote for Andy Barr. I kind of like the fact that he looks like if the Howdy Doody puppet grew up and became an alcoholic, but I like nothing else about him. He’s a useless man who is wrong about absolutely everything. But this is about Ben Chandler.

I want to vote for Ben Chandler, but as of now, I can’t. But I’m undecided, and I’m willing to listen to reason. So I say this very seriously—Convince me to vote for Ben Chandler. I’m Liberal and I’m motivated by fear of Republicans, and I am very, very up in the air on my vote.

But don’t just say “If you don’t vote for Chandler, it’ll be Congressman Andy Barr.” That’s not enough—or rather that’s not enough if you can’t follow it up with specifics about how they’ll vote differently. Andy Barr is the one making the best argument for Ben Chandler getting my vote. In Barr’s commercials, he says Ben Chandler supports Obama’s agenda, but he never gets more detailed than that—because Ben Chandler doesn’t support the President’s agenda, or the liberal agenda. In fact, he doesn’t support the Kentucky Democratic agenda.  What agenda does he support and why is it a secret?

Is he pretending to be more conservative than he is out of political necessity? Probably. Is he a better man than a congressman? I don’t doubt it, but I’m not voting for him to be my buddy or my neighbor. I want him to represent me. So the question remains—If one candidate is for conservative principles and will stand up to Obama, and the other candidate is for conservative principles and will stand up to Obama then why should I vote for either one.

Here’s what I know:
1. My vote matters. Chandler won last time by less than one vote per precinct. Chandler can win without me, but he can’t win without the disaffected liberals he let down.
2. I’m genuinely undecided and will listen to any argument. From now until Election Day, I will engage and try to respond to any and all reasonable suggestions. Why should a liberal vote for Ben Chandler?

I hope I’ve convinced you that, despite what Mitt Romney says, not all undecided voters are “mouth-breathing fatherfuckers who deserve to go to someplace worse than hell when they die, like Virginia.”  No, some of us are just waiting to hear our questions answered.

(Editor’ note: The following is written by my buddy Noah Siela, an award-winning poet, a college professor, and a frequent public-vomiter. He wanted to give those of us nestled snugly inside a red state a peak as to what life is like in a wing-state. From what I can tell, it’s pretty ugh the same as being anywhere else except your vote matters and is possibly counted. Enjoy Noah’s stylings, but be warned, if you let your children study poetry, they might turn out like him and if you send your children to The University of Maryland, they might wind up being taught by him).–R.C.

Swing These

Hello and fuck you, California. I live in a swing state. It’s beautiful this time of every fourth year in Iowa. If you take gravel roads to your place of work (ethanol refinery, school, meth lab, etc.), you can smell the diesel and hustle in the air as farmers, who hate brown(ish) welfare drug addicts who they’ve never met in person, augur bushels of government-subsidized grain into proud silos rising from the pastoral like Steve King’s (R-Iowa) supposedly-barbed and probably-hooved boner poking out of his Dockers at a dog fight. If you sit in the back of the coffee shop I go to every morning to construct the perfect 3-D Mao suit to put on page 1of my pop-up manifesto for Totskys, and you sit far enough away from the tall Swede that the very expensive private school across the street pays to loudly pray the gay out of conflicted, Pell-granted students, you can hear the young barista, grinding imported Venezuelan coffee, speak of Barack Obama being the Antichrist because her 1/8 Native American boyfriend had a dream-vision about the number 13 and there are 13 letters in the president’s name if spelled using Old Testament philology and Native Americans run the casinos in this state and if casinos have taught my mother and aunts anything it’s that math done by Indians is on our side so just trust the fucking Indian dream-math and build your Second-Coming shelter, Kit Carson!

 
Yes, we’re a sexy little beast this time of year so fuck you, New York. I lived in the town that is Iowa’s liberal epicenter for over a decade. The town not Ames and the one in which the gays float freely above streets paved with the furrowed brows of drunken undergrads contemplating which Women’s Studies course to take after their next abortion. The town that convinced me in 2004 that John Kerry’s impending victory would be more of a runaway than Mitt every time Ann wants to do “the doggy’s style.” The town where it’s a perfectly normal spectacle to see a tenure-track professor dressed as a robot chase a leading and insane GOP candidate into the Hamburg Inn while onlookers boo not because that leading GOP candidate is an insane idiot who recently mistook John Wayne for John Wayne Gacy (two of Iowa’s most prolific people, so it’s a reasonable mistake I guess), but dressing up as a robot and ruining a short stack and sausage links is just bad manners.

 
We are moderate and our even keel is important now so fuck you, most of The South. Really, fuck you, most of The South. But I love Iowa all the time. I love Iowa when we make same-sex marriage legal and I love Iowa when we remove State Supreme Court Justices for doing so and I love Iowa for realizing that was a knee-jerk reaction and we form awareness groups to make sure to “Vote Yes for Retention” to keep the judges who interpreted the state constitution on the bench, where they belong. I love Iowa when other states talk of moving up their caucuses so they can be first and the non-cacophony created by Iowa’s poise and stability when other states discuss that possibility is harmony enough to make the rest of the country realize that Iowa is, indeed, a pretty good place to launch the campaign season. I love moderate and reasonable Iowa when we raise children who are first-time voters and they stop to talk to their non-moderate professor after a lecture he’s given about avoiding ad hominem attacks to maintain academic tone and they say, “Mr. Siela, do you think Paul Ryan’s a good VP candidate?” “Not at all, first-time voter student,” I say. “But why, Mr. Siela?” first-time voter student says. “Well, first of all first-time voter student, he’s from Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Badgers’ college football coach is an ex-Hawkeye and that ex-Hawkeye has a Tigerhawk tattooed on his ankle which means that Paul Ryan is probably a secessionist. Also, Paul Ryan’s a midget coffin full of whale jizz, first-time voter student,” I say. “But Mr. Siela, that’s not a valid reason to not vote for somebody. Are you even sure that his policies aren’t something you can’t support?” says first-time voter student. “You’re exactly right, student, and I shouldn’t stoop so low with matters so important,” I say. “Good,” says student, “and you shouldn’t offend whale jizz like that anymore.”

 
George Orwell, famous cultural critic and creator of the mildly popular CBS reality show, “Big Brother”, once wrote: “Political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” What’s that dead limey pussy know about shit? Last Wednesday, on the campus of Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, I stood in line for 6 hours waiting to hear President Obama, hopefully, speak about clean energy and job creation the morning after the second presidential debate. As the time got closer to open the doors, cops from surrounding towns dribbled in over the course of the morning to assist with traffic and security. On 1st St., the main road that bisects the campus, the cops put up road blocks and folks who were attempting to drive through town were forced to stop, do a 3-point turn, and head back the other way. The driver of an out-of-state Hummer, which, by the way, is the perfect vehicle to transport 5-gallon drums of Axe Body Spray from the Affliction T-Shirt Warehouse to a domestic assault trial, rolled down his window and asked the line of Democrats the best way to get through town. A lesbian couple (I knew this because it was overcast and cloudy and they were wearing aviator shades and talking about making their own patio furniture) strayed out of line and compassionately articulated perfect directions to their lost and ostensibly civic opposite, creating the perfect metaphor that I’ve completely fabricated for the sake of this article. But it’s balanced Iowa, and it would happen. Every year. No matter what line you step out of.

Fact Check: TRUE

This ad just proves that our endorsement of Chandler was dead on.

Go out and vote, liberal Democrats! You have no choice, that’s how democracy works!