GRINDecision 2008: The GOP Field

Republican administrations make for the best music, according to hoary punk and metal conventional wisdom. So which of the GOP presidential aspirants has what it takes to provide another four years of fodder for angry music? Join us as G&P swings to the right and explores the Republican presidential candidates.

Rudy Giuliani, NY
As Will Scarlett O’Hara observed in Mel Brooks’ marginally funny Robin Hood: Men in Tights, you’ve got to be a man to wear tights. Nobody knows this better than Rudy. Despite donning a frilly dress on Saturday Night Live, hizzoner has been parading around as the nation’s toughest executive and talks like he’s being paid to shill for 9/11.
Guiliani has been living in the Age of Quarrel since his days as a New York prosecutor cracking down on organized crime. As mayor he fulfilled Travis Bickle’s desire for a “real rain (to) come and wash all this scum off the streets” when he reclaimed Times Square for tourists and MTV.
Rudy just screams tough guy NYHC. You know he just goes home at night and weeps manly tears into his pillow as he thinks of all of the friends who have stabbed him in the back. But he will rise above and overcome. Cuz revenge, revenge is sweet. So don’t tread on him.

Mike Huckabee, AR
There must not be a single grocery store in Hope, Arkansas, because the town’s residents seem to crave fast food. Bubba Clinton’s jogging trips to McDonald’s are well documented (it’s even on the tour), but now we have former fat ass turned health freak Mike Huckabee.
A Huckabee win in 2008 would mean one out of every 5,000 people in that tiny Arkansas town has succeeded to the White House. Per capita, that’s got to be one of the best ratios in the nation.
So let’s take a look at the demon hunting ordained Southern Baptist minister would be president.
He good naturedly endured the white trash jokes when he had to move from his governor’s mansion to a trailer on the grounds during renovation, like positive minded metalcore mavens he also urged everyone to get along, declaring a month of racial reconciliation in 1997. But like Demon Hunter, Huckabee couldn’t help but trot out his bff Jesus every so often. He signed the Covenant Marriage Act, making it nearly impossible for participating for some couples to get divorced and proclaimed “Student Religious Liberty Month” in 2001, encouraging schools to make time for students to pray, skirting the lines of Supreme Court rulings.
When he’s not Storming the Gates of Hell, Huckabee is laying down fat bass grooves with all-pol band Capitol Offense.

Duncan Hunter, CA
In the me-too primary that is the GOP runoff so far, Hunter is trying to out-Reagan Reagan by running a little to the right of Attila the Hun.
No women in combat units, a push to legally define life beginning at conception, arranged for a 14-mile stretch of fence between San Diego and Mexico and the disturbingly-titled Parents Empowerment Act, which would give parents the right to sue anyone who distributes "any pornographic communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other pornographic matter of any kind" to minors.
Since he’s such a pro-censorship dick, we give him 40 More Reasons to Hate Us.

Alan Keyes, MD
How many times does this guy want to lose to Barack Obama (even with help from his imaginary friend)? After lambasting Hillary Clinton as a carpetbagger for running for the New York senate, Keyes relocated from Maryland to Illinois to get soundly trounced by Obama in that state’s senate race in 2004.
Keyes has been running his own personal Family Values Tour for more than a decade now. Taking his third stab as the nation’s chief executive, Keyes is back with his familiar pro-Jesus, anti-gay, anti-abortion platform.
And who doesn’t love a warm and fuzzy family values type who disowns his own daughter publicly because she is of the Sapphic persuasion?
Obviously, somebody has Issues.

John McCain, AZ
While we doubt John McCain has a copy of …For Victory stashed away amid the Beach Boys and ABBA records he seems to prefer, nobody in the 2008 field has a better understanding of the realities of combat than the former Navy flier who spent more than five years in the Hanoi Hilton (never mind his musical paean to the destruction of Tehran).
But here’s where the metaphor starts to break down. To his credit, McCain, a former POW, recognizes that in battle there is indeed a law and has come out against torture, no matter how euphemistically it’s couched.
And unlike the Coventry warmasters, who have steadfastly persisted on the same track for two weeks, McCain has shed the maverick qualities that made him a media darling and has actively courted the religious right. Though he labeled him an agent of intolerance in 2000, McCain gave the commencement speech at televangelist huckster Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in 2006.

Ron Paul, TX
Ron Paul is an enigma. Like the Dennis Kucinich of the right, he embodies a lot of the best his party has to offer ideologically, but his personal wackiness keeps him gaining any mainstream traction.
The 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president is back again to pitch his ardent belief in personal freedom in another quixotic stab at the White House. But this time he’s channeling the dissatisfaction of young, alienated voters.
Hate the IRS, want America out of Iraq tout-de-suite, think the Constitution is worth saving or understand what the gold standard is? Then Ron Paul is the candidate who deserves your once over.
His pitch must be working because the idiosyncratic congresscritter took home $4 million in Internet donations in a single day in a grassroots effort by supporters and handily outpaced his GOP rivals. All of this despite his supporters being banninated from commenting on an influential conservative blog.
Ron Paul clearly has a hard on for people power and we think metal’s resident gun toting individualist Steve Austin would agree.
But there’s still on word from the Paul camp about his stance on fucking other men’s wives in the ass.

Mitt Romney, MA
Yes Mitt Romney is a Mormon, which is pretty nutty on its own. And yes, nearly half of the country thinks that cult is crazier than a guy who walks on water and comes back from the dead. But if that weren’t enough, Romney also has questionable taste in literature, preferring the ponderous tomes of huckster sci fi hacks to invent charlatan religions for the benjamins (and yes we know that’s redundant).
In that spirit, we’re pretty sure he could groove to Kiss’ intolerable Music from “The Elder,” a pretentious concept album farted out in the wake of the band’s unmasking and Pink Floyd’s success with the wall. We’re pretty sure Romney could really relate to the album’s incomprehensible story of a young boy set on the trials of manhood by a cabal of creepy elders.
So what do you need to know about Romney aside from persistent questions about polygamy and holy underwear?
Before politics, his major claim to fame is brokering the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002.

The Mormon Masshole served one term as that state’s governor where he pushed a moderate, pro-choice agenda, required state residents to buy health insurance and raised taxes to close that state’s $3 billion deficit. Not that he’ll admit any of that now.
(Big thanks to Rob for his encyclopedic knowledge of Kiss. Take a Kiss Koffin out of petty cash.)

Tom Tancredo, CO
Far be it from us to accuse Tom Tancredo of National Socialist sympathies ("They were Nazis, Dude?"), but the fact remains, he’s not the most welcoming guy if you’re an immigrant whose skin happens to be darker than your run of the mill Swede.
Tancredo has been pretty honest and pretty shameless when it comes to appealing to America’s xenophobia in his campaign, such as this ooh-scary-terrorists ad that ends with the dubious slogan “Tancredo…Before it’s too late.”
So while we doubt Tancredo has a larger collection of NSBM on the campaign bus as he wastes our time with his quixotic run for president, we don’t doubt a convo between the candidate and Rob “Darken” Fudali, the Polish racial purity champion of Graveland, would be rather interesting.
We’re sure at least one them of them has a copy of The Turner Diaries tucked away somewhere on their bookshelf.

Fred Thompson, TN
Jump in W.A.Y.B.A.C. Machine with me as we travel back to that magical time that was May 2007.
Conservatives were putting on sackcloth and gnashing their teeth over their lack of viable candidates (support the guy in the magical underwear; the crossing dressing, gay hugging former mayor; or the likeable former minister from the same godforsaken hell hole that gave the world Bubba Clinton?).
Then riding in on the back of a lame prosecutor porn show that should have been cancelled a kajillion years ago came Reagan Redux, Fred Thompson. Here was another former actor with solidly conservative credentials who could slay the Clinton beast and lead the faithful back to the halcyon days of tiny government, military clout and cultural prominence. At least that was the script.
At the same time, riding a way of MySpace buzz, Arizona troupe were supposedly going to lead metal out of the emo-core doldrums. Instead they farted out Genesis, another generic slab of hardcore and death metal.
Just as Job for a Cowboy failed to match their impressive hype, Thompson’s campaign has wallowed early on, dogged by persistent allegations that he’s too lazy to really run for President. Despite all the hype and hopes, Thompson and JFAC both turned out to be another warmed over slice of more of the same.