St. George Corner, Minnesota — Speaking at a luncheon held at the St. George Sizzler, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus acknowledged what he called “tremendous challenges” in wrangling the multitude of 2016 presidential candidates who have announced, are widely speculated to be announcing soon, or have at some point in their lives said the word “announce.” It is no big secret on the Hill that Priebus was hoping to slim the prospective field of nominees down, as one of the major takeaways from 2012 was that his party ran so many candidates out in front of the public that each had to stake out such extreme right-wing fringe positions that when the general election came around, all hope for moderate votes was lost.
“Make no mistake,” Priebus told those in attendance, “I would much prefer to have a handful of candidates, maybe six tops. That way we can have better control of the message, and keep the more extreme elements out of the debates.” Priebus paused. “But then again, I like money, and the best way as a political party to get money is to pander to the base and defend ideologically entrenched, extremist positions so that both your rabid rank-and-file voters and the super-wealthy SuperPAC owners can flood your party with sweet, sweet moolah,” said the RNC chairman.
Priebus told his audience — who had paid a few hundred dollars a plate for the choice of beef, chicken, fish or a vegetarian selection and one beverage — that he expects the number of candidates to “top out around 180” and that at first he struggled with how to present that many candidates at once. He decided in the long-run, he says, to hire “some of the best and brightest engineering minds from the best Bible and for-profit colleges has to offer” to build out a stage large enough to fit all 180 people vying for the Republican nomination.
“Sure, the Bible college kids are mostly just confused by math that doesn’t have equations that equal ‘Jesus,’ but the rest of them are doing quite well. I expect we’ll have our new stages built just in time for the first debate on Fox News in August,” Mr. Priebus said. “I’m really looking forward to how many different ways ‘fuck the Mexicans’ can be said in as politically-correct a tone as possible. And if we don’t get at least ten minutes of solid debate over who would pardon Hitlery – er I mean Hillary — for her obvious Benghazi crimes, then I feel like we have failed as a party to address the serious issues Americans want us to address.”
The Republican chairman did go on to say that he “understands” the worries of those in his party that are more moderate, and were hoping to overcome the electoral drubbing that they’ve taken in both of the previous presidential elections. The Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections, and conventional wisdom has been that an unfocused primary field could yield the same results — a candidate that the rest of the country has just watched take the hardest-right tack they can possibly take that then has to try and convince everyone they can be less extreme.
“Of course it would be better for us to simply nut-up and tell the lunatic fringe to kiss our balls,” said Priebus, making two testicular analogies. “But right now, the fringe is paying our bills. The Koch brothers advocate for segregated schools for fuck’s sake. It’s 2015 and some of our biggest donors still believe in that mess. So you can see why we’re in one hell of a quandary, can’t you,” asked Priebus rhetorically. “Luckily for us, the Democrats are all acting like Hitlery — oh I am so sorry, Hillary — is predestined and they’re ignoring the one guy who is actually trying to run for president the right way, so we could see them through sheer incompetence fuck this up, like they fucked-up the mid-terms last year…but I guess in the end I just decided that it might be better to embrace the morons while they’re cutting checks. Once they stop paying us so handsomely for representing the ideas of the past, we’ll stop fronting them.”
Priebus says the specially-constructed stages will be easy to set-up and breakdown. He also said that due to the number of candidates on stage, each one will get approximately two seconds to speak, and then the debate will be over. He is advising all the candidates to “pack as much regressive rhetoric” into their two seconds as they possibly can. Priebus has been the RNC chairman since 2011.
