Mess Neutral

There’s this game, you might have heard of it, it is really popular!

It involves racing round and round in circles over the same ground, chasing after your pals. Every time it looks like one of them is getting ahead, you all chuck loads of crap at them to drag them back, not forgetting to drop plenty of obstacles behind you to try and hinder those still biting at your heels.

Yes! I’m talking about the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidate Race!

Wait! Did you think for a second I was talking about Mario Kart?

Invoke the hidden GOP mode by entering B-A-START D-U-B-Y-A on the menu screen!

Politics in America always seems so much funner than at home. Such drama! Such insistence on letting crazy people run! Such bloody long campaigns! Do you know how far in advance Gordon Brown called for the general election last year? One month. One month! How many alleged affairs with flip-flopping grizzly bears that you can see from your back yard in Russia from whom you have been taking backhanders can you really expose in that length of time? Hmm?

Fortunately, the cycle in America takes a very, very long time, which affords the rest of the world a great deal of entertainment, especially with such a field of all-star nutjobs they’ve assembled this time. As I grew increasingly absorbed by the tit-for-tat debates, flat-tax wars and bigotry one-upmanship, I could not help but notice how similar the merry-go-round of frontrunners was to the world’s favourite virtual karting franchise.

What happens as soon as you’re out front? You fall under intense scrutiny and attacks from every quarter- you get bombarded with everyone else’s homing shells and are given only shitty banana skins to defend yourself with. If only the candidates would pay attention to their karting counterparts they might pick up a few tips.

But who’s who in the ultimate Mario Kart GOP race? I will tell you who! Because I’m determined to make this analogy last all the way to the Rainbow Road, where all those gay-fearing plonkers will duly drive over the edge.

THE SPIRAL INTO MORAL DECAY

Newt Gingrich is… Wario!

At first, all the evidence was pointing to Gingrich being Mario: the pot belly, the affairs with a succession of damsels. Ultimately though, Mario is a good, down-to-earth guy; there’s just no way to reconcile this courageous working-class hero with perhaps the most grasping of all the candidates. Wario, on the other hand, is the only character with enough delusions of grandeur/evil to stand a chance of keeping up with Newt, and is probably pocketing a gold coin or two being “consulted” by the failing Mushroom Kingdom mortage lenders.

Rick Perry is…Donkey Kong!

Well, this was the easiest match up by far. They don’t look too bright, huh? But we shouldn’t judge people on how they look! No, we should judge them by their ability to string an intelligent sentence together, which is something these poor chimps struggle with. While most of the fleeting front-runners crumbled under increased media scrutiny, Perry merely slipped on a succession of his own banana skins.

Michele Bachmann is…Yoshi!

What? She’s not Princess Peach?! I will not fall prey to such lazy gender-based comparisons! No, I think you’ll find many more parallels between she-of-the-faraway-eyes and a dinosaur, that go beyond their prehistoric outlooks.

The amount of eggs that Yoshi spews out, he must have a similar level of fostering experience to Bachmann, but the deal-clincher here is in their personal lives. Michele’s hubby Marcus Bachmann is so into his gay conversion camps, and we all know that means he must secretly be very gay and very repressed. Romancing someone with a repressed sexual identity is something Yoshi knows all about, thanks to his dinoromantic partner, Birdo. I wonder if Michele has a lesbian tongue like Yoshi too.

Rick Santorum is…Bowser!

Just because a friend of mine said Santorum is pure evil. Santorum’s been bumping around in relative obscurity, but is starting to make a late surge in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. Everyone knows though that Bowser takes aaaages to accelerate, so it’s gonna be too late for him. Hurrah!

Mitt Romney is…Princess Peach!

United in their 1%-ness (Princess Peach is apparently worth $1.3 billion) are the only character with any real political power in the Mushroom Kingdom and the only character in the Republican race with any real chance of winning. It’s hard to pair up Mitt with anyone, because even virtual people have more personality than he does.

Honourable Mentions

Hermain Cain - It was a shame for entertainment’s sake when Herman Cain dropped out. If I had to pair him with anybody, it’d probably be Luigi for the Italian food connection. Although Cain may physically resemble Mario a little more, Luigi still has a ‘tache, and looks more like an alleged sexual harrasser.

Ron Paul – Excluded yet again! But my reasons are valid: just like in the GOP, Ron Paul doesn’t quite fit in with the Mario Kart drivers. Of the two main characters left, there’s no way he’d pander to aristocracy like Toad, and Koopa Troopa is definitely a communist.