(In general, I try to keep my blog-post titles relatively reserved and save the real invective for the body of the text; however, given the horror with which many conservatives like to pretend to view sexual deviancy, I thought it appropriate thus to highlight Chairman Rudolph’s apparent downfall.)

We have heard that Mr. Giuliani saw Florida’s primary as a “make-or-break” event:

• Giuliani’s Florida strategy about to be put to the test (cnn.com)

In what many political strategists called a risky strategy, the former New York mayor essentially sat out the early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina and focused on Florida and its January 29 primary.

And as his rivals notched victories, Giuliani has mostly been out of the headlines, and his standings in the national polls slipped. He is banking on a win in Florida, with its 57 delegates, to propel him back into the thick of the race and restore his front-runner status.

Florida’s Republicans, then, have broken Giuliani:

• Sources: Giuliani will endorse McCain (politicalticker.cnn.com)

McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had been in “ongoing discussions” with Rudy Giuliani’s campaign about the former New York mayor ending his run and actively endorsing McCain’s candidacy, according to a GOP official familiar with talks.

CNN projected that Arizona Sen. McCain would win the Florida GOP primary Tuesday night, beating former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, with Giuliani in a tight race for third with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Well, at least this time he managed to beat Ron Paul. (That fact speaks volumes — not volumes of praise, mind you — about our electorate and its understanding of words like “freedom” and “liberty”, but hey; this is Florida.)

Going into the New Hampshire primary, I was rather optimistic that Senator Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination was effectively over; I’m bitterly disappointed that it is not. Thus, I’m rather reluctant to dance a gleeful little jig at the apparent death of Giuliani’s Presidential bid; that said, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to come back from this dismal a start.

Of the remaining plausible candidates, only Obama seems likely to even think about writing a memo regarding the possibility that he might one day consider addressing issues like the Federal Reserve’s flamethrower-like monetary policy, knee-jerk “war on terr’uh” military interventionism, the continuing erosion of Constitutional “guarantees” of liberty, and so on. I doubt that he will try to fix such problems, but I naively imagine that he’ll give a little bit of thought towards not fucking things up further as he does the sort of unsustainably stupid things that politicians seem to do these days. The others… uh, not so much. I can’t exactly see Edwards, McCain, Clinton, or Romney restoring habeas corpus or daring to ask the banks why taxpayers ought to bail them out for lending money to people with no income, no jobs or assets.

A more pungent metaphor is in order: all of the present front-running Presidential candidates are shit. Obama, however, may one day progress to fertilizer — for now, he stinks and spreads disease, but one day something useful might grow from the ground upon which he’s spread. The rest, however, are simply infectious human waste, distinguishable mainly by the colours of their buckets (and, if you’re a political pundit with the mainstream media, by their “unique bouquets”.)

Still, we may take some comfort in the (still hypothetical, I warn you) notion that Giuliani has passed down the Presidential toilet into the sewers of political irrelevance.