Not Liveblogging the Final GOP Debate RIGHT NOW!

As I type this, my radio is silent, my television is dark and the only other browser window I have open may or may not feature boobies or videos of cats sleeping.

What I am conspicuously not doing at the moment is watching the last Republican presidential primary debate scheduled before voting begins in earnest to kick off the 2012 presidential election cycle. Well, I say "voting," but it's the Iowa caucuses. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve any actual voting. I will say it's a pretty appropriate name given the ethnic demographics of the state.

By not watching this debate, this brings the number of Republican debates I have successfully not watched to All. I have not watched all the debates. Every single one of them has gone entirely unespied by me. Neither cone nor rod in either of my retinas has been asked to interpret a single gesture or utterance of any of the serious contenders or Herman Cain.

I worry sometimes that I've become the type of Uninformed Voter that I used to spend a lot of time berating and deriding in that adorable, endearing tone of sanctimonious condescension you only get from the chronically overinformed. But no, I don't think I'm one of the Uninformed, even though I've made a concerted effort specifically not to collect relevant data related to the topic of 2012 Republican presidential contenders. There are two reasons for this.

1) Good old fashioned Popsian Exceptionalism. I'm not the same as other people and therefore the same rules do not apply to me. Because I think with my brain and see out of my eyes and am privy to my own thoughts up to and including the most delicate and intricate crystalline webs of rationalization, I can't be held to the same standard as other people. You all out there, with your non-readable brains and inscrutable motivations. If I can't hear what you're thinking, I can only assume you're not thinking anything. Therefore my thought processes are privileged, because I know I've really really thought about them. I even get to invent my own rules of logic. It's one of the perks.

2) I consider it more self-defense. There's a new Anointed Of The Lord frontrunner ever 2-4 weeks it seems. The whole GOP substratum of our society has got all the emotional composure this year of a premenstrual teenager. The whiplash effect in the polling is a threat to most of my emotional soft-tissue centers. It's not the manliest admission you've ever heard, I'm sure, but I'm a liberal, so I'm used to being thought of as kind of a pussy. I use it to my advantage when I can. It gets me out of things. Mostly home improvement and car repair.

I'm also not paying attention because I don't want to get sucked into the game of Would You Rather? As in: which one would you rather see run against Obama in the general election? And I don't even want to consider it. Because people are terrible at it. And the one you thought you wanted fighting Superman is the one who ends up being made entirely out of kryptonite. People don't like Barack Obama all that much. And the economy thing... still not awesome. So as much fun as it may be to hope for the plutocrat with the space-based religion or the tubby dumb-smart guy who looks like your grandmother or that guy who likes to fuck, we don't know what the election will look like. Anyone who tells you they do is either a liar or on cable news. All of the contenders scare me, not just as opponents of the dude I'm likely to vote for, but because once one of them get past the primaries, they have about a 1 in 2 chance of becoming president. And look, I just wet myself a little.

The only good news is that by taking the long view, you are more likely to spot trends than others caught up in the friction heat of the moment. Gingrich is up now, but as I said, the shelf-life of a frontrunner is not impressively long. Sure, we're reaching the point where the music will stop and someone will be left with the last chair. But I'm not sure we won't keep circling long enough for it to end up being one of the two who haven't been shoved out in front yet: Ron Paul or Jon Huntsman.

If it does come down to process of elimination, though, I have to admit it's most likely to be Mitt Romney. He's the GOP 2012 version of John Kerry 2004: he's the guy you vote for because all the interesting ones made the mistake of being interesting too soon in the process. And if we know anything about the modern office of the presidency, nothing precludes you from it faster or more comprehensively than interestingness. Yes, George Bush II was interesting in the drunk-uncle-messianic-eschatologist kind of way. But remember who we tried really hard to elect over him in the first place.