As Election Super Bowl Tuesday looms, slogans are flooding the airwaves and talking heads jerking off over digital networks. With the side attraction candidates now on the newsunworthy sidelines, it is mano a mano time: Bill-supported Hillary vs. JFK-scent Obama and Admiral Big Mac vs. the Olympics-sized CEO Romney. Tomorrow will show the world just how American democracy works, the electoral college-bound Rube Goldberg contraption that allows pockets of regionally-minded voters, jerry-rigged delegate rules and a last-minute, last-ditch advertizing blitz to masquerade as political choice. Now that the warm-up Iowa Caucus and town meetings of New Hampshire have been proudly displayed as proof we are a nation of concerned voters, the two parties can break out the cigars and place the oil-profit crown on the great hope that promises to deliver the spoils to the White House in November. Politics is the media orgy of our time; we all get drunk with promises and laid on with promises. Not until after we pull the lever will we know that we can’t help puking and ending up with a hangover that lasts about four years. Most of us, so the polls tell us, are still reeling from the last time around.

There are plenty of issues to campaign about. The economy is in the recession-bound Red Zone and most economists think the stimulus packages being thrown up hail-Mary into the air will be dropped in the end. After all we have troops locked into a war that even a troop surge cannot rescue from political stalemate. Take your pick of the non-Pauline candidates, the score will be the same: less money in your wallet and more national debt for being the world’s superpower policeman. Would that we had a silly and totally irrelevant reason to pick candidates, like their stand on gay marriage. That worked like a piece of cake last time. But then that election had two white guys mud wrestling, one a war vet from the wrong color state and the other a family (Bush family that is) man who thought Jesus was the greatest philosopher of all time. Now in the semi-finals we have the kind of diversity that makes you dress for your grandmother’s funeral. The Democrats have a woman (so the opposition can’t be too sexist) and an African American (so the race card has to be hidden under the table); the Republicans have a Mormon (who is a latter day conservative saint) and a suspect conservative maverick (who is as old as Methuselah).

Even though Rudy Giuliani has lost his case, retiring as he did in chad-conscious Florida, there is still plenty of Islamophobic venom on the campaign trail. Picking up the Republican mantle, John McCain is refashioning himself as the new Anti-Jihad Terminator. With Arnie’s endorsement in hand and Chuck Norris out of range, Big Mac has gone on the attack. Not so much after Hillary, who he has called a senatorial friend, but the obvious post-9/11 enemy. Forget the amnesty pandering and aisle crossing, McCain wants to focus our attentions on the ratings-approved threat to America. And this is, after a long absence from White House speeches, the easiest target (and the most elusive) of all: Osama Bin Laden.

Remember Osama? McCain does and he is now telling the flock that he personally is willing to go to the “gates of hell” to find Osama. That gets the blood pressure up, for sure, in a way that Rudy was never able to pull off. Hey, this guy survived torture by the Vietcong and a humiliating political defeat by the sitting president, so who better to straight talk himself to the gates of hell. There is a problem, however, with this gung-ho script. Nobody in the present administration, fine Christian men that most of them are, knows where hell is. When the Democrats were in power, then it was clear where hell was; Rush and Jerry Falwell were even handing out maps. But all our spy satellites and CIA informants have so far, at least in the public record, not been able to find hell, let alone to pinpoint in which cave of hell (which must be as large as the state of Texas to accommodate all the sinners damned there) Osama is hiding. Now that Saddam has been dispatched, then perhaps the two evil masterminds are colluding in hell. Damn, we freedom-loving people are in for it now. It could be a Knights of Columbus Hall in Topeka next…

But let’s assume that on Day One of his presidency, President McCain is handed a top secret report that HomeSweetHomeland Security has a plan to find out just where hell is. Hell should be discovered not with technology, but a prayer circle and faith-based reasoning. Let us assume, because it would be obvious, that hell is actually in our own backyard and that backyard is, by vote count, a blue state. Clearly hell is full of people who support gay marriage and may even have sympathy for Mormons (this point would surely appeal to McCain). Just using Fox News exit polls would tell you where hell is most likely to be. Now the next step would be to figure out where the gates are. Assuming that Satan had the foresight to build walls large enough to keep out legal aliens, then the only way to get into hell would be a well-fortified gate or not being able to pay for amnesty in heaven. But Satan would not use conventional weapons; the road to hell would probably look a lot like Disney World (Florida) or Disney Land (California). Some people have long suspected that hell could be a Mickey Mouse fantasy, so both Disney World and Disney Land have been under surveillance at least since the Reagan era.

So where in hell would Osama be likely to hide? Here is where President McCain could call on his support from the Evangelical right. Secretary of State and Guitar Strumming Mike Huckabee could go to the main gate of Disney World (if Florida turned blue) or California (if Governor Conan failed to deliver) and pray for a sign from the Almighty Republican God. He might bring along Arnie, the new National Security Advisor or Chuck Norris, his deputy, just in case. If prayer can move mountains, then getting a ticket into hell should not be that big a hurdle for a conservative sitting in the Oval Office, even in Jerry Falwell is not praying for his soul anymore. But the problem with hell is that it probably is worse getting around it than Home Depot or Walmart, just too big a soul warehouse with too many cheap imitations and temptations. So it might be best to search the scriptures (or Google, if there is a Starbucks nearby) and look for a cave with a dialysis machine (since God cursed Osama with diabetes).

Now, at some point the press corps would have to be alerted that President McCain himself (along with his Secretary of Domestic Extramarital Affairs Rudy Giulianai) would storm the gates of hell only if the cable news networks had their digital cameras clicking. Can’t you see it? Wolf Blitzer in the CNN Situation Room with breaking news: “On McCain’s first day in office, he has gone to hell. Stay tuned to see if he can find Obama.”

Obama? Hell, Obama or Osama, it’s all the same, as special political news analyst Bill Clinton would explains to both the Wolf pack and the Fox den.

Luke R. E. Publican