Elephants! There are Elephants!

The number of elephants in the room is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Be careful where you step there. Haven't had a chance to keep up with the mucking out of the place lately.

I'm talking about how we select our presidential nominees, obviously. The elephants weren't simply milling around yesterday. They were trumpeting loudly and it was almost impossible to concentrate on ignoring them any longer.

The primary process we have adopted is a disaster. It is totally dysfunctional and largely unrepresentative. It disenfranchises the majority of the nation and leaves a minuscule and insignificant portion of the states making the choice of who carries the party banner. It is subject to manipulation and there is no way it can offer a two party system the best possible candidates to lead a nation forward in the 21st century.

We are tradition-bound to let Iowa have a "first-in-the-nation" caucus. A caucus is a quaint and archaic community meeting in which largely emotional and often directly employed representative of candidates attempt to sway their neighbors into a public declaration of support. Participation, even in a high-focus caucus such as Iowa, is disproportionately small. But impact on the reputation, momentum and subsequent primaries is disproportionately large. Be careful of those tusks there, he's just trying to nuzzle you.

Move then to New Hampshire. The entire state could be dropped into a dozen metro areas in the nation and still have room to put Rhode Island in with it. The population is less than over a hundred cities in America. It is as un-diverse as anyplace in the country except for possibly a Montgomery Alabama Klan meeting. These people egotistically demand a face-to-face meeting with all of the candidates to judge them. When you've got such a small footprint and such a large impact, a focused effort and a lot of money can make you King.

By the time you get to South Carolina, just over 4 million people out of a nation of 320 million have culled the field. This year we had eight contenders at the start. Here we are three weeks into actual citizens expressing a desire for a nominee and four of them are gone: Cain, Bachmann, Huntsman and Perry.

South Carolina is a bit larger. Their population equals the other two states, but you've still only got a total of less than 3% of the nation involved. Finally we find some non-whites, non-Christian, and actually metropolitan area dwellers involved. But, the identification is still the "buckle on the Bible Belt" so you haven't quite achieved representative parity.

Before midnight on Saturday we'll see a two-person field and in short order there is a good chance that Florida will have slammed the door on the process and the remaining 46 states will be conducting largely irrelevant ceremonial rites with regard to presidential nominees. The associated fall-out of that irrelevance is that the down-ballot nominees will be chosen by a much smaller party elite and the cycle of party in-breeding will continue to spiral downward. Watch out for that trunk. She thinks you might have an apple in your pocket or maybe some peanuts. Don't get between her and her calf.

Hey, don't go over in that corner. That big fellow is sort of a rogue. He's the hardest one to ignore. He really makes a mess and is terribly aggressive. He likes to pick up the dung left by the others and throw it at you. Yeah, he's really outrageous.

That's the one we call Main Stream Media. That's ABC News digging up the ex-wife and interviewing her. How tough is that? Do you know anyone's ex-wife? We all know ex-wives. Do you know an ex-wife who says nice things about her former mate? Do you know any, who if given the opportunity years later to derail their ex-spouse on the public stage, wouldn't do it? How about if there were some money thrown in for the interview? And what if we sweeten the deal by making out the new, younger, better-looking wife as some sort of amoral, ambitious tart?

Right behind MSM, the big rogue is his brother. We call him King. He's the CNN toad who starts a presidential debate with some sleaze then has a stunned look when he walks into a professionally delivered haymaker, loses the audience and isn't smart enough to change the subject.

Yeah, watch out for the elephants in the room. It's getting to be a bloody zoo in here.