Pre-Game Analysis, Only It's Wednesday

The Chief: Good afternoon, loyal readers. It has come to our attention that some of you feel as if we did not handle this week's fight properly when we allowed Doug and Tony to literally throw their arms up in the air and say, "It doesn't matter what we say, you're going to vote for Bartlet anyway." We should have realized that you, the loyal reader, don't want to hear them bitch about how life is unfair. You just want to hear them discuss presidential fighting. You guys got cheated, and that's not right. To make it up to you, we got Doug and Tony and we forced them to take this fight seriously.

Doug: This is nonsense, what do you want from me?

The Chief: We want you to actually weigh in on who you think would win this fight.

Doug: Roosevelt-Lincoln? We're not doing that yet. That's next week.

The Chief: No, not Roosevelt-Lincoln. I'm talking about Pierce-Bartlet.

Doug: I already did.

The Chief: No, you went on a tirade about how no one cares what you think and you accused the voters of not actually reading the post, and you implied that most of this week's voters only show up when Bartlet is up.

Doug: Nonsense. We always get 160+ votes in our first 24 hours of voting.

The Chief: What I want you to do is to actually give us your thoughts on how a fight between Pierce and Bartlet would go down.

Doug: Well, let's see. Franklin Pierce is a good decade younger. He has military experience, as opposed to Bartlet, who has none. Bartlet has multiple sclerosis which has left him temporarily paralyzed.

The Chief: You're saying Pierce has the upper-hand?

Doug: No, I'm not finished. On the other hand Pierce was a lousy president. And he's pretty forgettable. No one knows who he is or when he served except for history nerds like myself. I mean, look at how many Twitter followers he has:

He has 230. Somewhat impressive, I guess.

Bartlet, on the other hand, was on a popular TV show that has won a lot of Emmy's. Look at how many Twitter followers he has.

Whoa! That's over 100x Pierce's followers!

The Chief: But we're trying to see who would win a physical fight, not who is more popular.

Doug: But he's smart, and really good at debating.

The Chief: Does he have any experience fighting? Was he in the military? Was he even an athlete?

Doug: I don't think so.

The Chief: What about his MS? You said that sometimes he could become paralyzed. Do you think that would make him a good fighter?

Doug: I don't know. I guess we should ask his Twitter followers.

The Chief: Okay, you know who has even more followers than Bartlet?

Doug: Whoa! Over 100,000 followers? Good thing he's British not eligible for the presidency because that dude would clean up in the Arena!

The Chief: Okay, I think I've had enough of your sarcasm. Let's move on to Tony.

Doug: You're sick of my sarcasm, so you're going to move on to Tony?

Tony: Gee, thanks.

The Chief: Oy.

Tony: Look, you want to talk about Bartlet? Fine, we'll talk about Bartlet.

The Chief: Doug seems to think his M.S. would be an issue.

Tony: Oh, he would think that, wouldn't he? The fact is, Bartlet was in remarkably good health for most of his eight years in office. He suffered, what, three M.S.-related attacks in all that time? And it's not like those attacks knocked him on his ass for weeks on end. You slide Bartlet into the Arena on any random day of his presidency, and you've got great odds that the fighter you're going to get is going to be, relative to the Arena, at least, rather robust.

"Relative to the Arena" being the key term, here.

The Chief: Okay, but Bartlet doesn't have any military experience.

Tony: Well, that's true. But you've gotta admit, the man's got stones. The kind of stones that lead him to cursing out God in Latin in the middle of the National Cathedral. That's some serious stones. I mean, it takes stones to curse out God in any language at any place, but that's just a triple whammy of cojones, right there.

The Chief: Right, but again... no military experience.

Tony: Cojones is Spanish for balls.

The Chief: I know. Hey, did you know you're supposed to italicize words when they're from other languages?

Tony: Every word in English is from another language, so nyeh.

Damn right.

The Chief: Military experience.

Tony: Okay, confession time: I don't give a rip about what a hot damn general Pierce was. Why? Because of the raging drunkenness. Pierce's raging drunkenness, that is.

The Chief: Okay, here we go.

Tony: I'm just saying, you've got a much better chance at pulling out a pickled Pierce than you have banking a bedridden Bartlet.

The Chief: ...

Tony: Sorry.

The Chief: No, you're not. However, aren't you forgetting the affect Pierce's alcoholism would have on Bartlet?


Tony: Eh?

The Chief: Bartlet's Chief of Staff is this guy:

Tony: Bartlet keeps Leo around because a) Leo is awesome, and b) they're old friends. Neither description applies to Pierce. Bartlet is going to unload a whole heaping helping of Catholic badassery on Pierce, and frankly, Pierce is going to be lucky if there's enough of him left to bury after it.

The Chief: Well, there you have it, folks. An occasionally honest pre-game analysis delivered in the middle of the game. How... splendid.

Vote here if you haven't already. Polls close Friday at 9am MST.