So I realized last week that I must be the only columnist that hasn’t mentioned the Democratic presidential primary yet. This is mostly because I’ve been holding out for one of the candidates to court my endorsement. Thankfully, I checked my mail this weekend and discovered a gift basket containing some policy materials outlining Millard Fillmore’s position on why he believes snow creek berry is the best flavor of Boone’s Farm. Unfortunately, I simultaneously concluded that a prolonged winter has made me delusional.

That also means, however, that I’m uniquely able to report on the race, which by all credible accounts is completely insane. For instance, some folks have been baffled at the apparent contradiction between Hillary Clinton’s parting remarks at a debate in Texas, “Seriously, Barack, dude. Seriously. You’re great.” And her comments at a press conference a few days later, “WTF BARACK, SHAME ON YOU.” I think the difficulty people are having here is that they’re not accustomed to listening to hive minds.

Imagine it as something like the Borg. Every thought in a politician’s head is arduously constructed by committee, and then filtered through regressively competent focus groups until it retains only a passing semblance to normal cognition. This enables them to proportion the appeal of their message with the amount of money in their war chest. That’s why you never hear about candidates with no money: individual moral conviction and executive savvy hasn’t been a winning strategy since FDR. And if you’re skeptical as to how effective this strategy is, that last recorded successful extraction of a solid position from a hive mind was Mark 5:13.

Now, you could still be wondering what raised the ire of at least 51 percent of Hillary’s constituent thought generating machines, and for that you’ll have to look to Ohio. Barack’s campaign released a number of mailers that purport to briefly describe deficiencies in Hillary’s health care policy. They consist of text, and some typical photos of Hillary looking mad with ambition and Barack chilling with some scientists. One datum that Hillary described as especially objectionable was this quote from the Daily Iowan’s endorsement editorial: “.forcing those who cannot afford health insurance to buy it through mandates. punishing those who don’t fall in line with fines.” Well, I completely agree: I find the inclusion of this quote completely offensive.

The Daily Iowan? Shame on you, Barack Obama! I guarantee you that we have published infinitely more incendiary quotes than this. I’ll make one right now: Hillary Clinton’s policy on the capital gains tax can best be described as supporting the wholesale raw consumption of baby kittens. Really, if you’re going to syndicate part of an Op-Ed piece from a student newspaper, you might as well take it from your home state. Think of it as an earmark. More importantly, we have a way bigger circulation than the Daily Iowan: 20,000 to 19,500. I could make a papier-mache sculpture of Hillary Clinton abusing orphans with 500 newspapers.

Actually, after spending some time perusing the source of this quote, I’ve noticed some startling similarities to our dear rag. First of all, the Daily Iowan is an independently owned student newspaper with a roughly 130-year record of student-run journalism. It has also won multiple National Pacemaker awards, the “Pulitzer prize” of student journalism. It even has a thriving colony of anonymous online commentators, hell-bent on explaining their personal philosophy of what makes “quality” journalism. I think the only logical conclusion we can arrive at from these facts is that we’ve been cloned.

But more importantly, that means Barack Obama supports large-scale human and institutional cloning. I am aghast. At least Hillary Clinton wouldn’t send my genes off to increase the quality of journalism at some other University. Well, to be frank, I don’t quite know her policy stance on that issue. However, I have noticed some startling similarities.

Justin is a senior in religious studies. His clone at Iowa is Beau Elliot.