Rick Moran argues that the GOP race is a mess, and it's certainly tough to disagree with that. It is entirely possible that there will be five primaries with five different winners, and a "small but not impossible chance" that they could enter their convention without a nominee.

A Thompson win in South Carolina would help Giuliani in Florida as it would weaken his two main rivals in the state McCain and Romney. Thus, the unthinkable prospect of 5 different GOP candidates winning one of 5 early races would come true and all 5 would move on to Super Tuesday on February 5, laying claim to some legitimacy as a potential nominee.

But it is an eternity to Super Tuesday and between now and then, you will witness the spectacle of Republicans playing with the tag "frontrunner" as it were a hot potato.

Short of going into a coma, is there any way to just postpone all elections permanently? (Actually, there is, and Ted Rall and many on the left predicted it would happen. I'm beginning to think that my counter prediction will come true -- and that Bush will actually step down next January and his replacement will be sworn in.)

Rick's analysis alerted me to something I'd frankly rather not have heard about, and that is the Huckabee plan to amend the Constitution to make it conform to what he calls "God's standards":

...The idea that the Constitution should be amended to reflect the religious beliefs of any group is so far beyond the pale that it may very well drive most secular Republicans and even some evangelicals away from his candidacy. This is the price Huckabee is paying for pandering to evangelicals and setting himself up as a "Christian leader." Eventually, he was going to go too far in order to excite his base. Well, his base may be pleased but he very well could have lost most of the rest of the party then and there.

I don't know how I feel about Romney's victory yesterday, for the simple reason that I cannot get a fix on Romney. McCain makes me uneasy, and I continue to support Fred Thompson. Frankly what bothers me the most about last night is not so much that Fred didn't win, but that that Ron Paul outpolled him.

But I guess that's life in the activist-dominated primary system.

I worry that the primary system leads people to think along the lines of "If you don't like it, don't vote!" because participating in activities you don't like does not tend to make them go away.

As that Texas cook said, "There's just some things you gotta do. Don't mean you have to like it."

Maybe I should take more pleasure in complaining!

MORE: Ann Althouse looks at Romney's plasticity:

...he might be closer to what I thought than he appeared or at least pragmatic and accommodating on the social issues.