Rick Santorum is back! Is Herman Cain next? Do you think Rick Perry is kicking himself for dropping out of this race? Paging Sarah Palin!!!

The keepers of political conventional wisdom are sobbing in a bar next to the gamblers who took the Pats and gave the points. Nothing is deterministic in sports or politics. This is why they play the game (and hold the election).

Yes, those were beauty contests last night, nonbinding, ineffectual, pointless in the strict sense. But how would you feel if you were Mitt Romney this morning? You picture him yanking the bell cord and wondering why no one appears with the coffee and the papers. He was trounced in two of the three states and lost the third even though everyone assumed he’d win. He didn’t exactly compete in them, but still. Where’s the Romney love?

Romney now has to go after Rick Santorum, but Santorum doesn’t have baggage like Newt Gingrich. Santorum’s baggage is the carry-on kind. He’s never been drummed out of the leadership, never took millions from Freddie Mac, never had a blow-up in his personal life. He’s uncalculated, steady, long-winded, wonky, and sweater-vest earnest.

Romney’s main argument against a Santorum candidacy may be that he, Romney, has more money to compete nationally in expensive media markets. But, um, this is not an argument. Wealth is a strategic advantage but not an intellectual or ideological virtue. Romney right now has to be very careful that he doesn’t look like a spoiled kid who didn’t get enough presents on his birthday.

[So maybe that’s a headline that goes from the obscure to the incomprehensible. But I bet the Google spiders can read it. Welcome to language in the 21st Century: Humans are not the primary audience anymore.]

[Before I forget: Happy birthday, Charles Dickens!]

I just read the Karen Handel resignation letter, and it’s tough slogging, a bit like picking through tornado debris in search of a survivor. She’s basically saying, this wasn’t just my idea to defund Planned Parenthood, this was a group effort, a team effort, a Board effort, and I don’t like being blamed for this situation and thrown under the bus. This seems to be in response to a whisper campaign against her, as in this anonymously sourced HuffPo piece. That article pins the fiasco on Handel, who is reportedly anti-abortion.

The truth will now be clouded by the selective memories of partisans, publicists and lawyers.

What we need here, as we need so often in life, is a French-style literary deconstructionist, or a semiotician, or someone really fabulous who can swoop in — wearing a cape, probably — and tell us what’s true and false, what really happened, what people are really saying. A decoder. A decipherer. I’m kind of picturing myself here. The cape in particular is appealing, and the tights (implicit).

I’m going to try to snag a job as a semiotician to fill out the remainder of my professional career now that newspapers are becoming something that comes inside a Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrapper.

As a deconstructionist I could help Karl Rove rethink the Clint Eastwood Super Bowl ad. I thought it was beautifully done and surprisingly moving. The sentiments were patriotic. The script was

Last week we learned that the economy added 243,000 jobs in January. Now we know that roughly a third of them were jobs in Madonna’s halftime show. Herein lies the secret to America’s economic recovery: More cowbell.

In the old days, a football halftime show featured a marching band that awed and astonished the crowd by playing instruments while somehow not colliding with anything. Now, a marching band is just a tiny element of a much larger production with a Greco-Roman-Egyptian-Sumerian-Babylonian theme. Over-the-top is the baseline, and then you add elements, including potty-mouthed rappers, cheerleaders and a guy bouncing on a high wire. Watching Madonna last night, everyone surely had the same thought: This number needs parachuting barbarians. We need Genghis Khan and his hordes making a big entrance! And where was Noah’s ark? Couldn’t we get some elephants in there, some zebras, some llamas? A major missed opportunity.

I’m all fired up for Super Bowl Forty-something. Instantaneous translation of Roman numerals into American numerals ain’t a skill I ever mastered. It’s all Vs and Xx and Ls and Is and if they start throwing in a C or and M there’s no hope. I feel my lips moving as I try to figure out which Super Bowl this is. Why don’t we go all the way and make elevator buttons Romanic? Life is too easy as it is. Let’s build character by confusing everyone constantly.

I’ve inserted the fuel rods in the Big Green Egg and will soon attempt to cook a very large portion of a pig. The Egg, as I’ve said many times, is my new grill, which is great so long as it doesn’t achieve nuclear fission and melt down through the Earth’s crust. People will say: “Where are the hot dogs?” And I’ll answer: “China.”

And of course I made chili, a very special batch, using exotic dried chili peppers that I soaked and blended to give the chili a foreboding crimson hue. It’s important to have the right peppers. These are, I believe, from a species of pepper plant that is listed as Endangered, and indeed it’s possible that these are the very last ones. But will my guests appreciate that? It’s so hard to impress people these days, what with how everyone’s a foodie, and you have to use meat from animals that you’ve personally raised, bottle-fed, educated, combed, cuddled and slaughtered. Whatever happened to chili in the can? Hormel, anyone?

Mitt Romney campaigning in New Hampshire (Photo by Shane Achenbach) I usually don’t like it when the media play Gotcha and take a perfectly innocent if inartful comment and make it sound heinous. But the latest Romney gaffe is stuck in my gills. It does make him sound, as Jonah Goldberg has noted, like “a caricature of a conventionally stiff country club Republican.” It makes me think he’s out of touch with the merely affluent.

The very poor? They’re just a category, a demographic, a socioeconomic unit, a quintile on a graph. They’re not people.

When he talks of “fixing” holes in the safety net he sounds like a rancher who may have trouble with a fence.

The truth is, we don’t talk about the poor much. Obama talks about the fabled middle-class all the time. Obama, at least, has been middle-class, while it’s probably been a while since Romney knew what that felt like, if he ever did. It’s true that America’s special national power emerges from a vibrant middle class, but when politicians hammer this note too often it can sound like they’re channeling their political consultants.