Willard M. Romney: This is easy. If Mitt wins the GOP nomination and the general election, he’ll sell off all the Soul’s assets. Whatever remains of the Soul after that, he’ll trade to the Devil for future considerations.

Barack Obama: Obama seems almost certain to win the Democratic party nomination for president and, given the sudden carnivorous turn the Republicans have taken, only slightly less certain to win the general election.

If he does win, he’ll probably lodge the Soul in comfort at Camp David, careful to keep it away from newspapers and the internet—what if the Soul developed a taste for news or porn on the president’s watch? We don’t need another custody battle so soon—and promise it a job in a year or two, maybe three, four tops. He’ll trot it out for feel-good state functions involving one-legged champion wrestlers or universally beloved school teachers or the opening of a solar panel manufacturing facility, and fit it with a pair of custom-made blinders to wear on those occasions when the president is about to do something truly depraved, like strike a deal with Republicans to reduce Medicare benefits or blow up a bunch of third-world women and kids for no good reason. Because there are some things you don’t want the Soul of America to see, for the good of us all.

Ron Paul: If Ron Paul wins the battle for the Soul of America, the Soul is pretty much on its own and will likely end up as a massively pregnant stoner panhandling on a street corner and passing out fliers warning against an impending assault by forces of the outlawed Federal Reserve.

Vote wisely, vote well and vote often.

We have not a single prominent political figure to the left of your average John Birch Society aficionado speaking out against eternal war and our increasingly predatory national security state. People who oppose those sorts of things are desperately parched. The overwhelming number of Obama supporters glide past these issues as though they don’t exist; once Paul is off stage again, you will not hear a whisper of anti-imperial criticism from them aimed at the president. And that is precisely why those outraged liberals want him off stage again, and want any attention or praise paid his rhetoric in the meanwhile to be seen as beyond the pale.

Barack Obama believes the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. He likes them. He uses them enthusiastically. Ron Paul believes all sorts of weird and unsavory shit, but he doesn’t believe that the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. You don’t want Ron Paul siphoning off liberal/left enthusiasm? Then take those issues away from him and make them your own; they are, after all, progressive bread and butter issues. Can’t, though, can you?

(Obama also used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture to mount a stirring defense of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, which makes him not only an imperialist and authoritarian but an enormous asshole as well. And doesn’t say a lot for the Nobel selection committee either. But that’s another story.)

But like Glen Campbell in “True Grit,” Rick Perry ain’t dead yet. (Although we should note that Campbell’s character was fatally wounded at the time.) The alleged Texas governor managed to find his way to the press room to slather some soothing “Aw Shucks” balm on reporters after the debate, and his campaign sent out an email fundraising appeal not long after that.

We’ve all had human moments. President Obama is still trying to find all 57 states. Ronald Reagan got lost somewhere on the Pacific Highway in an answer to a debate question. Gerald Ford ate a tamale without removing the husk. And tonight Rick Perry forgot the third agency he wants to eliminate. Just goes to show there are too damn many federal agencies.

The governor said it best afterwards: “I’m glad I had my boots on, because I sure stepped in it tonight.”

While the media froths over this all too human moment, we thought we would take this opportunity to ask your help in doing something much more constructive: write us to let us know what federal agency you would most like to forget.

Is it the EPA and its job-killing zealots? The NLRB and its czar-like dictates? The edu-crats at the Department of Education who aim to control your local curriculum?

Send your answer to forgetmenot@rickperry.org, and if you are on twitter join us in using a new twitter hashtag: #forgetmenot. And, if you could, throw in a $5 contribution for every agency you would like to forget. We hope you have a long list. And we promise we will write down every last idea. So we don’t forget.

Still standing in our Boots,
Team Perry

Not bad, really, considering; it won’t win him any converts but as a tourniquet, it’s not bad. Returning to “True Grit,” though, somewhere in the upper echelons of the Perry campaign is a guy echoing the sentiments of fairly bad guy Tom Chaney: “Everything happens to me. Now I’m shot by a child.”