Primary season, which appears to have begun about a week after the 2004 presidential elections, is getting sillier with each passing day. This is thanks to the media, which not only feast on the season’s daily menu, but attempt to predigest it for the American people.

As fuzzy as the process of the selection of the two party’s presidential nominees appears to be, the media’s goal is as clear as day: to make it fuzzier and to influence the outcomes.

They do it by attaching great importance to a host of factors that are really meaningless, not the least of which is citing national polls to indicate the front-runners, while carefully ignoring those factors which will decide the outcome.

They know that national polls are worthless indicators of which candidates are probable winners, but that doesn’t stop them from proclaiming that the alleged winners in those polls are the front-runners in the race for their party’s nomination.

Given that false assumption, Rudy Giuliani emerges as the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Primaries, however, are not decided by national polls, they are decided by the voters in the primary states. Giuliani may be the front-runner in national polls, but he’s barely in the race in such states as Iowa and New Hampshire – the earliest contests where victory goes a long way in indicating which candidates are the likely nominees when the dust clears. And Giuliani himself admits it, pinning his hopes on the states whose primaries come much later and he is popular.

When Rudy Giuliani loses in Iowa and when Rudy Giuliani loses in New Hampshire and South Carolina, his standing in the national polls will also plunge.

What is now going on is what’s been going on for decades in presidential primaries – you have all of these leakers leaking information, such as the Drudge Report’s contention that the Democrats want Mike Huckabee to win the GOP nomination because they believe he’d be the easiest Republican to beat in the general election.

Translated, that means that Huckabee really scares the pants off the Democrats, who hope they can prevent him from being the GOP nominee by persuading Republican voters from voting for someone else because Huckabee is a sure loser. Continued...