(SNARK: The blunders are real, but the results are -- as far as I know -- entirely invented.)
A coalition of Las Vegas bookmakers lambasted House Minority Leader John Boehner and other senior Republican lawmakers today for their part in the GOP's 4,651st idiotic statement or event since President Barack Obama was sworn into office.
"These nut jobs are killing our betting lines for the November election," said Bookmaker Pro Senior Vice President George Winston. "Every time it looks like the Democrats' latest mini blunder is going to mean enough seats go GOP that we'll clean up on the people betting on the Democrats to keep control of the House, some Republican or Tea Partier comes out with some idiotic crap about how people don't want unemployment insurance or Obama isn't a native-born American or health care killed the dinosaurs."
The press secretaries for numerous Republican leaders on Capitol Hill declined to comment on the story, citing busy committee schedules.
"What's even scarier," Oddsmaker Senior Analyst Tami Sanchez said, "is that he's not doing it to collect on an anti-GOP bet.
"I would understand if he was trying to just blow his party up so he could make some ridiculously huge pile of money and start a new party or buy enough land to form his own Conservatopia and secede, but he's just genuinely a fucking moron. The only betting we have him doing was as part of a fundraiser after all those Republican governors were elected. It was a $5 bet for at least one Republican to win in November. Our lowest bet is $5, and the payoff for winning that bet is $5.10. The next-lowest bet placed at that fundraiser that night was for $1,500."
An independent analysis shows that after a Democrat makes a big mistake or is perceived as having made one, political betting surges 63 percent in the next five hours. But when a Republican or Tea Party member says something focus groups think is dumber than a box of hair, people actually cancel their bets.
For example, after a New York Times article and video composite purported to show Connecticut Senate candidate Dick Blumenthal lying about his service record, "a small but dedicated group of bettors dumped tens of thousands of dollars into bets on his opponent," Winston said. "Blumenthal did some work to clean up after that, and that tightened things up again, so that was nice because you don't want to have a race so uneven that one candidate is running essentially at 1:1. We want the numbers to be competitive, not lopsided."
As races get closer to being 1:1, the payoff fall and gamblers are less likely to risk money, Winston explained.
"But with Mark Kirk, boy, that guy keeps finding bullets to fire into his feet," he said. "He went from being this education savant and intelligence war hero to being a guy who was just a cog in the machine in a couple of places. We've had people call up wanting to bet 'for whoever's running against that Kirk jackass.' Every correction he issues needs a correction. It's a political perpetual motion machine."
But most of the partisan gaffery has been negative, and some has resulted in disgusted bettors.
"We actually have a fee now," Sanchez said, "where if you cancel a political bet made more than five hours ago on a race that's playing out in November, you forfeit a quarter of the money, just because it was getting so ridiculous with people pulling out so much. They'd watch the morning talk shows, about how Joe Scarborough thought Republicans were doing so well, and then on the evening news shows, just ... everything from that budget with no numbers to that chicken bartering garbage, stuff about eliminating entire government departments and eliminating civil rights. There's about 5 percent of the fiscally conservative part of the country that actually wants that crap, and it's all Boehner and those pea-brained opportunists can do to keep looking for parts of the government to eliminate.
"And that 5 percent isn't betting on anything. Those tea baggers must be putting their money in coffee cans -- they're not betting with it. When tea baggers win, Vegas loses."
The chairman of the Nevada Gaming Industry, Walt McDonnell, said the gambling catastrophe between Dr. Rand Paul's primary win and interview on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show was the worst.
"We had people actually call in, after doing their political betting online, and ask if they could have a full refund after the Maddow show," McDonnell said. "The morning after that show, they hear about how Rand looked like Orval Faubas up there, and they wanted all of their money back. Every penny.
"And they said they'd sue Paul's campaign if they didn't get it back. And quite a few of these people were very honest and forthcoming in saying that they hadn't even ever watched that show before, but they saw the footage, heard people saying he was just a disaster and so even though they liked him as a candidate, planned to vote for him in November, he'd just killed his chances statewide by saying all those stupid things about African-Americans. It was one of the biggest dramas we've had with political betting since Gore v. Bush.
"We put that fee in place that afternoon."
A spokesman for Paul said the candidate would not be conducting more unsolicited interviews with media outlets "looking to make a story out of him, not make him the story."
Another industry insider, who spoke anonymously on betting associated with the Nevada Senate race, said he'd never seen more people reverse their bets than they did on Harry Reid.
"This is a candidate who was dead in the water in the polling," the insider said. "Just absolutely atrocious. You couldn't make the odds good enough to get people to bet on him keeping his job. And then Sue Lowden comes out with that chicken bartering bullshit, and now you have Sharron Angle trying to dismantle the government before she's even gotten a single absentee ballot. It's insane. We have Reid running at 4:3 to win the seat, which means you're going to make almost no money if he wins, and every time we give him better odds, more people are buying in because Reid just has no chance of losing against these clowns. They're running as far to the right as they can in an electorate that just elected a black man as president, for fuck's sake. We practically can't give away odds that Sharron Angle wins. I may well hand them out to kids on Halloween just to meet quota."
Asked if he'd seen anything like this, the insider said he had not. "It's amazing," he added. "Harry Reid was dead in the water like Gary Hart in '87, and now we're struggling to find odds people are willing to buy on Angle beating him. I bet the folks at Daily Kos never thought the question would be not how badly Reid would lose but how easily he would cruise."