Not really a computer at all...

Over at Salon.com, on the Machinist blog, they are trying to figure out which political candidates are Macs and which are PCs. It is hard to justify equating any politician to something as useful as a computer. They simply don't provide the same utility. Perhaps a better analogy would be with a computer program?

• Given the recent news about Huckabee's desire to "isolate" AIDS victims, he is clearly an anti-virus program with a quarantine feature.
• Mitt Romney would definitely be a word processor. That's exactly the program you need if you need to keep editing your positions.
• Clinton would be one of those old programs that has been rebranded with a new interface --but which still does exactly the same thing.
• Giuliani would be a version of SimCity that has a really bad infinite loop bug.
• Obama might be one of those trendy productivity packages that sounds really great until you get it installed, after which you discover you can't figure out what it actually does.
• McCain would be a game of solitaire.
• It is not clear what Thompson would be. (He probably doesn't knows either.) Whatever it is, it would have shipped late. I'd suggest Vista, but Vista looks better than Thompson and runs faster too.
• And Ron Paul? He is a system integrity utility with a full "Constitutional" restore button. You know, one of those really great programs you never think to buy until after your system has already crashed.