RANT Undecided voters — make up your frickin’ minds! BY BRIAN C. JONES

I know that trying to nominate a man or woman as Most Loathsome Pond Scum Spider-Spit Person of the new American century means there will be many, many candidates.

A holdover from the last century certainly is the Corporate Citizen, who continues to scam stockholders, taxpayers, and workers with creative accounting, Medicare fraud, and other swindles. High on the ballot is the always-entertaining make-it-up-then-lie-about-it Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley breed of New Journalist. A promising entrant is the Board-Certified Hippocratic Hypocrite, out to cure malpractice costs by butchering the legal system, so the next time he saws off the wrong leg you can’t sue for the full amount.

My ballot goes to the Undecided Voter.

Just can’t figure out whether to vote for George W. Bush or John Kerry. Really? It’s a proposition at war with the laws of political physics. Anyone who can tolerate Bush cannot abide Kerry. And visa versa.

If you like that George Bush has sent America’s sons and daughters to do what he avoided himself at their age, if you like his employment-challenged economic recovery, tax cuts for the wealthy, paralyzing budget deficits, war on the environment, and his attack on civil liberties, you cannot consider voting for John Kerry.

If you like the way John Kerry fought in the Vietnam War and returned home to try to halt it, that Kerry is likely to appoint a civilized Supreme Court, and will tend to support a liberal can-do approach to social and economic injustice, you cannot consider voting for George Bush.

This does not mean that you have to like either guy. But if someone is "undecided," if someone does not have strong, can’t-get-to-sleep opinions about these two, it means he or she either is lying to the pollsters or hasn’t been paying attention.

My guess is that it’s both. When Gallup phones an Undecided Voter, the pollster reaches a voter watching reality TV or professional wrestling, surfing the Web for porn or racing out the door to feed a herd of slot machines. The Undecided Voter explains his ignorance of the questions by claiming to still be consulting his staff of academic and political advisors.

But the real reason I loath the Undecided Voter is that he or she is likely to end up running the country. It’s not lefties like me that George Bush and John Kerry care about this election year, nor my opposite number across the political divide.

It doesn’t matter how much time I or my evil twin put in with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, how many hours we stare at C-Span and Fox News, how often we listen to Imus and Rush, or that we set our browsers to an all-news home page.

The guy or gal that Bush and Kerry care most about is the one who cares least about them. This election is of, for, and about the prodigal voter. And as the campaign focuses on swing states and undecided voters, Kerry and Bush will tailor their politics to those who have no emotional stake in the outcome.

My solution — since the Undecided Voter poses a national security risk — is that he or she and their ilk be rounded up by Homeland Security and kept at Guantanamo Bay, at least though November 3, under the care of Private First Class Lynndie England and her playful band of photographers. This will keep the rest of us safe, and give the undecided time to consider what happens to democracy, and the individual’s place in it, when voters don’t care.