Let's judge the 2016 candidates by their website photos

Circle gets the square! One of these people could walk away with $10,000 in cash and prizes!

We're all very busy these days. Well, I'm not. But you probably are. And I'm guessing you don't have time to get to know all the candidates for president: who they are, how they spell their names, and what they generally stand for. You may only have enough time to visit each candidate's official campaign website for 5 to 10 seconds apiece, stare at the picture on the homepage, and move on with your life. After all, that gaping chest wound of yours isn't going to cauterize itself. The clock is ticking. Well, don't you worry, because I've visited the websites of the major remaining candidates, and I'm here to make some snap judgments about them, drawing mostly on purely superficial crap. Please do join me.

BEN CARSON

Talk to me. Pull up a chair and bend ol' Benny's ear for a while. That's why he's here.

HOT TAKE: Okay, this is just plain weird and unsettling. Ben Carson is the only one of the major candidates whose welcome photo seems to have been shot in a gray, featureless void. All the other candidates opted for real, recognizable locations. Was this pic actually taken in one of the corridors on the Death Star? Is that what's happening here? That queasy half-smile of his is creeping me out, as is his leaning-forward posture, and the way he has his hands folded. Is he a Bond villain? A serial killer who only kills other serial killers? "Heal * Inspire * Revive." Is this a political campaign or a goddamned day spa? Anyway, I have this theory that the candidates' photos will reveal how liberal or conservative they are. You'll notice that Dr. Carson is all the way to the right in his picture. Enough said. Also, couldn't he get a comfier chair? That's the kind of chair you sit in when you're sent down to the principal's office for talking in class.

DONALD TRUMP

Is that a peace sign? What is this, Woodstock? GET A JOB, HIPPIE!

HOT TAKE: Of all the candidates whose sites I visited, Trump had the biggest welcome image. No surprise there. I actually couldn't get the whole thing on the screen at once, so the red banner with the the word TRUMP at the top got cut off. Sorry. The rest is what you see here: Donald doing the classic "bunny ears" thing over his own campaign slogan, as if that slogan were some clueless underclassman he's been hazing all week. "Seniors rule! Freshmen drool!" You'll notice he's on the right side of the screen, too, just like Ben Carson, and they both have that "I'm a bad widdle boy" smile going. The most badass thing about Trump's site is that you can get there by typing jebbush.com into your web browser. Try it. I'm not kidding. Otherwise, this is very dull. I wanted everything to be written in money font, with maybe a shiny gold border around the edges. Step up your Scrooge McDuck game, Donald!

TED CRUZ

I swear, this is not a picture of a crooked faith healer.

HOT TAKE: Ooh, black and white! Classy! Notice where Ted is standing? Right in the center of the picture. I think that's to show that he's not an extremist like Trump or Carson, even though the former just called him "a maniac," so make of that what you will. It cannot be ignored that Ted Cruz has basically given himself a halo here, and he has his hands pressed flat together like a Precious Moments figurine of a praying child, so he's just maybe courting evangelicals with this image. Much more interesting to me, though, is the rambling slogan at the right. It's just a delicious, cheesy omelet of pure nonsense. "I'm running for President because we need to build a dynamic nation where anybody with nothing can achieve anything." So, conversely, nobody with something can achieve nothing? I'm lost, Ted. Stop praying to baby Jesus for a second and toss me a life preserver. At least he knows how to smile properly.

MARCO RUBIO

RubioBot is ready to lead America. And he makes crushed ice, too!

HOT TAKE: Well, are you ready for a new American century? A century in which the cyborgs take over the country and wrest control of the government from us lowly, imperfect meatbags with all our messy emotions? What is this thing you hu-mans call love? Marco Rubio™ is not programmed for love. Marco Rubio™ is confused by hu-mans and their hu-man feelings, but he cannot help but be curious and perhaps even yearn for something beyond the parameters of his pre-programmed system specifications. There's a prog rock concept album in this somewhere. His heart is human. His blood is boiling. His brain IBM. Even those words in the lower left-hand corner sound like something a lurching, clanking 1950s robot might say in a monotone. "Must.... watch... videos... Need... sensory... stimulation... Beep... Boop..." Another odd decision here is to put the candidate behind what looks like a tinted windshield. Is that so we won't touch him and get our oily hands on his delicate circuits?

JEB BUSH

"That's how you're gonna beat 'em, Jeb! They keep underestimating you."

HOT TAKE: This campaign has been an endless, joyless death march for Jeb Bush, and the strain is clearly showing in this picture. The mouth is smiling. The rest of the face is... not. It's too late to say we're sorry. How would he know? Why should he care? Please don't bother trying to find him. He's not there. Saturday Night Live just made fun of the poor guy for using "Jeb!" with an exclamation point as his campaign slogan, but I kind of like it. It reminds me of the old days of the Internet, when there were exclamation points at the end of seemingly every name. Maybe I'm misremembering that, and it was just Yahoo! Anyway, I don't know if Jeb (or Jeb!) stole the red "I'm In" button from Ted Cruz or vice versa, but I genuinely like the fact that he's being photographed with American servicemen. After all, they're the ones who ultimately have to risk their asses for the politicians of world. Why shouldn't they be front and center in this election?

HILLARY CLINTON

She goes through so much Purell on the campaign trail. So, so much Purell.

HOT TAKE: Hillary has, by far, the most modest welcome image of any of the major candidates. It's actually more of a banner and only takes up half the screen. By the bottom half of the screen, Hil's already into her talking points. ("Hillary's economic plan: raise middle-class incomes." Sounds pretty sweet.) In this respect, she's the anti-Trump. I wonder if this is just efficiency, or are women in politics expected to maintain a certain level of decorum and refrain from bragging about themselves too much, lest they upset the menfolk? I sensed that Condoleezza Rice was under this particular kind of strain when she was Secretary of State under Bush #2. It was like Condi was always telling herself, "Be good. Smile. Be nice." And then she'd go home at the end of the day and just scream for a half hour until her vocal cords were shredded. Anyway, you'll notice that Hillary is all the way to the left of the screen in her picture. And clad in bright blue, too! Is this subtext or just regular text?

BERNIE SANDERS

That's very interesting, sir, but can you PLEASE tell me your order? There are people waiting.

HOT TAKE: Well, Bernie ruined my theory. He's the furthest left on the political spectrum, but he's standing on the right in this photo. GODDAMN YOU, SANDERS! Anyway, the Bern-meister always looks haggard and disheveled whenever he's filmed or photographed, but at least his hair is relatively under control here. Smiling's not his bag, though. Never has been. I wonder about the shirtsleeves. They don't reach his wrists, yet they're not really rolled up in the classic "let's get to work!" fashion either. It's like he pushed his sleeves to the top of his forearms and rebuttoned the cuffs just south of his elbows. Is that comfortable? If not, is that why he's so grouchy all the time? It's hard to tell at this size, but I think he's wearing jeans. That's a nice touch. Really, a button-up shirt with jeans is how I dressed for work for years, so Bernie and I have a lot in common, fashion-wise. I also notice something odd about the photos of Bernie, Hillary, and Jeb. Why are there never any black people in these pictures? All three candidates are awash in a sea of peach-colored flesh.

Celebrity Halloween Masks: A Primer

The Point Break gang in their presidential masks. Does this arouse you in any way?

Blame it on Point Break. Without that popular 1991 thriller and its quartet of bank robbers disguised as, respectively, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Lyndon Johnson, the phenomenon of presidential Halloween masks would not be as prominent as it is today, in my opinion. The fad didn't start with Point Break, obviously, but Katherine Bigelow's film kept it going far beyond all reason. As it is, the small-but-vital industry of latex masks designed to look like rubbery, hollow-eyed likenesses of famous people is still dominated to this very day by prominent politicians: presidents, ex-presidents, presidential candidates, and even a couple of powerful governors and congressmen. I wanted to do a little article about "celebrity Halloween masks," but I kept running into the same few faces over and over. It doesn't really matter which site you're exploring. When it comes to masks based on famous people, presidents and presidential wannabes rule all. Pretty much every Chief of State from Kennedy to Obama is represented in this form. The best you can hope for is a really off-the-wall, inaccurate likeness. Take this truly awful so-called "George Bush Sr." mask, which looks to me more like Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The thing on the left is supposed to be George Bush, Sr. The thing on the right is Flea.

Aside from anomalies like that, what will you really find if you go shopping for celebrity Halloween masks in 2015? Exactly what you'd expect: a lot of Obamas, Hillarys, and Trumps, a handful of Chris Christies and Arnold Schwarzeneggers, plus some leftover Mitt Romneys, John McCains, Sarah Palins, and even a few stray Newt Gingrinches if you really go looking. Because of his marital proximity to presumptive Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton is back in a big way as a mask this year. Among the other ex-presidents, Richard Nixon is still the most popular, of course, but there are a surprising amount of Reagan masks, too. Dubya's still up there in popularity. Bush, Sr., JFK, and Carter are less common but not unheard of, while LBJ is relatively scarce. And as for Gerald Ford masks? Sorry, Ger, but those are strictly Ebay collectibles in 2015. There are plenty of Rob Ford masks, though, in honor of the buffoonish, crack-smoking ex-mayor of Toronto. In case you're planning to do a hyper-complete Point Break remake with a nine-man robbery team, here are all the presidents from Kennedy to Bush II as Halloween masks.

American History Latex: Nine ex-presidents as Halloween masks.

That'll stick with you for a while, won't it? Yep, it's difficult to get those images out of your mind. Once seen, they cannot be unseen. You'd think that presidential Halloween masks were scary enough on their own, but there is a weird sub-trend happening in this sector of the industry: rendering the politicians as literal monsters from horror movies and TV shows, often zombies, but occasionally vampires and Frankenstein monsters, too. In case you've decided never to sleep again, here's a selection of those types of masks. In this grouping, you'll see zombie Bill Clinton, two different zombie Hillarys, a couple of zombie Obamas, vampire Obama, zombie Dubya, and my personal favorite, Reaganstein. All are available to those with valid credit cards. As Peter Sellers put it in Dr. Strangelove, "It requires only the will to do so."

These monster masks are most definitely NOT a graveyard smash.

Okay, then. There's that. But what about non-political celebrity masks? Do they exist? Eh, sort of. Back in 2010, as you no doubt remember, there was a very messy, widely-publicized power struggle going on in late night television, and this led to a mini-boom in the Halloween mask industry. Of course, the mask makers didn't have the right to use the names of the actual combatants, so a clever manufacturer called Faces by Rubies came up with generic aliases. Jay Leno was "Motor Mouth," David Letterman was "Talk Show Host," and poor Conan O'Brien was "Ex-Talk Show Host." This kind of sly gamesmanship is common in the Halloween costume industry, i.e. "We're not gonna use the real name, but you and I both know who this is supposed to be." The masks themselves were appropriately hideous and bore only a passing resemblance to the real-life comedians on whom they were modeled:

Let this image stay with you throughout the years, my darlings.

Conan O'Brien, in particular, took issue with the appearance of his wizened-looking mask. In a YouTube video uploaded shortly before the debut of his TBS talk show, the ex-Tonight/Late Night host complained: "I look like a burn victim. This is just horrible. This is the face of a 95-year-old man. This is a John McCain mask that they repurposed and slapped some Howdy Doody hair on." O'Brien revisited the mask in his own likeness in 2012, when as part of a Conan segment, he visited a costume shop and found the forlorn "Ex-Talk Show Host" mask among the store's wares. As a clerk giggled and cringed nearby, O'Brien read the description on the package: "Life-like replica of a 66-year-old man-child. Watch him desperately try to win your approval." O'Brien described this text as "very accurate" and then donned the mask himself to deliver a delusional monologue: "I'm still on the air! Why are you all laughing at me? I used to be on network!" This, in turn, led to a bizarre sequence in which the female clerk donned a Conan mask as well and the two Conans pretended to make out as "romantic" music played on the soundtrack.

Apparently, nothing in popular culture has captured the imagination of the Halloween mask industry since the Great Talk Show Wars of 2010. Well, that's not quite true. Charlie Sheen's druggy, hooker-y shenanigans in 2011 inspired a number of masks as well. But that was pretty much it. Frankly, I'm disappointed. There are at least two stores in my neighborhood with a wide variety of Halloween costumes for sale, and I visited both of them hoping to see a fresh selection of celebrity masks. You know what I found? A few politicians and pretty much nothing else. No doubt about it, the industry is in a slump. I was, however, encouraged to see that my local Party City still had a wonderfully creepy mask based on Jim Parsons' popular Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory. Spend a good, long time staring at that eerie rubber face. Doesn't that look less like a lovable sitcom nerd and more like someone who would break into your house at night and slit your throat as you slept? Bazinga indeed.

This is supposed to be Jim Parsons, not Sam Donaldson.

P.S. I dug around a little online and found a second Sheldon Cooper mask for sale. This, I'm sure you will agree, is no improvement.

The last thing you see before you die.