Iowa watch: We’ll have fun fun fun!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2012

Our best friend makes us a promise: Tonight, the “press corps” will finally stop speculating (guessing) about the way Iowa will turn out.

What will these fly-weights do instead? Last night, at the end of her cable show, one of your best friends told you. Can you spot a recurrent theme in the lady’s remarks? To watch the display, click here:

MADDOW (1/2/12): The Republican Party’s 2012 nominating contest begins officially tomorrow night at 7 o’clock Central Time, 8 p.m. Eastern, when the doors will be closed at Republican caucuses in Iowa. Caucus-goers will congregate at nearly 1,800 precinct gatherings around the state. After everybody recites the pledge of allegiance, the caucus chairman and secretary will be elected and then any candidates or the representatives get to make short speeches. Then comes the main order of business, a vote by secret ballot in a presidential preference poll.

The results will be tallied right then and there, announced at the meeting and sent to the state Republican Party, which will tally up all the precinct totals in a secret location. Secret, they say, because party officials are apparently afraid that Occupy Iowa protesters may try to disrupt the counting process, even though the Occupy protesters say that will do no such thing.

Anyway, after the super-secret tallying is done, Iowa Republican fraidy-cat Party officials will tell the rest of us who has won. And it will be a very fun night.

Iowa Democrats will be caucusing tomorrow night as well. For Democrats, the process is a little bit weirder and more complicated. This is what it looked like last time around. But thank goodness, I will not realy have to explain it because the only candidate caucusing for the Democratic vote this time around is President Obama. So he will win and he is therefore going to spend caucus night video-conferencing with Iowa voters and taking their questions, live-streamed over the Internet.

So it’s all fun, it is all interesting. And our coverage of it starts in 2012 earnest at 6 p.m. Eastern tomorrow night.

MSNBC’s live coverage of the Iowa caucuses, I’ll be joined here in New York by Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell, by the Reverend Al Sharpton and by the MSNBC political analyst Steve Schmidt, who ran the McCain/Palin campaign in 2008.

My friend Chris Matthews will be hosting along with us from Des Moines, Iowa. And Chris Hayes will be anchoring late-night coverage of the Iowa caucuses when we are all done and spent.

So, join us here tomorrow starting at 6 p.m. Eastern. I promise it will be the overlap in the Venn diagram between a long night and fun night. That will be us right there.

As best we can tell, we’re going to have a lot of “fun” with our friends. If memory serves, this is the way Uncle Walt sold us that famous mouse club.

Maddow pimps these clubhouse themes a lot, in a wide array of ways. Rachel Maddow is your best friend. This is the way she gets us dogs to eat the nightly dog food.