SUPER, THANKS FOR ASKING

The tornado is already here, so close you can hear the mother throwing shingles from someone else's roof onto your back deck, and the pressure on the eardrums is brutal. No way to outshout it. Not enough gusto in the lungs. No willpower in a tapped soul.

Duck and cover and pray to the gods or whatever for next Wednesday morning. That's when the storm lifts. Until then the horrible shrieking of the Super Duper Tuesday storm -- a freak and twisted twister if ever we saw one -- only grows.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have ads up in Missouri. The Republicans can't be far behind, meaning Mitt Romney, John McCain and (maybe) Mike Huckabee. Four, perhaps five misfits, all claiming they're the only person on Earth worth having as president. Millions of dollars given to them to spend on ads and bumper stickers, yard signs and gurus. Hopeless craziness.

The polls say Missouri is Hillary Country, and if that holds, Sen. Claire McCaskill -- an Obama backer -- will come close to matching Sen. Christopher Bond for bad endorsement judgment. He's a Rudy Giuliani guy, even went down to Florida last week to stump for Hizzoner, and by Feb. 5 Giuliani's campaign will be an unpleasant memory, a smear worthy of its creator.

Even if Rudy limps into Missouri and SD Tuesday, he's nothing. Pollster Rasmussen has it Huckabee and McCain in Missouri, with Romney in third. That same pollster has Missouri Democrats going for Hillary over Obama.

Another new poll has Clinton 13 points ahead of Obama in Missouri. He wins men (38-33), she wins women (55-24). He leads among blacks in Missouri, 45-34. Her lowest support among Dems is in southwest Missouri, and still she leads Omaba, 40-30 (the Ozarks has the biggest share of undecided Democrats in Missouri, at 13 percent).

According to the Research 2000 Missouri Poll, the Republican side of Missouri supports McCain over Huckabee and Romney, but not by much -- 31 percent for McCain, compared to 25 percent for Huckabee and 21 percent for Romney. But that's not so in the Ozarks. Here, Huckabee is the choice of more than one in three southwest Missouri Republicans, according to the poll.

Huckabee, the weird Lokai to Bill Clinton's Bele -- two men from the same small city, both superficially affable, both capable of warped debaucheries most of us could never imagine, crazed excesses that would make the Marquis de Sade flinch.

Huckabee, the former big man who shed more than 100 pounds in a year -- and says he relied only on diet and exercise. It's either steel will inside his brain or he had gastric bypass surgery. We'd rather believe he's crazy.

Huckabee, the Arkansan who told Rolling Stone:

"Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries, and God doesn't," he says. "So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict."

And the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. God, but the twister feels good right now, swirling and shrieking as it blasts out the windows.