Fuck Iowa. How come a bunch of cow-tipping sheep fuckers get to set the tone of the presidential election?
–Curly, via the Blind Cavefish
Today the voters of Iowa meet throughout the state to pick their candidates for President. The caucuses are a hideously complicated, direct democracy sort of process so I won’t go into the mechanics of things. I thought, however, as we officially begin the Presidential Election season now might be a good time to comment pithily on our prospects for the next four or eight years.
I love the Democrat slate. I know better, but I like to think that in a sane country none of these blow-dried nitwits would have even the slightest chance of being entrusted with the most powerful office on the Earth. I love ’em because they demonstrate perfectly what is wrong with the party of Jefferson and Jackson. There’s not an individual among them. Nobody who wants to do right for all of the people of the country, they only want to do right by the various groups that back them. It’s a bloviating commercial for special interests.
Exhibit A – A white woman with a philandering husband whose only qualification for office is that she cares and wants to give each polarized little interest group well-funded Holiday gifts.
Exhibit B – A black man who rose from poverty to B-list celebrity level obscurity whose only qualification for office seems to be that he’s a really nice guy.
Exhibit C – A white man who made astronomical sums of money off of other people’s pain and suffering whose primary qualification for office seems to be that he thinks he’s Williams Jennings Bryan and is only one campaign away from matching the Great Commoner’s total.
All that’s missing is a gay hermaphroditic amputee to complete the collection. Sadly, if there was a person matching that description in the running they’d be a shoo-in for the nomination. And there’s really a 50/50 chance that these people might be running the country? Hell, look at the quote at top – do you want those sort of people determining your President?
The Republicans ain’t much better this time around. A northeastern Mormon with a flip-flopping problem, a short, socially liberal New Yorker with a speech impediment, a Martian citizen who thinks that flipping the “L” around in revolution to spell “love” backwards is the height of creative campaigning, a by-God Baptist preacher who thinks that international diplomacy would be a lot simpler with hall monitors and a fine, upstanding, consistent, noble citizen of Tennessee who just doesn’t seem to care all that much about the campaign either way.
All things considered, my vote is for whoever seems to least want the job. Does anyone truly believe that lusting after an office of enormous power and responsibility is a qualification for that office? Aaron Burr’s great sin was not that he was a traitor or an unscrupulous man: his great sin was that he openly coveted and campaigned for the various offices and trusts that he gained. There was a time when merely to proclaim oneself interested in an office, to openly seek and campaign for said office, was to render oneself unfit for that office.
Nowadays the campaigns start at birth. One President isn’t fairly in before politicians are jockeying to be the next to take the oath. How long have we been dealing with active campaigning for this November’s election? Since early 2007? Early 2004? Since November of 2000? Christ. Six or eight months of blowing hot air is too goddamn much, eighteen or twenty-four months is completely unacceptable.
Want to know why the Arctic glaciers are melting at a rate higher than anything potential global warming could cause? The Presidential Election started twelve months too early.