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Friday, March 20, 2015

NAVIGATING THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

I have been trying to make sense of the political landscape in America during this important time preceding the 2016 election campaigns. I have found this terrain to look a lot like Uranus, not in that it is an exciting new frontier, but in that there is very little sign of intelligent life.

I rarely discuss politics because I am afraid of lowering the bar of this already dangerously low forum. If the bar gets any lower I am going to hurt my back trying to get a drink. But I feel that it is important to go over some of the players and issues, because they may come up in a crossword puzzle. Let's run through some of the major topics.

HILLARY CLINTON
Hillary is the major democratic candidate for president, although she is not declaring her candidacy yet. She is waiting to see if anything better comes along, and keeping her options open. She has said that she will let us know after she is elected whether or not she was a candidate. Our vacuum cleaner has taken pretty much the same position, and it is not sure if it will run in 2016.

Ms. Clinton has recently been plagued by an email scandal, and when I heard that I assumed that she had been sexting with Anthony Weiner or someone else's. But the scandal is that she had TWO email addresses, something I can't get that excited about. Congress is afraid that she may have been hiding important emails when she was Secretary of State. So the State Department went through approximately 80,000 emails, and found that all but two of them were cat videos.

JEB BUSH
It is redundant to say "Jeb Bush," since "Jeb" is a nickname composed of his initials, and it would be like saying, "John Ellis Bush Bush." There is such a thing as too much Bush. He is also not a candidate, he is just another guy raising funds for a rainy day. One source said that in high school "he received poor grades and occasionally smoked marijuana," and that when he was 17 he taught English as a second language in Mexico. This sounds similar to my high school career, since I also received poor grades and occasionally smoked marijuana. And I could have taught English as a 4th or 5th language, or math that is sometimes correct.

As governor of Florida, on the issue of immigration, Bush supported a bill that did not pass which would have allowed illegal immigrants to be issued drivers licenses, as long as they proved they could drive better than people in Massachusetts.

Bush also suspended capital punishment in 2006 when an execution was botched, and took 37 minutes. The execution was poorly executed, and I assume they finally just conked the guy over the head with a shovel or something.

RAND PAUL
Rand Paul, or vice versa, is not a candidate for president, even though he hired a campaign manager. He could have saved money there by hiring an imaginary campaign manager. Paul was once an ophthalmologist, which explains why he does not see eye-to-eye with anyone else in Congress. He is possibly a member of the Tea Party and sometimes a Libertarian, depending on what day you ask. He is a supporter of the "Read the Bills Act," a piece of legislation that would require members of Congress to read the bills that they plan to pass. The bill has as yet not passed, since no one has read it.

SCOTT WALKER
Scott Walker is governor of the "badger state," and is currently not a candidate for the office of President of the United States. He believes that marriage should be a union between a man and a woman only, and as a union, should have no funding, power or importance.

RICK PERRY
After a less-than-impressive run for the presidency in 2012, Rick Perry has declared his non-candidacy for the office. He stated, “We are a substantially different, versed candidate,” apparently unaware that he is only one person, and choosing not to perform any of the other verses. Perry is staunchly "pro-life" for fetuses before they are born, but not really in favor of any of them having a particularly good life afterward.

CHRIS CHRISTIE
Christie is emphatically NOT a candidate, a fact that will become apparent when he finally does run for president. Of a possible pending campaign, he has said that he will cross that bridge when he comes to it, if members of his staff have not inadvertently closed it.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
So what I have discovered about American politics is that no one actually runs for president. So if we actually do elect someone it will be our own fault.



Incidentally, some of the aforementioned Republicans recently drafted and signed a letter to the Iranian leadership denouncing President Obama's authority to negotiate a lasting deal regarding Iran's nuclear capabilities. Whether or not you think the letter is a meaningful foreign policy tool or just a bunch of boobs in Congress trying to call attention to themselves does not really matter: the letter was discarded as junk mail along with an ENORMOUS ten-pound catalog from Restoration Hardware.