Presidential Game

I have a new game. I watch the presidential campaign news with half my brain shut down. I don't need illegal drugs, I have a natural gift! Besides, my doctors prescribe brain-shutting-down medicine, because it makes me so darn happy. They've seen me not happy, and it wasn't pretty.

[Right: Me not happy, from the Wes Archives.]

So let's put those filters up and examine the 2008 presidential race not with our right brains or our left brains, but with our leftover brains!

I was especially excited last week when McCain camp said Obama isn't fit to be president because the leaders of Hamas have said he's the Cat's Meow. The exact quote used was a statement by Ahmed Yousef who said in an interview: “We don’t mind — actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will [win] the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, he is like Kennedy, the Cat's Meow. Of course Kennedy loved Israel and would have despised us and crushed us militarily, but hey, he was American, you take what you can get."

Subsequently McCain deflected similar charges against him by sort of renouncing his endorsement from John Hagee, the man who said "Everybody gets me wrong when I say the Catholic Church is the Great Whore. I didn't mean ALL of the Catholic Church, just most of it. Gee, lighten up people." McCain says he still likes Hagee 'cause he has that old-timey religion, but he now acknowledges that Hagee is political rat-bait. His exact words (this part I'm not making up!), in response to being asked whether it was a mistake to accept Hagee's endorsement were, "oh, probably, sure." He then went on to say that, still, he was "glad to have his endorsement."

In other election news, Hillary Clinton has charged Obama as being "out of touch" for saying working class Americans are bitter. She went on to explain, "Where was he when they came out with Prozac? I've been using it since I married Bill! Bitter? Who, me?"

Speaking of questionable endorsements, Hillary Clinton has been endorsed by none other than the ring-leader of the vast right-wing conspiracy, conservative billionaire publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, who sank millions of dollars into the effort to keep Whitewater alive. Tomorrow Barrack Obama will charge that Clinton is unfit to be president because, "That is just so whacked."

In the latest news, upon hearing Obama say that McCain would be a better president than Bush, Clinton responded with, "We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain." McCain responded with, "We need a nominee who is John McCain; and let me tell you, I am not bitter either." Hamas responded with, "John McCain is better than Bush, but he is no John Kennedy. We never knew John Kennedy, but, look at McCain, he is surely no John Kennedy." Hagee responded with, "John Kennedy is just what we don't need. We need a candidate that won't suck at the tits of the Great Whore. I did NOT just say John Kennedy would have sucked at the tits of the Great Whore. We need John McCain." Richard Mellon Scaife responded to that with, "Twinkle twinkle little bat."

Questions for Further Abuse

1. Turn to your neighbor on your right and explain to him or her how the identity of endorsers became more important than all other issues such as the economy, the war(s), health care, homelessness, the environment, education, racism, energy, or food prices. If you have no neighbor on your right, talk to the wall until the bell rings.

2. Compare and contrast the odiousness of endorsements from Hamas, Hagee, and Scaife. Remember, comparisons themselves are odious, so wash your hands after.

3. Obtain drug treatment if necessary. Then, when you are clean and sober, listen to Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues on a continuous loop for five hours. Now you're clean and sober, and nevertheless half your brain is out to lunch. See? I told you it was possible.

Don't Not Preach On!

I couldn't remember just now what I was going to write about. Then I spotted the story about Chuck Norris saying McCain's "too old to handle the pressures of being president." Chuck Norris is a spry 67 while McCain is a decrepit whole four years older, at 71.

[Left: Chuck Norris in '76, or John Edwards in '94?]

Which reminded me, I was going to talk about reasons not to not vote for presidential candidates. I don't want to tell readers how to vote, because that would be presumptuous of me. But some of the reasons I've seen given for NOT voting for certain candidates are sheer bovine doody.

That John McCain will, if elected, be a year and a half older than Reagan upon his first election, means nothing. After all, we went and re-elected Reagan when he was two and a half years older than what McCain will be. So we just have to all agree, scouts honor, to only elect McCain once.

Also his full name is John Sidney McCain The Third. Do NOT NOT vote for someone because one of his names is "The".

Let's examine a few of the other candidates now, in no particular order.

Some say Hillary Clinton shouldn't be president because she 1) screwed up that national health care initiative of hers back in '94, and because 2) she's married to Bill. Actually, 1) Congress fails to pass lots of good laws and 2) Mrs. Lincoln was Mary Todd.

Lincoln is an excellent source of counterexamples. Too tall -- Lincoln. Too inexperienced -- Lincoln. Dude slept with a man -- Lincoln.

Mitt Romney is a Mormon. While most decent Americans his age were learning how to make bongs out of tin cans and aluminum foil, Mitt Romney was speaking to Frenchmen, telling them the good news that Jesus had vacationed in America. Who cares? The important thing is, he didn't inhale.

Barack Obama has people saying he isn't black enough. Evidently, none of these people have noticed that ALL of his Democratic Party rivals are less black than he is. It makes me worry that we put too much emphasis in K-12 on the three Rs, and not enough emphasis on encouraging consciousness.

[Left: Photoshopped white enough?]

Then governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee declared 1997 a year of racial reconciliation in that state, rather than propose any significant civil rights legislation. On the other hand, as a minister, he took proactive steps to integrate his church. He is a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University. Ouachita is most likely pronounced "ouch-itta". One must look deeper to excuse oneself from voting for him.

Dennis Kucinich, a leprechaun, was the keynote speaker of a North American Street Newspaper Association conference attended by yours truly. I can vouch that he is shorter than my Grandmother, who was a genuine pixy woman. He once saw a flying thing, while at Shirley MacLaine's house, and admitted he couldn't identify it. He is more than twice the age of his hot babe wife. While mayor of Cleveland in the 70s he so offended the Mafia, they sent a hit man after him. Hey, no one's perfect.

[Above Right: Kucinich in '78, or Eric Burdon of The Animals in '64?]

Fred Thompson played D.A. Arthur Branch on Law and Order, a TV show. If he were a liberal Democrat that would be grounds for calling him just another wacko Hollywood liberal. But he's not a liberal so you can't hold that against him.

John Edwards looks like your rosy-cheeked paperboy, but people say they wouldn't vote for him because he's sued the American Red Cross three times for distributing AIDS contaminated blood. It goes to show what an "ambulance chaser" he's been. But it was his JOB to sue the American Red Cross for distributing AIDS contaminated blood. Haven't you ever done things you didn't want to do while working for The Man?

Short and quick: I haven't mentioned Guiliani, Ron Paul, Gravel, or any of more than a dozen declared third party candidates. That's NOT a reason to not vote for any of them. This column has 666 words.

[Below: The author depicted as the Beast Of Another, Unlisted, Number.]

Bump In The Road

© Dr. Wes Browning

President Clinton says we did all right

To bomb Serbs eighty days and some nights

"We did it the right way," he says gleefully

"We'll finish the job! Take it from me!"

And you know there could be somethin' to that

We might have done right for an actual fact

I heard we bombed Serbians only with bombs

We didn't drop anything else on their lawns.

Sorry about that last rhyme. I meant it to be better but I came to a "bump in the road", such as the ones that slowed the Kosovo peace settlement and the end to our bombing. In my case the bump in the road was the English Language. In America's case it was real bumps in the road from the Macedonian coast to Belgrade.

Those damn bumps! Isn't that always the way it is when you're trying to bomb the bejeesus out of some people and forcing them to submit to your will? I know it is for me. People are always resisting. You're just trying to have a perfect little war with perfect airplanes where no one, absolutely no one, who was anyone important dies, is that asking too much?

But nooooo. There's got to be bumps in the road. I even heard some of the road was blown up! And even where it wasn't, there were actual enemy soldiers who didn't want us to march to Belgrade, and homes full of people lining the roads, that didn't want us to march to Belgrade.

And homes empty of people lining the roads, people who have already expressed their opinion about us marching to Belgrade in the most emphatic way imaginable, by laying their bodies down and dying, to be bumps in the road. It's just so very frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating bumps in the road, and aren't we always, you will find in this issue a story about how our city officials are looking into ways to improve services for the homeless, and incidently cut costs for those services, by tracking the homeless better.

The trouble with the way it is now, every time you turn a homeless person away from a shelter because there's no space left on the floor, you lose that person in the dark of the night, and wouldn't recognize her/him if you saw him again.

Why wouldn't you recognize her/him? Because there are thousands of her/him that's why, if there were only twenty or thirty, everybody could just remember what they looked like.

But I digress. The point is there are thousands of homeless not getting into shelters, and we all know that, but the funds needed to build more shelters are constantly being denied on the basis of the fact that no one knows who those people are.

I know who those people are, they are bumps in the road.

We will have shelters enough for everybody, trust us America, down the road, we are doing the right thing, we are doing it the right way, it'll be a little slower than expected, there are bumps in the road.

Well I got off on a tangent again. I meant to deliver a powerful polemic on the subject of software solutions to hardware problems and vice versa, but I got carried away by this whole road thing.

But what I really regret is that I have failed to make room for the deep sociological analysis that I was going to provide that was going to explain what the War in Kosovo and tagging homeless people in Seattle have each to do with what we all are really most interested in these days, the revelations in the press regarding Charles Kuralt's mistress.

Oh well. Meanwhile here's a poem I wrote in honor of dear Charles, may he rest in peace and good cheer, and may there be no more bumps in his road.

Late to the Wake

We've come too late t' the wake, I see,

The man's been dead two years or three!

His last word said upon his bed,

Was "Pat"! not "Rose Bud"! nor even "Dead"!

Who's Pat? all asked, around the room.

A long lost friend, they'd all assume.

But not so long lost as all that,

A fishing partner was fair Pat!

To be precise, Charles made the fish,

for Pat to catch and make a wish,

then put him back in his fish den

the Magic Fish to leap again

& again & again, for near thirty years,

for Fishing always gave Charles cheer.