BLAS LEAVES RACE! NO ONE AFFECTED!! FILM AT ELEVEN!!!!

Mayor Bill De Blasio of New York has ended his bid for the Democratic Party's 2020 nomination for President of the United States. This has caused next to no consternation at all among millions of people who did not know he was running for the Democratic Party's 2020 nomination for President of the United States, that he was (and still is) the Mayor of the City of New York, or that he is a tall man who likes to drive to Brooklyn to go to the gym. In short, he is the political equivalent of William Hughes Mearns' man who wasn't there.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

Enough said.

A word to the Berniacs

“You’re being ridiculous.” So said Sarah Silverman to her fellow Sanders delegates the other day and while I would probably agree with anything Sarah Silverman says—I will admit to a strong attraction to good-looking Jewish girls with potty mouths and big breasts (yes, I am that shallow)—in this case she is right: you are being ridiculous. I knew this months ago, when Bernie Sanders didn’t want to talk about Hillary’s damn emails. No serious candidate for any office throws away an important issue like that unless that candidate is not, in fact, serious. I hate to point this out to all of you Berniacs, but the only person in your crusade who wasn’t feeling the Bern was Bernie. He knew it was a con all along.

So let me tell you Berniacs what the deal was here. Simply put, the fix was in. The fix was in from the start. Hillary and her machine made sure of that. There was never going to be a serious challenge to Hillary. The Clintonistas scared off any other Democrat who might have thought this was a good year to run and then imported Bernie, who wasn’t even a Democrat when the campaign started and has, now that he’s out of it, become an independent yet again.  The role of the Democratic National Conference in this election was to make sure no one threatened Hillary’s chances of getting the nomination, not to be a neutral observer of the people’s will. If you Berniacs thought the DNC was shortchanging your guy’s campaign, then you were right: they were. Hillary has had eight years to plan for this moment and she wasn’t going to let another Obama come out of left field and screw her out of what she thinks she’s entitled to for a lifetime of putting up with Bill’s bimbo eruptions.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz was put in charge of the DNC to make sure nothing got in the way of Hillary’s ambitions and she did her job. Hillary has the nomination and Bernie is going back to Vermont with whatever the Clintons promised him as a payoff. That Debbie got caught in the backlash of the DNC hack scandal is certainly not a great thing for her personally, but for Hillary, Debbie is just one more casualty on her road back to the White House. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, comrades, everyone knows that. 

And now you have Hillary. You must learn to love Hillary, or if you cannot love her, then you must support her in order to keep Trump out of the White House.  You must keep Mick Jagger’s words in your mind, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you can get what you need, or at least, you can get what you need as Hillary defines it.  You must put away your doubts and love Hillary. I know it feels like a betrayal, largely because it is, and I must admit that I feel sorry for you guys, I really do. You are the poor misguided virgin who trusts her boyfriend to slip on a condom just before the cherryectomy, only to discover afterwards that the boyfriend lied about having one. So there you are without your pants on, with a cootch full of his baby batter and wondering, oh my God, what have I done?  Now, you may or may not get pregnant from this great misadventure; chances are you probably won’t, but it does happen, which is why you should have made sure he was wearing the rubber before he got close to you; but what is also true is that from no matter what angle you choose to look at it, you’ve been screwed in more ways than one.  Welcome to the real world, Berniacs.

Still nothing much to say

Even if the well is still pretty dry, it's hard not to wonder about the outcome of the upcoming Democratic primary for mayor of New York.  Will Weiner walk? What will Huma do? And what about Miss Leathers, who gets all hot and bothered listening to wonks debate health care policy? Actually, you really do have to feel sorry for Huma. Here she is, a proud warrioress of Islam, devoted to spreading the True Faith by any means necessary amongst the loathsome kaffirs who dwell in benighted darkness in the Dar al-Harb with their loose women and their thirty minute pizza delivery and their flush toilets, and she is stuck with this idiot Jew who can't stop showing off his tallywhacker to any woman who wants to take a look at it.  Taqqiya has its limits, after all.  Perhaps she thought a little rehab and a lot of hudna would help; the Americans have the attention spans of gnats, you know, and if she could just get this dopey son of apes and pigs to keep his weener in his pants, then all would be well and she could be well on her way to a position of great power and influence amongst the unbelievers, a position where she could aid the cause of Allah and His Prophet, may peas be upon him.  But it wasn’t to be.  Wiener’s weener is once again a topic of conversation throughout the length and breadth of this our Great Republic, and poor Huma, she is stuck with a pathetic loser who has not only turned himself into a joke, he’s made her one too.  Life is horribly unfair sometimes.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: The Civil War came early to Winchester, Virginia, and it stayed late. Between the war’s beginning and end Winchester passed from Union to Confederate and back to Union control no fewer than 72 times, including one prolific day where the town see-sawed back and forth no fewer than thirteen times. Faced with the almost daily reminder of the ever-changing fortunes of war, the good merchants of Winchester protected their personal fortunes with a simple expedient: a split level cash drawer with Union money in the top drawer and Confederate money in the bottom. In this way, they were the loyal citizens of whichever country’s army occupied Winchester on any given day.

Winchester’s merchants were wise in a way that the Democratic Party was not in 1864. When the circumstances of the war changed, the merchants changed with them. The politicians, on the other hand, refused to change, even refused to acknowledge that there had even been a change. The Democrats nominated George McClellan, the former commander of the Army of the Potomac, as their presidential candidate that year, and although McClellan himself repudiated the central plank in the Democratic Party’s platform, that of ending the war with a negotiated peace between the North and the South, Abraham Lincoln knew better. In a memorandum dated 23 August 1864, Lincoln noted that his re-election was unlikely and that he would have to do his utmost to save the Union between Election Day and the presidential inauguration in March, because McClellan would have “…secured his election on such grounds that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”

Lincoln was right; McClellan would have to make peace, whether he wanted to or not. The summer of 1864 was the nadir of American political and military history. The people of the North wanted an end to the never-ending violence that seemed to accomplish nothing and the Democrats were willing to give the electorate that peace if it gave them the White House. In the field, Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland campaign, which saw some the most prolonged and ferocious fighting in the history of warfare up to that time, had come to a bloody halt in the trenches outside of Petersburg, Virginia. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Atlanta campaign was stuck outside the campaign’s eponymous objective. In the West, the Red River campaign, possibly the least explainable military campaign in American military history, ended ingloriously with the engineers having to dam up the Red River so that there would be enough water to float the rest of the army back down the river to its starting point. Politically, Lincoln faced a growing sense of panic in the ranks of his own party; many Republican leaders wanted to hold another convention and nominate someone, anyone, else for President. The conventional wisdom of the day was that Lincoln not only would not win, he could not possibly win.

And then everything changed. On 5 August 1864 Rear Admiral David Farragut ordered his fleet to “…damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead…” and charge through the minefields that protected Mobile Bay to smash the Rebel fleet inside, thereby closing the South’s last major port on the Gulf of Mexico. Less than a month later, Sherman finally forced John Bell Hood’s army out of Atlanta. Atlanta was the rail hub of the South and a major industrial center; the loss of the city meant that food, munitions, and other supplies from the Deep South could no longer reach Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s army would now have to make do with what their commissary corps could find in Virginia and the Carolinas.

Disaster then, as it is wont to do, followed on disaster. Philip Sheridan, commander of the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps, received orders from Grant to destroy Lee’s supply base in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley once and for all. Sheridan, a five foot five Irishman with a six foot seven chip on his shoulder when it came to Southern aristocrats—he had been suspended from West Point for a year following a fight with the scion of such a family—went about his incendiary duties with an pyromaniac’s glee, turning the once verdant Shenandoah Valley into a Dixieland version of Mordor. When a Confederate army surprised and defeated his army early one morning at Cedar Creek, Sheridan single-handedly turned his routed army around and sent them smashing back into the Confederate lines. The Rebel army cracked under the unexpected onslaught, retreating out of the Shenandoah Valley for the last time. Winchester would not change hands again.

What was clearly obvious to the soldiers soon became obvious to the war-weary citizens of the North; the never-ending war was, in fact, coming to an end, and coming to an end without having to tear the nation in half. The national mood lightened, as did the determination to see the thing through, and support for Lincoln began to grow.

And through it all, the Democrats’ message did not change: the war was a disaster, the country wanted peace, emancipation was a mistake, and Lincoln was an illiterate dictatorial buffoon unworthy of the high office he held. They repeated the party line over and over again, perhaps to reassure themselves, perhaps believing that if they said it often enough the voters would ignore what they read in the newspapers and vote to end a war the North was now clearly winning. But whatever the reason, the party leadership and the Democratic press insisted that nothing had changed, that their party’s platform was still relevant, that it was still July 1864, even though the calendar and the war and the electorate had moved on.

The Democrats lost the 1864 election; in fact, they wouldn’t win another presidential election until 1884, and the two noncontiguous terms of Grover Cleveland were the only two Democratic administrations between 1868 and 1912; and a generation of Republican politicians rose to power and prominence by reminding Union veterans that they ought to vote as they shot, and that the Democratic Party, the party that wanted to end emancipation and divide the Union, was now the favored political party of their erstwhile enemies. There isn’t much anyone can learn from this, I suppose, except that denial, whether we’re talking the state or the river, can be a dangerous place for people with a blind spot.

JUST A THOUGHT: My apologies yet again for the lack of posting here; my life has been fairly hectic the past couple of weeks and I haven't been able to give anything the thought necessary for a long piece. So here's something I noticed in all the rush: Senator Obama resigned from his church this past week, this after him saying he could no more disown Rev. Jeremiah Wright than he could disown his own grandmother. Given the alacrity with which the junior Senator from Illinois has just tossed the good parson under the metaphorical bus, Grandma had better make sure young Barry does not have the keys to the front door, lest she be taken and left on the railroad tracks when he needs to win a swing state.

AND THE WINNER IS...: My apologies for the prolonged absence; I have had to endure a spasm of work-related activity these past couple of weeks. In addition to that, I am having an allergic reaction to something in my house; the rash is gone now, for the most part, and the hives have gone from being the size of baseballs to the size of dimes. They itch about the same, though.

In any case, I haven’t had much time to think about anything profound these past two weeks or so, so let me go out on a limb and engage in political prophecy. Come the Democratic convention in Denver in August, the junior Senator from New York is going to offer the junior Senator from Illinois the vice-presidential nomination. At this point, I don’t see either of the two candidates going to the convention with a majority of the delegates, which means that the super-delegates and the Florida and Michigan delegates will provide the margin for victory. The problem with the junior Senator for New York’s winning with these folks is this: the supers are party insiders, and the Florida / Michigan delegates don’t count, at least as the rules stand now. Those two states moved their primaries to an earlier point in the calendar in violation of Democratic Party rules and both campaigns promised to honor those rules. Indeed, the junior Senator from Illinois’ name did not appear on the ballot in those states. But his opponent needs those states to win now, and as those of us who have been watching the lady and her husband’s careers for some time now know, they will do anything to win, even if it means changing the rules in the middle of the game.

The problem with winning this way is this: it alienates the young, the more affluent, and, most importantly, the black vote. If the lady chooses to win in this manner, then there is no way she or any of her supporters in the African American political elites can explain her victory to the vast majority of black voters as anything other than a white woman using her position as a party insider to rig the vote and so steal the election from a black man. This, after the hopes raised by her opponent’s powerful rhetoric, will lead to an inevitable letdown, if not outright anger. Black voters may not vote for the senior Senator from Arizona, but they may decide to sit this election cycle out and not vote at all, which amounts to the same thing. In our 50/50 nation, any large disaffected group can sway an election one way or the other, and the gentle lady from New York cannot have any swaying in any of her core constituencies if she is to have any chance of winning. The only way to inoculate herself from the charge that she got the nomination in a backhanded fashion is to have the junior Senator from Illinois on the ballot with her. And that is my prediction for this month, boys and girls. Come back next month when I intend to do the Bible Code and Nostradamus one better by predicting the outcome of the Olympic water-polo event using the December 1956 edition of the Reader’s Digest as the basis of my prophecy. Now I will go into a trance, the better to divine the future and to ignore that damn rash. OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

HARD SELL: I don’t do a lot of political commentary these days; I figure there’s a lot of people who do that sort of thing better than I can, but every so often I feel the need to indulge so I hope you will bear with me.

The political news these days is that the presidential campaign of the junior Senator from New York is starting to look a little vulnerable around the edges. The junior senator is still the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, of course, but her constant invocation of her “experience” for the job is now causing some of her fellow candidates to point out that she has none. The junior Senator’s campaign staff makes much of her eight years in the White House as First Lady, but it seems to me that this means that the junior Senator’s husband has presidential experience and not the junior Senator; if I want to hire a plumber, I hire a plumber, and not the plumber’s spouse. But you won’t hear this from the junior Senator’s campaign staff, who hype the junior Senator and her nomination’s inevitability with all the verve, gusto, and hard sell of Madison Avenue pitch men who know they have a flawed product on their hands and are trying to sell as many units as possible before the public figures out that once you get past all the glitz, what’s left is a lemon.

CAMPAIGN POSITIONS: Unlike many Democrats, I don’t think about politics morning, noon, and night, even if I am running for my party’s nomination in 2060. This shocks many of my fellow Democrats, for whom politics is not merely a way of wrapping peculation in a sugary but otherwise wholesome covering of chocolate and patriotism, but provides a reason for existence itself. I suppose that one of the benefits of the long 2060 election cycle is that, on occasion, I and my fellow candidates for the nomination get a chance to do other things, like go with the family to the beach, see a movie, or read the paper with some other motive than to see how we’re doing in the polls (I am not doing so well, but I ascribe this to the New York Times’ ongoing embargo of news concerning my candidacy). This is certainly useful for any Presidential candidate; it gives a view of the country and the world that we would otherwise lose amid the constant pressure of campaigning, speechmaking, and reading position papers, campaign strategy memos, and the ingredients on the sides of cereal boxes. Sometimes this down time will even lead to a startling moment of discovery or even provide an idea that might help the campaign. In that case, it is best to strike while the iron is hot, as the old saw has it, and declare your support of the idea before any of your opponents gets to it first and has the sheer unmitigated gall (just for the sake of curiosity, is there such a thing as mitigated gall? If there is, I have not heard of it, but then I lead a very sheltered life) to swipe the idea right out from underneath your nose.

So it was just the other day, when I read in the paper that the government of the People’s Republic of China announced that it and not the Dalai Lama will decide all questions resulting from the unfortunate tendency of certain deceased Tibetan religious leaders to reincarnate themselves in areas outside the reach of the Chinese secret police and most debt collection agencies. This causes the Chinese government no end of distress, as the deceased lama almost invariably leaves a house full of stuff for someone else to sort through and leads the impartial observer inevitably to the suspicion that the lamas have found a somewhat offbeat way of not paying their income taxes. That the government of the People’s Republic does not officially believe in reincarnation in particular or religion in general makes little difference; that government does not really believe in its own founding ideology, either, and seems to be getting on quite well without it, thank you very much. Whatever its ideology, however, the Chinese government insists on its right to control the lives of its citizens, no matter which life they happen to be in at the moment.

I was gobsmacked. The sheer brilliance of the idea stunned me when I first read it, and it stuns me even now that no Democrat has had the wit to see this simple solution to many of the pressing social needs of our time. Therefore, let me be the first Democrat to announce that I fully support government regulation of reincarnation and the equitable redistribution of good karma to those who have had to do without it for much too long. That this is necessary for the long range social health of this our Great Republic is so obvious that it should not require explanation, but let me just say that the centerpiece of any effort to make reincarnation more fair is the need to remove karma from the chaotic effects of the free market. Karma, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, is the Buddhist tenet that what you do in this life governs what happens to you in your next life. A good life begets good karma and hence an even better next life, while an evil life brings suffering and pain in your next incarnation. The whole objective of this cycle of life, suffering, death, and rebirth is the eventual extinction of the individual consciousness in Nirvana, or the E Street Band, if you’re my age, either one being a state of perfect bliss. There are even some great souls who, although entitled to enter this state of perfect bliss, do not, preferring to remain in the cycle of life and death in order to help their fellow human beings reach Nirvana. These great souls are the bodhisattvas, and it is their role that the Chinese government now insists on assuming.

Let me reiterate something here: I do not understand why no Democrat has ever come out in favor of this idea before. Clearly, if we, as Democrats, want to make life more fair and equitable for the great mass of our fellow Americans, which, as Democrats, surely we must, then we must reform the current unfair system of apportioning karma in this country. Relying on the free market and the occasional bodhisattva is no longer enough; the government must step in and regulate the market. Government regulation of karma and reincarnation assures, at long last, the equitable treatment everyone deserves. The bodhisattvas will, at last, be able to move into the eternal bliss of Nirvana that their good actions have earned for them, which has the added benefit of removing them from the scene in such a way that they will not be around to demand the accumulated Social Security checks the government owes them for all of their past lives.

There will be, no doubt about it, the usual carping from the Republicans, who will blather on about the free market and individual responsibility for their own karma and how Democrats are once again instituting another big expensive government bureaucracy without any idea of how the government intends to pay for it beyond jacking everyone’s taxes through the roof, but this, frankly, is just the sort of thing you can expect from a party dedicated to perpetuating societal inequities from one life to the next. Let’s take a look at the karmic free market: poverty and war are still with us, injustice and racism are still with us, the Boston Red Sox and their minions are still with us. Can anyone really say that the vagaries of unregulated karma have been beneficial to the broad spectrum of American citizens? I think we all know the answer to that question.

With government regulation of karma, it will finally be possible to tackle many of the social problems that have, for far too long, plagued our country. Racism will fall by the wayside when the government can guarantee our African American citizens that not only will the government guarantee their equality with white citizens in this life, it can even guarantee that in their next life they will be white as well, despite the bitter cries of reverse discrimination from people who have been white for at least their last five or six lives and have no intention of sharing the whiteness with others. Our traditional supporters in the labor movement will be happy to know that, when I am President, my administration will guarantee that no American worker will be reborn as an Indian or Chinese worker making less than the union wage and that the shameful outsourcing of American souls to foreign countries will cease on the first day of my Presidency. I pledge to all Americans right here and right now: no American will be reborn as a foreigner unless that is their choice and that I will strive to amend the Constitution so that all persons born in the United States shall be reborn in the United States. And I will make sure that the teachers’ unions that there will be more money for teachers and smaller class sizes as well; it has nothing really to do with karma—it’s what they always want and so supporting this is a no-brainer, even if by 2060 class sizes should be so small that there’s no one actually in the classroom.

In any case, regulating karma will lead to a golden age in this country, and provided we can keep control of Congress and the Presidency, for the Democratic Party too; if we can control the bureaucracy that regulates the outflow of karma, we can create enough Democratic voters to keep us in the majority for a very long time to come. It’s not every presidential candidate who can tell his party that if you vote for me in 2060, I will guarantee our party wins the Presidency in 2160 and 2260 and so on and so forth. This was a wonderful idea, even if it was Made in China, and I think we ought to do something about it before anyone can get good karma down at Wal-Mart.

ELECTIONEERING NEWS: I am sure that many of you will be happy to know that my run for the 2060 Democratic Presidential nomination is finally back on track and even, dare I say it at such an early point in my candidacy, acquiring some momentum. The money troubles that plagued the campaign in the beginning have abated somewhat; the money is not exactly pouring in, but the trickle is now a stream of sorts and we have picked up some powerful support. My commitment to raising the refund on all bottles and cans to 75 cents from one end of this our Great Republic to the other has garnered a good sized chunk of the homeless and mentally ill vote, and the good thing about having them on your side is that they are always available, except when they have to line up for their meds at the outpatient clinic, and that five people with multiple personalities can bring a candidate anywhere up to thirty to forty extra votes on Election Day, and a one man voting bloc is nothing to sneeze at, I can tell you.

My opponents still refuse to debate me, that much has not changed, but I am resisting the urge to go negative yet. There seems little point in my pointing out that my honorable opponents routinely behave in an un-Presidential manner when their mothers, of all people, will do that for me, and in public, no less. I don’t believe that I have ever seen a crop of candidates in any election cycle as psychologically immature and unprepared for high office as this one is. But as I said, now is not the time to go negative, I think. If you start with this sort of thing too early in the election cycle, I’ve found, you tend to turn off the voters, who will always associate you with negativity. This is not a good thing for anyone trying to gain elective office.

I have to say, though, that the thought of going negative now is pretty damn tempting, I can tell you. It’s not just the jejune nature of my fellow candidates, it’s that here we are facing the second half of the 21st century and for reasons I am not sure I fathom the Democratic Party was and is the party of nostalgia. It’s as if the last bright idea any Democrat ever had was the New Deal, and let’s face it, even that wasn’t everything Democrats crack it up to be. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not run in 1932 and 1936 on 54—40 or fight or on Tippecanoe and Tyler too, and yet all anyone ever seems to hear from us Democrats is the same old New Deal programs repackaged for a new generation. We keep appealing to the same old class warfare nostrums without thinking that the same old class of people we aim those nostrums at have picked up and moved on. But we don’t want to hear that, because that would mean having to change the game and we like the game as it is, even if it is way out of date.

Still, there may be hope for these Democratic stalwarts. A new underclass may emerge, although just where we’d find this new set of potential voters is a little hard to figure out. We could convince California and its scads of underprivileged to rejoin the Union, even if more than one cynic has pointed out that back in the day, Baja California didn’t start in Oakland, or we could ask the Mexicans if they would rent Texas back to the United States for a little while. That doesn’t seem very likely to me, though. The reemergence of Mexico as a world power was certainly one of the more surprising developments of the past century and I saw in the New York Times the other day that Russia demanded that Mexico stop its ongoing aggression at the latest meeting of the Security Council. The Mexicans denied that they were committing any aggressive acts against Russia—they always deny their hostile intent, no matter what the circumstances—but this time the Russians had proof: a live satellite feed showing shadowy figures in blue jeans and baseball caps crossing the Bering Sea bridge on foot in the middle of the night. Then the Russians showed many of these same people standing outside a 7—11 in the Siberian city of Yakutsk, waiting for los rusos to come and give them a day job working construction or digging snow in the hot July sun. The tenor of the meeting was definitely hostile, with the Russians claiming that their country was not going to meet the same fate as the Disunited States and the Dominion of Nuestra Senora la Virgen de Guadalupe, which I always think sounds so much better than Canada anyway, even if it's hard to get all of that on a bottle of ginger ale, and that the Russian armed forces would use force if need be to halt this ongoing attack on the sacred soil of the Rodina. The Mexican ambassador, clearly outraged by these charges, told the Russian ambassador to go chinga a tu madre, cabron and that if the Russians didn’t stop whining like mi vieja and shut the hell up, Mexico would have no choice but to ram the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo up their culos sideways. Clearly, the Mexicans are not in any mood to rent Texas back to the somewhat United States, not when there are fresher fish to fry.

That’s what happens when you wind up on the D-list of nations; no one on the A-list wants to take your phone calls and you wind up talking to some punk kid right out of diplomat school who wants to impress his boss by making you feel like the poor relation asking for a handout. Once upon a time in this country, Mexicans came across the river to work for Americans. In 2060, some Mexicans still come across the river to work, but that traffic is very well—regulated nowadays; it is much harder, though, to stop the traffic in Americans crossing the Mississippi to find work in Mexico. That’s one of the major social and economic problems of our times and none of my opponents want to address the issue, not when they can promise the voters that they won’t have to pay for anything ever again. I’m still not sure how they intend to pay for that; we’ve already sold off the Dakotas, and most of Illinois, as well, and I don’t want to frighten anyone here, but if you live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, you might want to learn Mandarin or Arabic in fairly short order. Just giving you guys the heads up. Have a nice day.

CAMPAIGN UPDATE: Well, here I am, just over one week into my campaign for the 2060 Democratic Presidential nomination and I can safely say that my candidacy has already hit a couple of minor snags. The first is money, which is usually a problem for almost all candidates this early in the election cycle, and the other is the willful silence of the mainstream media on my candidacy, a problem reserved for conservative candidates no matter what their party. The faithful reader of The Passing Parade will no doubt remember that I began this campaign with just $15.63 left over from my previous paycheck. Since then I have managed to add $5.75 to my political war chest. These funds are not, however, immediately available to me; I will have to bring the bottles across the street to the local Grand Union and redeem them first; but I estimate that, if you factor in the inexorable rise of inflation, the $21.38 now will be more than enough to buy air time in New Hampshire and Iowa. In fact, if my calculations are correct, my $21.38 in 2007 dollars should be worth something approximately $117,934,726.41 in 2060. Assuming that I will spend at least 25% of that on prescriptions and other medical costs; keeping a 102 year old candidate on the campaign trail is much costlier than keeping some whippersnapper half that age is; I believe that I should have more than enough to swamp my opponents in the primaries and still have enough left over to play online poker morning, noon, and night.

That is, of course, assuming my opponents do not stoop to low and devious means to raise money. As I’ve previously mentioned, I do not want to take the low road in this campaign, but it is becoming clear that at least one of the other contenders for the nomination has recently taken substantial sums of money from the tooth fairy for what I, for one, can only see as a somewhat questionable quid pro quo. Let me be among the first to say that while I would be more than happy to accept the moral and financial support of the gay rights movement and the dental industry, I will not allow them to dictate my agenda nor will I stand idly by when some misguided members of those two groups attempt to suborn a candidate for the highest office in the land. That the tooth fairy involved seems to have gotten the money for this pre-emptive bit of peculation from two, and possibly four, members of the AARP only leads me to conclude that my opponent is now so indebted to the special interests that the American people cannot take his (or her) candidacy seriously. These, of course, are the same American people who in 2007 obsessed daily about the comings and goings of one Britney Spears, at that time a well-known bit of intellectual fluff known to promote tooth decay and senile dementia in laboratory rats. I am sure that in 2060 someone similar will have the same equally noxious effect on broad swathes of the populace, so perhaps there is still hope for my opponent.

As for the mainstream media, I must say that their lack of interest in my candidacy is truly astonishing. As far as I can tell, not one major news outlet covered the announcement of my candidacy and not one political blog has offered an opinion about my running for the nomination one way or the other. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal apparently don’t care about my positions on the issues, Rolling Stone doesn’t want to know my opinions on the hot new bands out there (word up, that Bach kid, he’s going places, dude), Annie Leibovitz hasn’t taken my picture for the cover of Vanity Fair and apparently won’t be taking my picture for the cover of Vanity Fair any time soon, GQ hasn’t mentioned that chances of winning the nomination would improve greatly if I dressed for success and got rid of my usual wardrobe of sweatshirts, ratty sneakers, and dirty navy blue Dockers (at least I think they’re navy blue; it’s hard to tell nowadays), and absolutely nobody on Hef’s staff has called trying to line me up for an in-depth Playboy interview. The Playboy thing really cuts me to the quick, too, given that my site meter tell me that The Passing Parade is the place to be for anyone who thinks Miss November 1984, Roberta Vasquez, was the hottest Chicana babe since La Malinche.

Since I am now that rarest of creatures, a conservative Democrat, I’d thought that I could at least get a rise out of the folks who read the Daily Kos, that these people would demand that I, like Joe Lieberman, be run out of the Democratic Party on the electrified third rail, preferably after a good tarring and feathering. I am, after all, on record as being a big supporter of President Bush, I think that the ideal way to end the war in Iraq, or wherever it is we will be fighting a war in 2060, is to win the war, I am pro-life, anti-gun control (for the most part; I do support weapons testing—maybe it’s just me, but I think you should be able to prove you know what you’re doing with a gun before you can buy one; accidentally shooting yourself in the ass because you don’t know the muzzle from the butt when there’s an intruder in the house is not the ideal way to deter criminals and makes you look foolish to boot), and for smaller government in general. These are my positions, and yet not one Daily Kos reader, or anyone else from the leftosphere, for that matter, has left so much as an intemperate or even vaguely impolite remark in the comments section. Not one of those guys has taken the trouble to call me a no-good Nazi KKK racist fascist homophobic bastard who ought to die choking on my own puke. I don’t know why not, frankly; they’ve done that and more for candidates who are a lot more moderate than I usually am.