Elections

 I have not written much about the current election season, which is to say that I have written nothing about the election at all, for which I do apologize. The comic possibilities raised by the lives and thoughts of the two main candidates are endless and I have chosen not to use them because I am very lazy. Therefore, I am resurrecting a post from 2004. No one liked it then; frankly, I am not sure if I like it now; but it is what it is and I am going to resurrect it from the Blogger boneyard.  Enjoy!!!

Well, the silly portion of the political season has finally arrived and not a moment too soon, I think; the voters can always use some diversion. This year we are all a-buzz about election signs and posters vanishing from roadsides the length and breadth of our happy little burg, vanishing with the rapidity of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies off the top of your grandmother’s oven. There’s no apparent pattern to the thefts; signs for Republican and Democratic candidates alike are disappearing during the dark of night with equal speed, with each side declaring that they are the injured party and blaming the other for the political pilferage. The local constabulary is now hot on the case, the gendarmes declaring that they will get to the bottom of the mystery posthaste and once again make our streets safe for politicians to annoy honest citizens.

Frankly, I don’t care if the signs ever reappear; the streets look just fine without them. I can remember the day when one such sign was put up on a telephone pole near a busy intersection on South Cedar Street, announcing that the gentleman running for office was an outsider, new to politics and, unlike his predecessor, who'd been in office for the better part of thirty years, not at all susceptible to the blandishments and corruption that come with political power; the poster finally weathered away halfway through the man’s third term in the state legislature.

And if the posted signs were in any way protected from the elements then they would never go away, remaining year after year until they became an embarrassment. One famously bald local politico had to paper over a poster like this at a bridge underpass; it had been there for years, reminding the voters that when they first voted the man into office he’d had a full head of hair and only one chin. Some politicians, on the other hand, do that sort of thing on purpose. You can save a lot of money on signs recycling last election’s signs for this campaign. It’s good for the environment as well.

I can see the point of stealing some signs. I’ve read somewhere that there are approximately 86,000 governmental bodies in the United States, the vast majority of which hold elections to determine who gets to run things. There’s so many state senators, assemblymen, aldermen, mayors, school board members, town supervisors, and library board trustees running at any given time that no voter can keep track off them all, and before long they all start to blur together in one's mind. The first time you really know who the candidates for some of these offices are comes when you see their names on the ballot. You have no clue who some of these people are, what with their signs disappearing left, right, and center, and in that case why not just vote for the incumbent, since you really don't want to waste your vote on someone you've never heard of and who was obviously not clever enough to steal his opponent's signs. Letting someone too dumb to steal his opponent's signs anywhere near the public coffers is not a good idea, I think; if he doesn't notice his signs are missing what else won't he notice when he actually has the job?

You don’t always need signs or posters to run for office. A few years ago my brother became the president of our local volunteer fire company, elected for reasons that surpasseth understanding, as the Good Book often says of the Lord when He goeth about smiting the hips and thews of passersby for no immediately discernible reason. My brother was a write-in candidate; he agreed to run because a firehouse faction, and yes, we have those here, needed a warm body in the race. My brother won, which everyone in the family found very odd, and makes one question the wisdom of the whole concept of universal suffrage. In the United States, candidates for public office run for that office; in the United Kingdom, a more politically sedate country, candidates stand for office. My brother is one of the few political candidates anywhere who sat on his ass on a barstool for office. He has since retired from the presidency, laying down the onerous burdens of civic responsibility and returning to a richly deserved private life, ending all too early a none too promising political career. He remains firmly ensconced on his barstool, however, offering sage political advice to all and sundry, which is what got him into trouble in the first place.

So for some, but not all, political races, stealing signs is not at all a bad idea. This, however, brings up the question of why anyone would steal the signs of the presidential candidates? Signs or not, it’s not like the populace doesn’t know who’s running, what with those two guys all over the evening news every night of the week and twice on Sunday. Still, you can never be too careful. I bring my Keep Cool With Coolidge sign into the house with me every night. You never know when you’ll run into a John Davis Democrat; better to be safe than sorry. People were awfully bitter about Davis' losing back in 1924.

Typed this up and forgot about it, or stuff that happens to Donald Trump

 

Well, things have gone to hell in an organic hand-basket here in the Vampire State, which is the norm hereabouts, just in case you did not know that, but this week has proven more norm than the week before that. A jury in the fifth-rate Gomorrah squatting at the mouth of the river that flows two ways has convicted Donald Trump, the erstwhile (or current, depending on who you talk to) President of this our Great Republic, of removing the tags from sheets, pillowcases, and mattresses at his hotels from one end of our amber waves of grain to another. This is a most shocking development, and if you are reading this in the presence of children, I would recommend that you send them out of the room quickly, lest you unwittingly corrupt their innocence forever.

The President manque cannot plead ignorance of the law; generations of Americans have known that the tags on bed linens and mattresses are inseparable from the mattress to which they are attached, and that the Federal government would fully prosecute all malefactors engaged in separating the tag from its pillow.. Sympathy for the ignorant, for the poor schnook just trying to get a good night’s sleep without that tag irritating his feet like a horsefly that keeps buzzing in his ears and won’t back off, even after the schnook’s 438^th attempt to commit blunt force trauma on the fly with a two-year old copy of Good Housekeeping magazine, is wasted on the likes of Mr. Trump, who knew what the law was and chose to play fast and loose with it (wow, you’d need a good pair of binoculars to see the verb from the subject in that sentence).

The jury was on to Mr. Trump’s desperate prevarications about those missing tags, thanks to the heroic police work of Officer S. Gregory, undercover bed inspector for the New York Police Department’s Tag Removal Squad. The Tag Removal Squad is an integral part of the NYPD’s Special Investigations Division, an elite group of detectives that investigates the city’s most sinister crimes. Officer Gregory, who plays the bass strumpet for the NYPD’s marching band when she is not prowling through the bedsheets of the Naked City looking for tag-rippers, spoon lickers, and various other members of the criminal classes, caught Mr. Trump colluding with Russian louts, thieves, and sundry other Slavic ne’er do wells to rip the tags off of the pillows at several Trump hotels in order to invalidate the warranties.  Why Mr. Trump would want to do this was not adequately explained at the trial, but the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case said that the crimes charged might have something to do with insurance fraud, unless they did not have anything to do with insurance fraud. You never can tell about these things, you know; it could be one way or another, unless you are not a Blondie fan.

East Coast Earthquake

 

The thing is, I did not feel the earthquake that has so discombobulated the East Coast this morning, Really. I did not feel the thing at all. I was sitting in my comfortable chair at work minding my own business and the earth moved and I did not realize that the earth had moved. Having missed the earth moving, I simply went on with my bureaucratic life as if nothing had happened because for me, nothing had. Well, better luck next time, I suppose. And that was that, or at least that was what I thought. 

Apparently, not feeling the earth move during an earthquake is a sign of diminished mental capacity. People kept coming into the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and demanding to know how I coped with the great East Coast earthquake of 2024 and were deeply shocked that I coped with the massive catastrophe by not realizing it was happening at the time. Now, I would understand this lack of insight on my part if the quake was an event on the order of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or the Tokyo earthquake of 1923—it would take several deep hits off of a very large bong with incredibly strong weed to ignore disasters as large as those—but it wasn’t; from what I understand the quake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, which several people from California have assured me is the planetary version of mild heartburn and not something to be worried about at all. Trees shook, plates rattled, pets were perturbed, and that was about it. The East Coast has hurricanes that do all of that and more, and in the winter we have nor’easters that leave you and yours up to your backsides in freezing cold mucky water, an altogether unpleasant experience. I am still pumping water out of my cellar from our last meteorological misadventure.

My guess is that it was the novelty of this intense non-disaster that has impressed itself on everyone’s mind. We don’t get a lot of earthquakes here in the Vampire State; the last one that I remember hereabouts was when the Attorney General managed to push the Governor out of office on sexual harassment charges, which people tell me is not the same thing at all, although I am certain that it was the same thing to the Governor. He was planning to run for re-election for the umpteenth time, but as Mr. Burns says, the best-laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley. For years I had no clue what an agley was; I thought an agley was some sort of French cookie before an out of breath Scottish tourist stumbled into this place looking for a men's room and told me what it meant in the post-micturation interview where I told him how to get to the train station.

Be that as it may, many of the patrons of this mycological sinkhole regarded my insensitivity to the travails of Mother Earth as somewhat odd, given their own traumatic experiences, but I must say that insensitivity to what is going on around me is something people have been accusing me of for more years than I care to remember. The accusers are usually women, for some reason or another, teachers and librarians and other strange females that I became involved with in bars who decided that they did not like me anymore. I was never sure what the problem was, but it was usually something about not paying attention to their feelings. I thought I was paying attention, but my perception was clearly off as I am an insensitive lout. I know that because people, and by people I mean women, keep telling me that I am and who am I to argue with such a widespread and deeply held opinion? I do wish, however, that my mother would stop agreeing with them. It's an uncomfortable feeling when a boy can't be sure that his mom has his back.

 

Sight unseen

 "Democrats have demonized the Georgia law, insisting that there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election, despite the last-minute election rules changes due to COVID-19 and the Time expose about a “conspiracy” to “save” the election for Biden. While the Trump campaign was unable to prove in court that the former president truly won the election, that does not erase the serious concerns regarding election integrity that the Georgia law and other reform efforts address."  Tyler O'Neil, Townhall

And I weigh 185 pounds and look like George Clooney, just as long as I stay off the scale and away from mirror in the bathroom. Cases are hard to prove if no one looks at the evidence, or, in this case, wants to look at the evidence.

When we dead awaken, in this case, not a play by Henrik Ibsen

 

Blarney, the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, is flattery laid on so thin that you couldn’t help but love it, whereas baloney was flattery laid on so thick that you hated it.  And so it is with elections.  A little Chicago-style chicanery here and there livens up the dinner conversation and makes the teller seem dashing and worldly, especially if you don’t live in Chicago and have to live with the consequences of electing and re-electing hordes of grifting and grafting politicians, and causes the Europeans at the dinner table wonder how such an advanced society could tolerate such shenanigans. For example, one can hardly imagine Maximilian Robespierre casting his ballot for Monsieur Macron, Louis XIV seriously contemplating the political ramifications of voting for Marine LePen, or Joan of Arc publicly supporting France staying in the European Union.  And yet here in this our Great Republic, veterans of the Civil War voted for the Democratic Party’s nominee less than two short weeks ago.  I found this bit of news a bit perplexing, given that the last undisputed Civil War veteran, Albert Henry Woolson of the 1^st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment, died in Duluth, Minnesota on August 2^nd, 1956 at the age of 106.  While I think that we must all honor the sacrifices made by the men of the Civil War generation, I do not believe that this homage extends to permitting those same veterans to vote in the 2020 presidential election or even the 1956 presidential election. The question arises, however, if any Confederate veterans voted for the Democratic nominee in Georgia, and if they did, does this make that nominee a racist, an important question in our iconoclastic age.

Here in our happy little burg nothing like this would ever happen.  We live in a safely Democratic state in which nothing untoward ever happens to the Democratic nominee for almost any office you choose to name and therefore no feels the need to stuff the ballot box, except, of course, in municipal elections.  In municipal elections the population of our town awaits with bated breath to find out who Mr. Martin Meehan voted for in this election cycle.  Mr. Meehan was the scion of a lace curtain Irish family—his father was a respectable publican and one of his brothers was a priest and his youngest sister became a nun—but young Martin himself fell in with evil company and became a wastrel, a lout, and an altogether unpleasant young fellow. After his father cut off his allowance, Martin decided to make some money of his own so he could continue his debauched habits.  Not being the sort of person who would ever stoop to or even contemplate actually working for a living, and not being especially bright to begin with, Martin decided to rob a grocery store in the slough of urban despond that lies directly across the river from our happy little burg.

To that end, Martin procured a pistol and a box of bullets.  He fired two bullets for practice and did not hit the empty beer bottle he was aiming at.  Later that day, he crossed the river on the ferry and proceeded to the grocery store, which he then robbed of $12.83.  The owner of the grocery store objected vigorously to Martin robbing him, a trait common to many small tradesmen, whereupon Martin fired two shots at him.  The shots struck the owner of the grocery store in the chest, the man being somewhat larger than an empty beer bottle, and he fell dead to the floor.  Martin, according to the testimony of the eyewitnesses, seemed more than a little nonplussed by this turn of events; apparently he had not given any thought to the possibility of being a murderer as well as a thief; and so dashed out of the grocery store and into the arms of a local constable, who had heard the gunshots and came running. After a brief scuffle, in which the constable broke Martin’s nose and blackened his eye, our heroic flatfoot dragged Martin the two blocks down Broadway to the police station.

Events moved swiftly after that, the judicial system of the time being less constrained than it is nowadays.  Young Martin was found guilty of murder by a jury of his peers and sent up the river, or in Martin’s case, down the river, to a cell in the state’s death house, where he waited a month for the courts and the governor to reject his appeal. Two days after the warden got the bad news from the governor’s office, Martin received the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church from his brother the priest.  The brand-new state electrician and his equally brand-new electric chair then swiftly dispatched Martin onwards into that country from whose bourn no traveler returns, except, it seems, in election years.  Martin was only the third person the state electrician had executed with the device and he was the first person the state electrician had gotten the voltages right with, the two previous occupants of the chair having been more roasted than electrocuted. 

Afterwards, Martin’s parents buried him in St. Thomas’ Cemetery, in the family plot near his great-grandfather, where Martin has remained active in local politics ever since.  To my certain knowledge, Martin Meehan is the most loyal Democrat in the county, having voted in every local, state, and national election since the state shuffled him off this mortal coil in 1912.  I think that it is a good thing for Martin to be so involved in politics, a much more remunerative and altogether safer form of crime for everyone involved than robbing grocery stores.  After all, the present Democratic nominee for president has spent most of his life drawing a government salary and is worth $9 million that we know of.  Martin, I think we can all agree, missed his calling in life.  He would have made a fortune if only he had run for the state assembly, a fortune, I’m telling you!

NOT. MY .PRESIDENT.

 What the title says, not now, not ever. Resist.

TOP SECRET!! READ ALL ABOUT IT!!

A gaggle of Republican Congressmen (what is the proper collective noun for a member of Congress, I wonder? A congress of Congressmen seems redundant, whereas a murder of Congressmen seems more than a little hostile, but that’s just my opinion) forced their way into the super-secret classified room in which the Impeachment Inquisition is holding its demonic rites and demanded that the proceedings be made open to the public, among other important things—they did order pizza, for example, and ordering pizza is always a very important thing, although there is no record of who ordered the slice with the anchovies and pineapple; clearly some distinguished gentlemen  from a state somewhere west of the Mississippi River who doesn't know any better.  The Grand Inquisitor, Mr. Schiff of California, a man who could not inspire terror in a lame housefly even when holding a can of Raid and a sawed-off shotgun, promptly closed down the testimony of some spavined State Department bureaucrat muttering about how the Ukraine girls really knock him out, and demanded that the Republicans leave the West behind.  Tempers flared again today when the Impeachment Inquisition announced that the Republicans had, horror of horrors, actually used their cellphones and other personal electronic devices while in the super-secret classified room eating their pizza. The Democratic Party’s sudden devotion to the procedures for handling classified materials and areas is welcome, albeit slightly suspect; I do not recall this devotion to the letter of the law when Mrs. Clinton was letting a plethora of classified cats out of the bag with her personal email server, but perhaps my memory fails me. In any case, the Democrats’ screeching about the violation of their sanctum sanctorum is a little hard to take seriously. The whines emanating from Capitol Hill about the violation of security protocols frankly remind me of a drug dealer complaining that the cops ignored the Keep Off The Grass sign in his yard on their way into his house.