Curtis Dahlgren
"The next President of the United States": April Fool!
By Curtis Dahlgren
"Who's April? Who's May? Who's June?" – Rodney Dangerfield's wife (looking at his day planner)
GOD WILL HAVE A HAND IN THE 2016 ELECTION, but He may be writing a parody. Speaking of writers, Dan Popp said (2/12/16):
"Is it just me, or . . . does it seem to you like the whole world lost 20 IQ points overnight? . . Government incompetence, destructive as it is, is a side issue. The main problem in Washington is lawlessness. I don't expect government to do well things it isn't supposed to do at all . . [people] think they can throw out all of God's 'Do nots,' then shift the 'Do's to the government, and claim God's authority for their [deviltry] while pretending they're fighting against a theocracy . . Ah, so the science is settled on the question of 'climate change.' That means we can end all government funding for research into that, right?"
Finding good quotes isn't hard today, but I like to set them in an even better order. "The worst form of government is democracy – except for all the rest," to paraphrase Churchill, but that's another way of saying that a constitutional republic is thebest form of human government (barring the presence of angels). Your President said the other day that there isn't much difference between capitalism and socialism, and he may have a point – judging by the last decade (a decade of crony capitalism and moral decay).
The cultural/political revolutionaries like to say that Congress only has a 10 percent approval rating, and I hate it when people miss the point: 90% of the left thinks Congress is too far right, and 90% of the right thinks it's too far left, thus a ninety percent of all people "disapproval" (I should say people who actually care). Dan Popp said:
"Great minds think alike, but so do small minds."
Bernie Sanders is running on the platform of attacking Wall Street, whatever that is, and free college for everyone. Hillary is running on the "right" to abortion[s]. It would be more interesting to list the issues that haven't even been brought up yet. Senator Ron Johnson wrote:
"Every single second of [the B.O.] presidency, the [national] debt has grown by $37,000. I'm an accountant by training and projecting forward, the debt will rise to $103 trillion in the next thirty years and it'll be growing at the rate of $108,000 per second!"
So many people in the wagon, to coin a phrase, and so few people pulling the wagon. And most of the income targeted by the crisis-deniers resides, by necessity, in the middle class. The few "rich" are not a "silver bullet." A few years ago, the International Monetary Fund estimated that, in order to keep entitlement spending at current levels while 'stabilizing' the debt, every federal tax on the books – income tax, payroll tax, excise taxes, etc. – would have to be raised by 88 percent!
I guarantee it (as Joe Namath said), by the 2040s, NO ONE WILL WANT TO BE PRESIDENT. Maybe sooner. Much sooner. Even Yahoo/news had an interesting item yesterday. It was about a long-forgotten speech during 1987 politics:
Driven from the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hart repaired to his cabin in the Denver foothills, where he and his family were literally penned in by a fleet of satellite trucks and news choppers. His aides wrote him the kind of withdrawal statement we've come to expect from scandalized politicians – contrite, gracious, bland.
Hart couldn't sleep after reading that speech. . . Then, the next morning, Hart drove the canyon road down to Denver, stepped before the national media and calmly delivered one of the most stinging and prescient indictments of an American institution you will ever see.
"In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're important," Hart said, decrying a process that he said reduced reporters to hunters and candidates to the hunted.
"And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for high office," Hart went on. . . And if it continues to destroy people's integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself.
"Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match."
He closed by paraphrasing his idol, Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve." [ end quote]
If we get the kind of leaders we deserve, we are indeed in deep doo-doo. The rest of the world is not sleeping while we focus almost entirely on the "horse race." Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. In 2012 a friend of mine said:
"There are 300 million people in this country and these are the two choices we get?"
Speaking of races reminds me of a shtick that a Milwaukee DJ used to play, a stride -for-stride account of an imaginary horse race. The last one out of the gate was Beetle Bomb, who stumbled a couple of times before the first corner. The announcer goes over the list of horses from the leader all the way down to "Beeee-tle Bomb"! He repeats this around the second corner and the third corner, and down the stetch, to the wire, and he calmly says:
"And the winner is Beeee-tle Bomb."
Third term for O'Boma? Bernie Sanders?
NO WAY!(?)
P.S. The three leading candidates in the race, that are IN the race so far, are:
QWERTY UIOP – a neanderthal (related to Alley OOP)
ROY G. BIV – a colorful personality
W.D. DIM – like, "What difference does it make?" (the Pity party)
PPS: Then there are the write-in candidates. In 1940, Gracie Allen got 63 votes in the Wisconsin primary. I'm voting for Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Three times. I know they were dummies, but -
© Curtis Dahlgren
April 1, 2016
"Who's April? Who's May? Who's June?" – Rodney Dangerfield's wife (looking at his day planner)
GOD WILL HAVE A HAND IN THE 2016 ELECTION, but He may be writing a parody. Speaking of writers, Dan Popp said (2/12/16):
"Is it just me, or . . . does it seem to you like the whole world lost 20 IQ points overnight? . . Government incompetence, destructive as it is, is a side issue. The main problem in Washington is lawlessness. I don't expect government to do well things it isn't supposed to do at all . . [people] think they can throw out all of God's 'Do nots,' then shift the 'Do's to the government, and claim God's authority for their [deviltry] while pretending they're fighting against a theocracy . . Ah, so the science is settled on the question of 'climate change.' That means we can end all government funding for research into that, right?"
Finding good quotes isn't hard today, but I like to set them in an even better order. "The worst form of government is democracy – except for all the rest," to paraphrase Churchill, but that's another way of saying that a constitutional republic is thebest form of human government (barring the presence of angels). Your President said the other day that there isn't much difference between capitalism and socialism, and he may have a point – judging by the last decade (a decade of crony capitalism and moral decay).
The cultural/political revolutionaries like to say that Congress only has a 10 percent approval rating, and I hate it when people miss the point: 90% of the left thinks Congress is too far right, and 90% of the right thinks it's too far left, thus a ninety percent of all people "disapproval" (I should say people who actually care). Dan Popp said:
"Great minds think alike, but so do small minds."
Bernie Sanders is running on the platform of attacking Wall Street, whatever that is, and free college for everyone. Hillary is running on the "right" to abortion[s]. It would be more interesting to list the issues that haven't even been brought up yet. Senator Ron Johnson wrote:
"Every single second of [the B.O.] presidency, the [national] debt has grown by $37,000. I'm an accountant by training and projecting forward, the debt will rise to $103 trillion in the next thirty years and it'll be growing at the rate of $108,000 per second!"
So many people in the wagon, to coin a phrase, and so few people pulling the wagon. And most of the income targeted by the crisis-deniers resides, by necessity, in the middle class. The few "rich" are not a "silver bullet." A few years ago, the International Monetary Fund estimated that, in order to keep entitlement spending at current levels while 'stabilizing' the debt, every federal tax on the books – income tax, payroll tax, excise taxes, etc. – would have to be raised by 88 percent!
I guarantee it (as Joe Namath said), by the 2040s, NO ONE WILL WANT TO BE PRESIDENT. Maybe sooner. Much sooner. Even Yahoo/news had an interesting item yesterday. It was about a long-forgotten speech during 1987 politics:
Driven from the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hart repaired to his cabin in the Denver foothills, where he and his family were literally penned in by a fleet of satellite trucks and news choppers. His aides wrote him the kind of withdrawal statement we've come to expect from scandalized politicians – contrite, gracious, bland.
Hart couldn't sleep after reading that speech. . . Then, the next morning, Hart drove the canyon road down to Denver, stepped before the national media and calmly delivered one of the most stinging and prescient indictments of an American institution you will ever see.
"In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're important," Hart said, decrying a process that he said reduced reporters to hunters and candidates to the hunted.
"And then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why some of the best people in this country choose not to run for high office," Hart went on. . . And if it continues to destroy people's integrity and honor, then that system will eventually destroy itself.
"Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match."
He closed by paraphrasing his idol, Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve." [ end quote]
If we get the kind of leaders we deserve, we are indeed in deep doo-doo. The rest of the world is not sleeping while we focus almost entirely on the "horse race." Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. In 2012 a friend of mine said:
"There are 300 million people in this country and these are the two choices we get?"
Speaking of races reminds me of a shtick that a Milwaukee DJ used to play, a stride -for-stride account of an imaginary horse race. The last one out of the gate was Beetle Bomb, who stumbled a couple of times before the first corner. The announcer goes over the list of horses from the leader all the way down to "Beeee-tle Bomb"! He repeats this around the second corner and the third corner, and down the stetch, to the wire, and he calmly says:
"And the winner is Beeee-tle Bomb."
Third term for O'Boma? Bernie Sanders?
NO WAY!(?)
P.S. The three leading candidates in the race, that are IN the race so far, are:
QWERTY UIOP – a neanderthal (related to Alley OOP)
ROY G. BIV – a colorful personality
W.D. DIM – like, "What difference does it make?" (the Pity party)
PPS: Then there are the write-in candidates. In 1940, Gracie Allen got 63 votes in the Wisconsin primary. I'm voting for Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Three times. I know they were dummies, but -
© Curtis Dahlgren
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