Oh God. Oh God. We are down to Biden. I think. Bad. Bad. But maybe no worse than any of the other dwarves and surreal curiosities offering themselves as our managers Look, if you can bear it, at what we started with. Two billionaires, three women, two Jews, a black, a self-proclaimed Indian, two threshold octogenarians in mid petrification, an advocate of busing, a poofter, and an utterly unqualied small-town mayor with the additiona electoral handicap of being documentably intelligent. It’s nuts. What are we doing? At Biden’s age he probably had trilobites as house pets. Never mind, though, as he probably can’t remember them.

The only one fit to be seen in public with was Tulsi Gabbard, but she was a threat to military budgets and so snuffed like an unwanted candle.These frightening candidates have dropped out like rotten peaches from a tree until Stochastic Joe is the only dropping left undropped Oh help.

Lurking in the wings is Hillary, like some terrifying bat hanging by her feet in a cavern below the DNC. A bat with theropod instincts. I tell you, I am going to move to Mexico..

Are we daft? A nuclear-armed country of three hundred twenty-seven million with more problems than people, in desperate need of leadership, In the grip of an epidemic yet unable to design a virus test, and this dreck is the best we can do? You could find better in a New York bus station at three a.m. Maybe we should look there.

Meanwhile, in the Great Doublewide on Pennsylvania Avenue? Pompeo, an ambulatory clot of malign suet, apparently with a pudgy boy’s manhood problem, who wants war with Iran. The country is decaying like a corpse in August, everything going wrong, declining technologically, infrastructure antiquated–and we need a war with Iran. Why didn’t I think of that?

Mike Pence, a lethally boring Christian heretic who thinks he is about to be sucked up to heaven in the Rapture. We can only hope. As I understand it, the Rapture seems to be a theological vacuum cleaner, schloop. Perhaps he can advise God on avoiding The Virus.

And of course the gorgeous grand guacamaya hisself, the head parrot, golden-haired and baffled, who fluffs his plumes and talks like a confused child of twelve. In these transgender days, he may lay eggs.

Think Kaiser Bill’s court invited partying in Caligula’s basement.

But back to Fingers Joe the Geriatric Groper, cause for all to hide their daughters, who seems to teeter on the raw edge of senility and lies about how he hugged Nelson Mandela and marched in the civil rights movement. Yeeesh. Only in America does electing a dementia patient seem reasonable. And maybe it is, giver the alternative.

I mean seriously, think about it. The man apparently is suffering from Alzheimer’s, or at least Somesheimers and waiting for the rest. This is documented to the roots of its teeth. Yes. The Democrats are trying to elect a genuine, diagnosable empty skull and the Republicans want to stay with the Pompeo Posse of Ragheard Killers.

Are we kidding, I hope? These inverts, losers, clowns and embarrassments are going to play grrr-bowwow-woof with grownups like Putin and Xi Jinping?

Oh, I forgot. Elizabether “Tonto” Warren who seems to have traded her feathers and tomahawk for third-grade economics. Taken together, remind me of nothing so much as the debating society of a land-grant high school.

If Burbling Joe gets the nod, who will be the Veep? Will Hillary come flapping down with codpiece bulging? After all, she did get the popular vote the last time around.

None of these, note, is running on competence. It’s more like a competitive freak show. Maybe all of them will win. Americans don’t want competence. They want someone who isn’t threatening. Thus the Republicans work the Deplorable pump handle, Mekkamerkagrettagain!, while the Democrats open the googoo spigot fullbore, Everything free! Twice as free for the nonperforming!

Well then, how about Congress? The cream of democracy, right? Profound minds, products of the Enlightenment, just like Jefferson and Madison and Franklin, no?

No.

A friend in a position to know estimates that ninety percent of the Senate doesn’t know where Burma is. The Senate is supposed to be up-demo, aristocratic, and scholarly, not like the rabble in the 435-member bus station. They don’t know where freaking Burma is? You know, the house that does, like, foreign policy?

Thing is, the whole journalistic establishment colludes to hide the blank ignorance of much of Congress, and their own. It’s a set-up. Reporters ask, “Senator, what do you think of Afghanistan?” To which he answers, “Well, I think we need to reassess our options and consider alternative strategies that will enhance national security and foster democracy.”

Oh.

They do not ask, “Senator, where is Afghanistan?” or “What is the population of Russia? Can you name the countries littoral to the Caspian Sea? Can you tell us why this might be important?”

The public? Says the National Science Foundation, 26% of the public think the sun goes around the earth, 74% can’t name the three branches of government. The Education Department says that 14% can’t red, which means that a hell of a lot more don’t.

Isaac Asimov nails it: ““There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Exactly. If we actually wanted to essay democracy in America, which we don’t, we would mandate a voting age of twenty-five and require a literacy test. Fifty questions, published in advance. As lagniappe we might demand some minor evidence of good character, even to the extreme of elimiinating those convicted of armed robbery, rape, drug dealing. Don’t hold your breath. That curious Pelosi woman wants to enfranchise children of sixteen.

It really doesn’t matter. American democracy, as we curiously persist in calling it, is as finely designed as a Swiss watch to keep the national reins in the hands of reliable hacks. Biden, Warren, Bloomberg, Clitler should she run again, or Pence or Pompeo, or any number of collusive footsoldiers. These would make appropriate noises about trivial issues like abortion, gun control, and the pressing question of transgender confused. They would also do what they were elected to do: protect the military budget, waffle on the wars, prevent investigation of Wall Street, and collaborate with the big corporations in fleecing the public. This, beyond doubt, we will get.

Write Fred at [email protected]

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