I posted this on my secret personal facebook page last night.

And when it refers to that night and the night before, it therefore actually means the night before this one and the night before that one. I hope this has been minimally deformative. The personal facebook page is “secret” because I primarily use it to manage my non-secret bimshwel page, and my last personal page got shut down for having a stupid name. Since this one has an even stupider name I seek to minimize awareness of it.

This mostly summarizes what I months earlier shoved not completely relevantly into a long boring post about being tired of watching television that I forced myself to watch. Oddly enough this summary of that paragraph is longer and boringer than it. Although that is consistent with my past behavior and therefore not very odd at all.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, was a guest on the Late Colbert Show last night, remarking on the fact that Mr. D Trump has not been overtaken by “mainstream” presidential candidates yet. What makes Trump not “mainstream?” I hate to accept that somebody who studies this stuff as a lifestyle can look at the non-Trump candidates and think “it is the natural and correct order of things that one of these buffoons be one step away from the national presidency.”
To summarize what I have been squawking elsewhere the past few months, the modern republican party needs to die, good and dead. For the values it espouses, and allows the democratic party to also espouse in an effort to draw support away from republicans, and worse, still look good in comparison to. The worse the republicans get standing for the worst things, the better our wimpy, principle-devoid democrat party looks standing for nothing at all. We should not be forced to see that as the good choice.

I dislike Bernard Sanders less than the other candidates, but first of all that is based on the same kind of internet hype that made me prObama, which ultimately let me down. And also, running as a democrat forces Uncle Bernie into the democrats’ box, which wants its candidates to drop any topic that does not meet that box’s terms of service, and also agree not to oppose Hillary Clinton after a certain point. Indeed, that box wanted everyone to stop opposing Hillary Clinton after November 2011. That ending was written before the story started. We’re living in a perpetual frustrating prequel, like Smallville or Gotham or whatever. Nothing can happen to disrupt something in the future whose status is totally arbitrary, no matter how long the prequel goes on, and how many details develop that we didn’t have in mind when we wrote the ending. Ha ha ha, let’s laugh at Lincoln Chafee for having a funny name and wanting a measurement system with more order and less random numbers to memorize, regardless of how many other countries use it (most of them). And we can laugh at Dennis Kucinich for looking like a character from a Fievel movie. But please don’t dismiss them entirely for that.

What I think we need is a legitimate force to oppose these two parties, even a force with “no chance” to win. I think a lot of us do. And we could use a major news organization, with infrastructure behind it, to not tacitly back the policies of any party. Not just sporadic obscure advocacy that can be ignored for 20 years and later presented with “look at who predicted our garbage present!” Imagine if ABC news worked as hard at digging for facts behind the terrorism threat threats they get from the government as they did at digging for new Star Wars trailers. You’ll have to!

Sanders himself was an obscure advocate. You can look up video of him, in 1991, when he was a US representative, predicting prolonged US entanglement in Mesopotamia if it invaded Iraq, (Dick Cheney, as well). Why wasn’t that a story THEN? Or in 2003? Why can somebody offering an informed reason to not do something that cannot be undone be taken seriously? Because our major news organizations, funded by corporations, would have lost sponsors if they gave weight to anti-war arguments. Anyone found guilty would be forced out, like Phil Donahue. I would say Dan Rather as well but you could point to sloppy inability to defend or back up his own story about George Wuh Bush that lost him his CBS news boatholder job.

Anyway, what I want at this point is for Donald Trump to be nominated by his party and then have the “mainstream” republican candidates refuse to support him. I do not want any of them to be president, but this would undermine the whole convention process, and reveal more publicly how dumb this all is. Reveal that “the people” don’t really decide who they vote for, or even who they are allowed to vote for. Trump represents horrible things, but he is the most sincere reflection of actual American voters in his party, apart from having loads more money. The other candidates present no basis for denying that. If they really believe in telling people what is “right,” they’ll stop pretending we don’t have a gun problem, a bank problem, a pharmaceutical problem, a meat problem, a pollution problem, a pumpkin problem, a church problem, a surveillance problem and on and on. We need to stop pretending persecution, misdirected aggression and divinity of the famous are not core American values going back to the country’s founding so we can actually do something about them.
I do not share the Isis standpoint of “hurry up and destroy the world,” but I also do not believe in condoning mediocrity. Condoning mediocrity, doing something just because a lot of visible, impatient loudmouths demanded it done allowed Isis to exist!

I feel it is owed to my state, Connecticut, personally, after Joe “Mortal Kombat will turn our children into homicidal palette-swapped ninjas” Lieberman refused to back Ned Lamont, who won their democrat senate primary, and ran instead as an “independent” and ultimately got re-elected to the senate by harnessing the collective ignorance and dumb fear of both permitted sides. If we can do that to keep boneheads in office, we can certainly do it to keep boneheads out of office.

Hardly a collection of complete thoughts; I hate being “topical” because there is not time to think about things at length. There is not even time or space to finish or scan that terrible drawing I put on this just so somebody would notice it. But if this was my JOB, I would make certain I did so. I wish we had not created a world that demanded immediate uninformed emotional responses all the time. “Why hasn’t the president condemned Joe Bones’ outrageous remarks yet?” Because outrage doesn’t accomplish anything!

Howdy.

I will have a terrible story to tell you soon.