If I Were President

November 24, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     If I were president, I would not pardon a turkey at Thanksgiving time.  That's just stupid, especially when you're probably going to eat turkey for the Thanksgiving meal.  But even if you're not having turkey for dinner, pardoning an animal that gets raised for slaughter is absurd.

     If I were president, I would promptly commute the death sentence of any person convicted in a federal court.  People's lives are more important than those of turkeys, and if you can't figure that out, you shouldn't even be walking around, much less be the president.

     If I were president, I would not allow Mitch McConnell, or any other mealy-mouthed Republican senator or congressman, to set foot in the White House.  I would arrange for them to meet with my staff in front of a landscaping place next to a porn shop, on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

     If I were president, I would have regular news conferences, but at the news conferences my favorite thing to say would be, "That's got to be one of the stupidest questions I've ever heard.  What are you, the fucking scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz?"

     If I were president, I would not say "so help me God" at the end of my oath of office.   It's not in the constitution, and I don't care if that revered old slave owner George Washington said it.  I wouldn't place my other hand on the bible when taking the oath, either.  I'd put it in my pocket.  Also, I'd never end a speech with "God bless" anything at all.  Fuck that.

     If I were president I'd try to get "under God" removed from the pledge of allegiance, where it was put in the early 1950s during the Red Scare, at the behest of the Knights of Columbus--as if they should have any say in anything we do as a country.  In fact, I'd discourage the use of the pledge of allegiance to the flag altogether.  What's the point?  If you make war against the U.S. or give aid or comfort to our enemies you're committing treason, and can be tried for it.  Isn't that enough?  Why make a kid, or anybody else for that matter, pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth?  What is this, Nazi Germany?

     If I were president, I'd try to ban the playing of the national anthem at sporting events.  What a waste of time.  They say baseball is too slow now.  That would speed things up.  What is this, Nazi Germany?

     If I were president, the next time a vacancy came up on the Supreme Court, I'd nominate a mainline Protestant or a Jew or an atheist.  We have more than enough Catholics there now, and they're systematically fucking things up. 

     If I were president I'd have the Treasury Department try to remove all images of slave owners from our currency.  That means no more George Washington on the dollar bill and the quarter, no more Jefferson on the two-dollar bill and the nickel, and no more Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.  I'd replace Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr.  I'd replace Jefferson with Ma Rainey.  Jackson was already supposed to be replaced with Harriet Tubman.  Maybe we'd mix it up every few years--get some new blood on those coins and bills.  

     If I were president I also would try to remove "In God We Trust" from all our currency.  That was the misguided idea of Abraham Lincoln, an otherwise fairly bright and decent guy.   

     If I were president, speaking of money, I'd try to eliminate the penny.  It costs more to make than it's worth.  Retailers accepting cash would have to round everything up to the nearest five cents, which shouldn't break their hearts.  Credit card and bank purchases could still be recorded in odd amounts of cents, though.  They add up.  Didn't you ever watch Office Space?

     If I were president I'd instruct the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of any church or other religious organization that ever tried to get anyone to vote for any Republican, ever.  (Political activities are already not allowed to be conducted by tax-exempt 501(c)(3) entities under the Internal Revenue Code, but I would selectively enforce this provision so as to allow Black churches to continue to host politicians, as long as they were Democrats.)

     If I were president I'd have the Attorney General put the FBI on a mission to infiltrate and eradicate all right-wing organizations.

     If I were president I'd propose to the congress that it repeal the second amendment to the constitution.  Also the part of the first amendment that prohibits the government from making laws restricting the free exercise of religion.

     If I were president I'd find a way to have Kid Rock and Ted Nugent locked up in Guantanamo Bay.  

     If I were president I'd issue an executive order making Tom Brady's birthday a national holiday.  It's not that I like Tom Brady that much--actually he's a right-wing dick, as far as I know.  But Tom Brady's birthday is the same as mine, August 3, and so as not to appear immodest I'd put Tom Brady up as the ostensible reason for the holiday.  But then I'd call it President Teeuwissen's Day.

     If I were president I'd deport Elon Musk to whatever country, or planet, he came from.

     

Something

In Memory Of

John Carbaugh, 1951-2020

Loyal Blog Follower

And Good Friend

R.I.P.

November 14, 2020

Cathedral City, California 

     Something really terrible happened in this country last week.  No, not what you’re thinking—you all know me better than that.  What happened was this:  over 72 million people—the second largest number of presidential voters in the history of this country—CHOSE to vote for Donald Trump.  Of their own free will, well over one-third of all the eligible voters in the United States voted for an unapologetically immoral, undemocratic, semi-literate, immature, utterly self-absorbed pathological liar, who foments racial hatred and bizarre conspiracy theories, panders to absurd religious beliefs, and rejects science and normal human progress in a way that would make a shit-covered medieval peasant in a Monty Python movie look like Einstein by comparison.

     In so doing, were these 72 million plus people—more than one in every five humans who inhabit this country—voting to stop a Hitler from becoming president?  Were they voting to prevent the next Stalin, or Kim Jong-Un, or Idi Amin, or Genghis Khan from taking control of our land and ripping our constitution to shreds?  Were they trying to stave off the coming of the Antichrist or the naked evil of Satan himself?  No; quite the opposite.  They were, instead, voting against a man who has ably demonstrated that he is capable of occupying the office, and has never done much worse than to be rather repetitive and hokey, and at times (certainly in my book) a bit too bipartisan.  Oh, and he's had some hair transplants and cosmetic surgery.  They were voting to reject the standard-bearer for a political party whose platform calls for affordable health care, cheaper education, racial justice, fairer taxation of the wealthy, ecological responsibility, international cooperation and leadership, and a well-organized effort to end the worse pandemic to plague the earth in over one hundred years--all ideas that his opponent and his party either explicitly rejected or neglected to carry out.

     Probably not since the days prior to the Civil War has such a large chunk of the American electorate deliberately opted to reject human decency and enshrine the degradation of human life.  And that was at a time when neither African Americans, nor Asians, nor Indians, nor women of any race or color could vote.  Just white men.  You'd think, given that fact, that the onus for the recent display of horrible bad judgment on the part of this very large segment of the American people would fall primarily and directly on the heads of the descendants of those same white males.  And you'd be mostly right, to be sure.  If you took out all the white men who voted for Trump, you'd be left with a much smaller number, and a more lopsided victory for Biden.  But a hell of a lot of white women voted for Trump, too.  And they didn't do it while holding their noses.  No sir.  They did it with the full-throated enthusiasm of drunken Harley mommas.

     The operative word in the analysis in the above paragraph, however, isn't "men," or "women," it's "WHITE."  Already, due to a delay in vote counting and tabulation in several states, the news media are falling all over themselves to come up with new filler in the form of obscure demographic factoids and statistics meant to alarm us and challenge what, for most thinking people, should be a simple application of logic in the light of history.  In part they are doing this in order to cover up for the fact that, for the second straight presidential election, they were substantially wrong in their predictions of the outcomes of the election.  Oh sure, they backed the right horse, but they picked him to win by half a furlong, not by a length.  And that, again, is because they were looking in all the wrong places for the answers--the keys, so to speak, to the situation.   For instance, we're being treated right now to articles about how the Black vote isn't monolithic, and how a "surprisingly" large number of Black men, in particular, voted for Trump.  But when you burrow into the numbers you find that the size of the majority of Black people, male and female, who voted for Biden was enormous--80-90 percent or more--far larger than the percentage of Latins or whites or Asians who voted for him.  And, as John Oliver put it so well in his last show, these Black people weren't doing so in order to give the stamp of approval, a ringing endorsement, to the elderly white guy at the top of the Biden-Harris ticket.  They were doing so for the best of all possible reasons, namely, pragmatism:  given the choice between two old white guys (which, let's face it, is almost always the choice), they voted for the one less likely to deliberately fuck them over.  Same with the Indians.  And same, to a lesser extent, with Latins (about whom more in a later posting).

     But quibbling about whether or not Black men, or Latins, or Asians, voted for Trump more than people might have expected them to is a big waste of time.  And by the same token, quibbling about what might have motivated the overwhelming majority of those 72 million voters to vote for Trump is also a fool's errand, when the answer is so simple.  Economics?  Hell no.  Trump didn't do jack shit for them economically, unless they were Wall Street sharks.  Health and safety?  Are you shitting me?  They're dropping like flies from a disease that loves to eat the old, the fat, and the dissolute.  No.  The reason almost all those people, male and female, voted for Trump is that they are scared shitless of Black people, and angry at their attempts to assert their equality with white people.  Trump voters voted for Trump because he validated their racism, their sense of white entitlement and supremacy, or, if they weren't quite white, their sense of entitlement to something more than Black people have ever had.  

     Assuming the transition of government goes as it should, people will soon be writing books, op-ed pieces, and high-toned magazine articles about what happened, and why.  And they'll be coming up with some weird-ass theories.  This is particularly ironic, because the only people literate enough or interested enough to read such things are the folks who voted for Biden, and they should already know the answer to why people voted for Trump.  HATRED OF BLACK PEOPLE.  Sorry, I don't think I can make it any more explicit.  

     Hillary Clinton put it best a few years ago when she was running for president--the people who favor Trump are a "basket of deplorables."  She caught hell for that, because, folks said, it cost her the election in key states where such deplorables might have been more likely to vote for her if they hadn't been insulted.  Well, first of all I don't believe that.  And second of all, fuck whether they were insulted.  Deplorables are deplorables.  They proved it in 2016 and they proved it in 2020.  For that matter, they proved it in the 1860s, and many other times along the way.  These people are irredeemable.  If you're thinking that we're going to "bind up the nation's wounds," and all that, think again.  We might harass the organized far-right using the FBI.  That would be good.  And we might bring about some tiny measure of police reform.  And we might teach ourselves more nuanced ways to look at the subjects of institutional and individual racism.  That, also, would be good, but it won't reach the people who voted for Trump.  We will never change their minds.  The only end to their beliefs is the grave.

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