Since when does the U.S. Constitution allow us to sign away our rights for the privilege of survival?

Enough already with election wonkery and outrageous Trumpfoolery. Do you mind if just for one post, just this once, I change the subject? No? It’s okay with you? Thanks. Now play along with me.

Imagine you’re crawling on hands and knees across Death Valley, in California. It’s July. It’s 107 degrees. You have no water. You’re dehydrated. You’re thirsty.

Suddenly a truck drives up.

“Need some water, friend?” the driver asks.

“Yes thanks.”

“Okay,” he says. I’ve got a whole icy-cold tank of it here. Gallons and gallons of the stuff. More than enough for you to survive on. Just sign this.”

And he pulls out a 30-page document, set in mouse-type print, on wide measure, while you rest on your hands and knees, panting.

Have a good long drink

 of water, sucker!

“What is that?” you ask.

“Terms and conditions of service for water. A user agreement which I can change at any time although you can’t. It’ll only take you a couple of hours to study. Well, maybe three or four. Plus a law degree. Sorry, I can’t let you have any of my water until you sign.”

Hey, you can’t get by without water. And you don’t have two hours to wade through the fine print. You sign.

As promised, he gives you water. All the water you want. Then he claps a pair of handcuffs and a pair off leg irons on you.

“It’s off to the plantation with you, kid,” he says, “You’ve just voluntarily surrendered your right to life and liberty to me. Fair and square. It says so right here in the contract you just signed. And don’t tell me you didn’t read the contact. It says right here, ‘I have read this contract and I agree to all its provisions.’”

No no, you can’t do that.

Not even if you want to.

Of course, in modern America, at least since the mid-19^th Century, slavery has been against the law. Period. The United States Constitution, and specifically the 13^th Amendment clearly states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In other words, unless you’ve been found guilty of a crime, nobody can compel you to work for him, to wake up and go to sleep when he tells you, to eat what you’re told, when you’re told; nor can anybody buy and sell you. And you can’t sell yourself into slavery. No matter what you sign. At least not in this country. Says so in the United States Constitution.

Hey, has anyone here read

the Seventh Amendment?

Now let’s consider the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It says: “In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”

In other words, for any civil matter worth arguing about, you’re entitled to a trial by jury. Still with me?

Now, why is it that if you can’t sign your right to freedom away and decide to become a slave, you can sign away your right to a jury trial that would enable you to seek justice in commercial matters?

And you do this almost every time you buy a service on the Internet, purchase a computer, acquire software, open a bank account, apply for a credit card, or in many cases, take a job.

You usually agree — far in advance of any possible negative event or dispute — to arbitration, with an arbitrator who depends for his living on the company you’re arbitrating against. Guess how that’s going to turn out?

Choice? What choice?

Please don’t tell me you’ve the choice not to buy or sign up for any of those things that make you sign away your rights. In today’s high tech society, software, and a computer, and a cell phone, and a credit card, not to mention a job, are just as necessary to sustaining life as water. See how far you’ll get in this without a bank account, or a credit card, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a job.

Further, the cost to you of the arbitration may be outrageous and the odds of getting full justice slim. You may have to arbitrate in a distant state where the company you signed on with locates its business. You can’t join with others who’ve been ripped off by the same company in a class action suit, because you’ve all waived your rights to sue when you signed those humongous contracts.

To be fair, in some circumstances, arbitration may be to the mutual advantage of buyer and seller. So it makes sense to give both of you the right to arbitrate at the time you get into the dispute, if you then both agree to that. But most of the time, arbitration is clearly to the seller’s advantage. And you have no choice, because you signed your rights away before you realized you were going to get ripped off.

Hey it’s election year. So grab

your representative’s ear now.

So, fellow computer owners, software users, salary earners, bank depositors, brokerage account customers, credit card spenders, car loan and mortgage payers, cell phone callers — even seekers of romance through online dating services — it’s time to contact your congressmen and senators. Tell them you want an end to forced arbitration. Insist that arbitration should permitted only if both parties agree to it at the time a dispute arises.

If we can put an end to forced arbitration we’ll go a long way toward ending company bullying, slipshod manufacturing, predator lending, and sometimes even homicidal neglect. And even if the Congress remains sclerotic after the next election, people who’ve been forced to sign away their rights can start thinking about bringing the issue before appeals courts.

If you can’t sell yourself into slavery, why should you be permitted to sell your soul to some greedy industrialist who will leave you stranded in the 19^th Century if you don’t surrender your rights when you use today’s essential services?

 Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Will there be any Clinton vs. Trump TV debates? (A bit of idle speculation.)

We know Melania Trump swiped part of her speech from Michelle Obama. Now

 there’s prima facie evidence that Donald Trump got his political philosophy 

from Tony the Tiger. But that’s not what this post is about.

Somebody in the Trump camp must be sweating bullets.

It's  quite nearly a given that opposing Presidential nominees are expected  to debate each other on television. Which leads me to wonder what’s going through the minds of people at Trump headquarters.

No, I’m not talking about the mind of Donald Trump himself. I’m sure he thinks he can walk in front of the cameras, call his opponent “crooked Hillary” a few hundred times, and promise he’ll be like Tony the Tiger of Sugar Frosted Flakes fame, and make America grrrrreat! again. And that will be that.

But less bloated heads in Trumpland must assuredly know better. As we saw during her speech on Thursday night, Hillary is calm, confident, knows her stuff in depth, is not likely to be rattled easily, and has a fat dossier on Trump.  

So for openers, if Hillary, or questioners from the press ask Trump a single “how” question, his goose is is deep fried in oil sludge.

“How will you pay for that when you also promise to cut taxes, Donald? What government waste are you specifically talking about? How much will this program cost and how did you calculate that, Donald? Will you really give nukes to Saudi Arabia and risk the resultant mid-Est holocaust? Will you actually permit your pal Putin to march in and take Poland and Hungary? Nice tie you’re wearing Donald...why did you have it made in China?”

And so on. Not to mention all the tangible horrors waiting for Hillary to pull out of Trump’s past and demand that he answer to, from the Trump University Follies to stiffed carpenters and plumbers, to bankrupt casinos. And what’s Trump specifically going to counter-punch with other than “she got $600,000 for a speech,” and “Don’t believe her, she’s crooked, folks.” 

The one danger is that Trump will try to shout down anything Hillary says. But that can be, and should be addressed in advanced of the debate. It ought to be stipulated that during each candidate’s turn to talk, the other candidate’s microphone shall be turned off by a neutral time keeper. In fact, I like that idea so much, that in the name of civil discourse I think this rule should be extended to all political debates, not to mention all those migraine-inducing Shouting Head Festivals on CNN.

But back to the Clinton-Trump debate:

I can’t imagine anyone in the Trump camp who wants the disagreeable duty, after the first debate if there is one, of handing The Donald a bloody plastic bag with something horrifying in it and saying, “Mr. Trump, Hillary said I should give this to you for a souvenir.” 

The Donald will of course make a face and ask, “What is that?” And the Trump staffer will have to say, “Those are your testicles, sir.” Whereupon The Donald will discover for the first time that during the debate he lost something without even realizing it.

So I’m saying there’s a better than fair chance that Trump’s handlers will find an excuse not to let him debate. Any excuse. It might be a flareup of the old “foot thing” (whichever foot he decides to remember it was) that kept him out of the military. Or it might be the petulant announcement that “I refuse to even be in the same room with Crooked Hillary.” It might  even be, “the press is so biased against me that I can’t debate her.” 

Nobody will be fooled, but I’m guessing that Trump will use any escape hatch he can find to  run like a scared rabbit. And if he doesn’t run from the first debate, he even more likely will before the second. 

You say his ego is far too inflated to miss a an opportunity to appear on national TV and demonstrate that, no matter what anybody says, vulgarity is not dead? Just remember that what’s really inflated is just another gas bag. And the more inflated they are, the more easily and louder they pop.

My advice to Hillary: declare some debate dates, get the network time reserved, and if Trump doesn’t show up, debate from your side and let the camera point to an empty chair when it’s Trump’s turn. 

As for me, if there ever actually is a Clinton-Trump debate, or two, or more, I intend to sit in front of the television set with two bowls. One will contain a heaping serving of popcorn. The other will be filled to the brim with schadenfreude.

Cross-Posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Maureen Dowd, Donald Trump, and Don Rickles

Dowd

Trump

Rickles

In today's Sunday New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd writes:

Nothing should be remarkable with Trump anymore. But it was still remarkable to see him the morning after his balloon-drop coronation as head of the Republican Party return to trolling Ted Cruz. There’s a dissonance in his bleak dystopia and his brash diss-topia as he switches from Dr. Strangelove to Don Rickles.

That's an outrageous insult to Don Rickles.

Maureen Dowd, Donald Trump, and Don Rickles

Dowd

Trump

Rickles

In today's Sunday New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd writes:

Nothing should be remarkable with Trump anymore. But it was still remarkable to see him the morning after his balloon-drop coronation as head of the Republican Party return to trolling Ted Cruz. There’s a dissonance in his bleak dystopia and his brash diss-topia as he switches from Dr. Strangelove to Don Rickles.

That's an outrageous insult to Don Rickles.

The morning after, or, ten events that could very well happen if Donald Trump becomes President

Yes, yes, of course it includes this, but read below to learn how we'll get there.

1. Putin rejoices and moves Russian troops into the former Iron Curtain satellite nations — Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Romania, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia (including Melania’s home state of Slovenia.)

2.  Some of the captured nations appeal to NATO for defense aid as Russian tanks rumble down their streets.

3. Donald Trump says he will look into the contributions to NATO that these countries have made and will get back to the world after he discusses the matter with his accountants who at this very moment are flying to confer with him at Mar-a-Largo. Meanwhile, he reiterates that Putin is very strong (unlike Hillary) and he admires that, but that he can easily negotiate a solution to this mess with Putin.

4. Putin shrugs, says in Russian, “What the hell,” and sends troops to take over Germany and Finland.

5. Trump says payments from Russia’s newly-acquired nations were insufficient to warrant heavy boots-on-the-ground expenditures to defend those countries, but that he will “consider” sending in a few spy drones "to see what the hell is going on."

6. Putin reinstalls Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba and and announces he has pointed some of them toward Miami, Houston, Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, the Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and just for the hell of it, Phoenix and Indianapolis.

7. Trump calls Putin and demands to negotiate the situation. Putin mutters the Russian equivalent of a statement that if Donald’s fingers aren’t really as short as reputed, he should go have a sexual relationship with himself.

8. Enraged,Trump launches a nuclear strike at Russia. Some of the nukes, powered by aging missiles, fall short of their targets. One lands on London and blows the capital city of our longtime ally to smithereens. Several nukes explode in the Atlantic ocean and the North Sea, poisoning those waters with radiation for centuries to come. Russians shoot down others. However, one missile does manage to get through — and hits the abandoned nuclear power plant in the abandoned city of Chernobyl, just as it was programmed to do more than 30 years ago, before Chernobyl's meltdown.

9. Trump again demands to negotiate with Putin. This time, Putin agrees. Trump negotiates the unconditional surrender of the United States to the newly reformed USSR. 

10. The Russians transport ISIS troops to the United States to “restore order.”  From a secret bunker below what’s left of Trump Tower, Secretary of Homeland Security Tiffany Trump issues a four-step plan to Americans who either think they are suffering from radiation poisoning or who get captured by ISIS troops: “One: Stand with your feet 18 to 24 inches apart.  Two: Do a deep knee bend. Three: Stick your head as far between your legs as it can go. Four: Kiss your butt goodbye."

Republicans demonstrate that their party is nothing more than a comic book, while Melania Trump all but lip synchs Michelle Obama

I  must say, watching the first night of the Republican convention last night was almost as entertaining as my first exposure to comic books.

I tuned in too late for the floor fight to boot Trump off the ticket. News reports have the Republican-Trump Complex squashing their opponents like a bug, thwarting what could have been a grave embarrassment to the party and The Donald.

But I tuned in just as the comic book characters that represent the Republican Party came onscreen.

Among them  were Mr. Flag Wrapper — Willie Robertson, the

Duck Killer Willie disses the American 

flag by using it as a sweat rag

long-bearded, hillbilly-ish, Duck Dynasty dude, who took an American flag and used it as a sweat rag to wrap around his head. Had a Democrat done this on TV, no doubt the Republican outrage machine would have been belching steam and giant clouds of volcanic ash. "How dare some lib-tard desecrate the flag?!?!?!"

But should a Republican even use the flag for toilet paper? Well heck, that’s showing he has a patriotic ass.

Is he Rick or is he Clark?

Then former Governor Oops of Texas, perfectly disguised as Clark Kent, got up and said something so forgettable that I can’t remember what it was. Sort of the way he forgot the three departments he'd eliminate if he remembered to become president.

Another huge highlight for me was Rudy The Air Chopper Giuliani, the so called “security expert.” Rudy's “accomplishments” included establishing a super-double-secret emergency command center for grave emergencies in the World Trade Center, shortly before 9-11 (but after terrorists had already tried to bomb the World Trade Center with a truck bomb in the garage of one of the towers.) 

Shucks, what made Rudy think that just because they failed once to blow the place up, and because it was a symbol of what the terrorists decided they hated about America, that they would never back and try again? 

Crazy Rudy. His gestures are in-sane!

Rudy last night looked as if he had lost whatever common sense and sanity he ever had. He turned into a cross between a super villain out of Batman, and a former New York TV appliance salesman named Crazy Eddie, ("His prices are in-sane" said Crazy Eddie's slogan.) 

It was like a nuthouse ballet to watch Rudy wildly gesticulating, chopping at the air, with his hands, looking like somebody the cops would blow to smithereens if only he were black and someone whispered, “He probably has a gun, and as you can see, he’s a whack job.”

And finally there was Melania Trump, all but lip synching the wife of the man Donald Trump says we should hate. There were some interesting demonstrations on TV this morning: Michelle Obama says it, then Melania Trump says the identical thing. Then Michelle says something. Then Melania Trump copycats again.

"I'm not really bad. I'm just ghost-
written that way."

But I don’t believe Melania plagiarized Michelle. I believe it’s the fault of plagiarizing speechwriters, who put Michelle’s worlds in Melania’s mouth. I feel just a bit sorry for Melania. 

I suspect that after his first very costly divorce from Ivanna, and a later divorce from Marla Maples, The Donald’s lawyers have engineered prenups so harsh that Melania would be all but living on the street if she ever divorced The Donald. So she's trapped, forced to forever mouth plagiarized words and defend a loose cannon of a husband.

She’s like that beautiful but not in control character in the movie, “Who Killed Ronald Rabbit?” I’m talking about the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit who spoke the immortal line, “I’m not really bad. I'm just drawn that way.”

And these are the people that roughly half the voters want to put in charge of America’s future?

God help us! 

He's alive! He's alive, I tell you! I saw him on a wall. He's alive!

Old icons never die. They just vanish for a while, and then show up on walls with a
new crop of facial hair.

I think the first time I laid eyes on him I was about 11 or 12. A kid in my class named Bernie Feuer turned me on to him. I'm talking about Alfred E. Neuman, the “What, me worry?” boy.

I always wondered what became of the "What Me Worry?" boy. Well, I've wondered about Bernie Feuer, too, but this piece is specifically about the face that lured me into Mad Comics.

For years, he kept me entertained. He kept me spending my dimes, and later my quarters, just to get a laugh from his gap-toothed mug. It was the face of what today you'd call a nerd. In those days, there was no such word as nerd.

Eventually I grew up and went to college. And then, decades later, the last time I looked at Mad, he wasn’t there any more. Or maybe he was confined to a page or two that I missed. At any rate, I didn't see him.

Was he brutally murdered in an editorial putsch? Was he exiled to some distant file drawer to wither away in our aging memories? Had he escaped to another country, where he now thrives by practicing, say, psychiatry or obstetric medicine, or acupuncture?

I don’t have the answer for sure. But it would appear that he became a surrealist artist, in the tradition of Salvador Dali. Or maybe he's just a fading dandy these days, paid by a shipping line to dance with single ladies on cruise ships.

Whatever the case, here’s how you can find him, today. Go to the northwest corner of Second Avenue and 35th Street in New York City. There he’ll be, at least for a while, up against a wall, staring at the garbage cans that would be at his feet, if he had any feet. He has been put on display in this fashion by something called The Bushwick Collective, or so they sign his portrait.

Hello, Alfred. Or may I call you Al? And by the way, after all these years you finally look a trifle worried to me. Perhaps you fear that a Republican congress will cut your Social Security and Medicare benefits. Or privatize them. Or both. Or is "privatizing" another way of saying they're going to cut you to the quick?

And question: if Donald Trump actually manages to get himself elected, and then actually manages to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, should your portrait be on the wall, too? And if so, on which side of the wall?

Anyway, I’m glad to think you’ve finally learned to worry. Why should you be any different than the rest of us?

But before I leave on vacation again….is 316-630-8031 a scam operation or a cheesy ambulance chasing lawyer?

I don’t know who got hold of my phone number, but I live with a constant barrage of scam phone calls. Sometimes I get as many as ten a day. 

This is outrageous because I’m on a FCC no-call list. I’m beginning to suspect that all these phantom callers got my number directly from the list of people who it's against the law to call.

Many of the calls are from “engineers” purporting to be from Microsoft (oddly, they all have Indian accents) telling me I have to get in front of my Windows computer and type in some code that will help them get rid of viruses they have detected on my computer.

Yeah, right. And don’t think my Mac wasn’t insulted to hear that the guys in a Mumbai boiler room thinks it’s a Windows machine.

Some callers promise to reduce my credit card interest payments. That's tempting, except for one thing. I don't have any credit card debt.

About twice a month I get congratulated on winning a “free” cruise. I’m beginning to think “free cruise” is the most deceitful phrase in the English language after “I love you”.

Today, I got a new one from 316-630-8031. When I picked up the phone, a robot played a recorded announcement informing me that if I had taken Xarelto, I might have a cause to take legal action and I should stay on the line. 

No, I don't take Xarelto. But I stayed on the line anyway.

When a live person finally came on, I asked for the name of the organization she was calling from.   

“Legal Assistance Help Line,” she said. Then I asked her what attorney or law firm the "help line" represented.

She immediately hung up.

If this operation is a bottom-feeding lawyer or law firm trying to siphon up business from the sewer, he or it ought to be dragged naked before the bar association and have his or its law licenses burned at the stake while the naked lawyers themselves are clubbed over the head with a judge’s gavel.

If it’s a scamming operation representing themselves as lawyers, the scammers ought to be dragged naked to a negligence law firm. What will happen next? It’s likely too cruel and prolonged to go into here. 

That’s it. I’m outta here. Happy July 4th. And don’t forget to disconnect your phone before you go.

Brexit at Tiffany’s, Johnson and Trump, bad hair — and other reasons I’m sorry I came back from vacation

 So I’m back in New York, rested, refreshed, even re-quirked after spending time in Yellow Springs, Ohio. And what’s the first thing that smacks me in the face? Boris Johnson, the leader of the British Brexit movement, who got what he asked for and now seems to be suffering from snake oil salesman’s’s remorse.

Brexit, as you almost certainly know by now, is not a morning meal you eat while dashing out the door because you’re late to work. Brexit is the exit of Britain from the European Common Market and the European Union. 

Britain, egged on by yet another fair haired bullshit artist with a bad haircut, a spiritual and coiffure-cousin of Donald Trump named Boris Johnson, bought the notion that all their problems would be solved if only they got out from under the thumb of Common Market bureaucrats in Brussels.

Like followers of Trump, a large mass of dopey Brits said, in effect, yeah, Brexit is a great idea. We’ll keep out all those Mooooslims who are free to travel to Britain under Common Market rules, and we won’t have to do any more bureaucratic paperwork or pay money to Europe. In effect, the Brits thought they were building a wall around the British Isles and making Europe pay for it.

So they cast their ballots, and with remarkable speed reaped a whirlwind of financial and political nightmares. The bottom fell out not only of the European stock market but of the British securities market. In case you haven’t checked your own 401(k) or investment account in a while, I’ve got bad news for you. While screwing themselves, the Brits also screwed you. The Dow has dropped so fast, far, and hard in the last few days, it’s amazing it hasn’t been followed by bodies tumbling out of windows on Wall Street.

Further, the canny Scots, who mostly liked Brexit, are now thinking of pulling out of the British Commonwealth. Which would leave Britain vastly diminished in territory, population, and industrial output.

Now Boris is pulling a Donald and saying, well, he didn’t really mean a total Brexit. The Brits hope, to quote a story in The New York Times, that “Britain could, while leaving the European Union, somehow maintain access to its signature achievement: the world’s largest common market.”

It’s as if I walked out of your dinner party declaring, “Your food is sewage, your culinary skills are disgusting, your dining room looks like a toilet, and your ugly guests have body odor.” And then, ten seconds later, I rang the door bell and told my shocked hostess, “However, I’ve always like your key lime pie, so I will come back in for dessert.”

The hostess would slam the door in my face, which is exactly what the Continent should do to the Brits.

This will not only teach the Brits a lesson, it will also teach other dissident European nations a lesson:

If in unity there is strength, in disunity there is nothing but chaos, disaster,  financial collapse, the potential for bloody revolution, and an open invitation for Vladimir Putin to come in and take his Iron Curtain back.

The British pound is, at least compared to last week, toilet paper. That’s fine. It means strong dollar Americans and Continental Europeans loaded with Euros can traipse around Britain, lording it over those remorseful Brits and rubbing their noses in one of the greatest acts of self destructions since the lemmings invented mass suicide.

And that object lesson may help keep Europe together. It may also serve as an object lesson to Americans as to what is almost certainly going to happen if you elect any blubber mouthed blusterer with a bad haircut and a penchant for going it alone in an interconnected world. Yes, I’m looking at you, Donald.

If the Brits want back in to the EU, I hope the Continent will make sure it’s all or nothing. And I also hope Europe makes the Brits pay for their folly. How to make them pay is easy. Charge them a one trillion pound re-entry fee. Cash only.

Meanwhile, I hope there will be no “gradual” Brexit. Europe ought to grab Britain by the armpits and give it the bum’s rush out the door.

Oh, and should you happen to go shopping in Tiffany’s here in New York, odds have it that the gentleman at the diamond counter buying bright shiny rocks for his third and much younger wife is not a Brit. However, a real Brit’s $20 million New York apartment is, I'll betcha, going to be up for sale soon, at distressed prices, one supposes.

That said, I find all the Brexit news nauseating. So I’m going back on vacation for a while. 

"BLOGGER'S BURNOUT" FRIES NEW YORK CRANK'S BRAINS TO A CRISP!

This is not a picture of me, but it's a pretty good representation of how I
feel about blogging at the moment.

That's it! That's all. For the moment at least, I've had it. I'm done. I have nothing more to say. Kaput!

Nothing about Donald Trump, even though every time I mention his name in a headline, my page visits soar.

Nothing about Hillary either. Or Bernie. Or DeBlasio. Or about anything else.

My brains cells ache. My hair hurts. My nose is twisted out of joint.

Maybe you've noticed that my pace of posting has slowed noticeably in recent months. Every time I sit down at the computer and look at my blog, a loud voice inside my head screams, "Noooooo! Not again! No mas, no mas!"

So I'm going to stop posting for a week or two. Given the rate at which I have been posting recently, you should hardly notice.

And I'm going next week to my favorite quirky American small town, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Maybe somewhere on the main street, Xenia Avenue, between a shop called Mr. Fub's Party and The Gulch Saloon (well, that's around the corner from Xenia Avenue, but even so) maybe there I'll find my soul sitting on a quirky, psychedelically-painted street bench, waiting for the next flash mob of dancing grandmas. (Yes, such things really happen in that town.)

"I wondered when you'd finally come back to me" my soul will say.

And I will put it on like an old glove, or an old shoe, or an old sweatshirt, or maybe a brand new hat, and I will feel comforted enough to start muttering about politics again. Or potty mouthed politicians. Or potholes in Manhattan. Or why I have a blog in the first place.

Until then, LEAVE ME ALONE, OKAY?

Are you insane enough to be President of the United States?

No matter what happens, the next President of the United
States will be nuts. The question is, how nuts?

Let’s face it, you’ve got to be nuts to want to be President. 

You’ll spend a year in a grueling, voice-killing, health-wrecking political campaign. 

You’ll be lied about and vilified by the opposite side as the devil incarnate, while you throw similar charges at them.

I admit, it's possible that you may undergo all this, and a gauntlet of press scrutiny, and of violently negative commentary, a bit more serenely than most of the Republican candidates for nomination have this year. You may not have to fight a self-evident urge to whip out a ruler, zip down your fly, and measure your penis on television. But you’ll undergo an unbearable ordeal all the same.

Then, if you win the election, you’ll spend four years away from home, sleeping in a public building . That’s almost exactly what homeless people do on freezing nights in New York.

Furthermore, regardless of where you stand on anything, the Other Side will be out to fling mud and manure at you. They will try to wreck your reputation and destroy you by any means possible, some of those means extra-legal.

Your life will be in danger. There will be all kinds of enraged people out to kill you, from stray drunks, and unemployed and politically disaffected malcontents, to Al Queda and ISIS. You, and your family, will need to be guarded day and night by phalanxes of Secret Service agents, some of them so unreliable that when they should be guarding you, their minds are likely to be on booze and hookers.

Little wonder the hair of most American presidents  to date has turned white while they were in office, if it wasn’t already white by the time they got there.

Little wonder that 

Nixon and John F. Kennedy clandestinely filled their medicine cabinets with psychotropic drugs, recently uncovered documents reveal. In fact, Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggested in his journals that several modern presidents were mentally unbalanced; he recorded top aides arguing whether President Lyndon Johnson was clinically paranoid or a manic-depressive, and fretted that there was no constitutional “procedure for dealing with nuts.”

As I said, you’ve got to be nuts. It seems to be a prerequisite of the job.

Donald Trump is so nuts that he has received mental status diagnoses that range from "classic narcissistic personality disorder” to full blown “psychotic.”

Not that Hillary isn’t nuts, too. What’s with her obsessive-compulsive need, as demonstrated by the whole e-mail server brouhaha,  to shoot herself in the foot? And then what's with her other obsessive-compulsive need to tough it out and pretend her toe isn't bleeding, instead of fessing up and putting the whole matter to rest by admitting she made a dumb mistake and apologizing? 

Bernie Sanders? He thinks he can start a revolution of the human spirit. He thinks he can inspire civil behavior, human kindness, and social consciences, by sheer force of will, from coast to coast, right here in the United States of America. Right. And I am the King of England and Slobovia.

Jill Stein of the Green Party? If she gets so much as a significant fraction of one percent of the vote, and the Democratic candidate loses by a similar fraction, she’ll forever after be vilified with the same kind of opprobrium that Ralph Nader suffered when Gore lost to Bush. And yet she insists on running.

So what are we Americans to do?

Here's what. This nation needs to design a presidential insanity scale. It should measure a variety of psychological factors and first of all avoid vetting  for nomination any candidate who is not nuts. That's because any sane person won’t want to run. (Case in point, Elizabeth Warren.) 

Nor should anybody who is one of  the wildly, totally, unstoppably  out of control whackos be permitted to run, because that person might, during his first 72 hours in office, sink the United States economy, loot the U.S. Treasury, set off a nuclear bomb, unleash a nuclear war, and get us all incinerated. (I’m lookin’ at you, Donald Trump.)

No, what we need is somebody who is certifiably half nuts. Crazy enough to run. But not crazy enough to do  more than a generation or two of lasting harm. And we need a diagnostic scale to measure that person by.

Psychiatrists, do your stuff!