Ted & Donald & Bernie & Hillary & Very Cranky Me

Eeuwwwwwwww!

Sheer laziness aside, one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately has to do with the recent slew of primaries. There are just too many of them. And there are too many news reports about them. Simply glancing at the news is exhausting.

I prefer the days when  “too many” referred not to primaries, but to the list of Republican presidential wannabes. 

...the biggest boor to run for the White House since America was founded.

And now look what we’re left with. On the Republican side it’s Trump or Cruz. Either should be easy for the Democratic nominee to beat. If not, Hillary’s going to have some explaining to do. I’ll get to her a bit further on, but first this about the leading Republican candidates.

On the one hand, we have the biggest boor to run for the White House since America was founded. Some make comparisons between Trump and Andrew Jackson, also a populist. But that comparison is fallacious. 

Jackson was born poor, not with a silver spoon in his mouth. Unlike Trump, who sat out Vietnam because he managed to find a doctor who found a bone spur somewhere, Jackson was a war hero. And Jackson served in the U.S. Senate while Trump served as Grand High Poobah of the Miss Something-Or-Other beauty contest.

...after three minutes of listening to Cruz I feel the need to take a shower.

On the other Republican hand we have Ted Cruz, who just may be the most oleaginous personality to appear in American politics since most people gave up vying to catch greased pigs. I have no personal experience with the man, but I take the Republican law makers whom he disgusts and repulses at their word.

I don’t know what it is — perhaps it’s  his self-righteous lectures, or his self-satisfied smirk, or his faux choirboy look, or his willingness to smear his opponents and New York with equal impunity, or the disgusting causes he backs — but after three minutes of listening to Cruz I feel the need to take a shower.

Bernie Sanders? I love him. I still support him, at least in spirit. I agree with the New York Times assessment that his candidacy has been a gift to Democrats, forcing us to raise our ambitions for America’s future.

Alas, Bernie is most probably a lost cause. And that brings us to Hillary.

A friend recently described Hillary as “not really a Democrat; she’s a moderate Republican.” She certainly is, or perhaps even a bit to the right of moderate Republicans in the context of the 1950s, when Republican Dwight David Eisenhower ’s campaign platform included this:

We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance —improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people.

As I keep reminding people, I’m a 1960s middle-of-the-road Democrat whose political opinions have not changed one iota, but who now finds that his centerist 1960 opinions mark him as a flaming left wing radical. 

That said, one thought of what just one arm of government — the Supreme Court — could become if any Republican gains the White House is enough to make me hold my nose and make sure I vote for Hillary in the general elections.

 I ... cringe at the thought that some Republican operative has a copy of one of [Hillary's] speeches and will release it after her nomination is set in stone

But I must admit to a nervous twinge. And that relates to Ms. Clinton’s refusal to release the content of her speeches before the likes of Goldman Sachs. Somewhere in the back of my mind lurks the thought that the speeches do contain something that would incriminate her, not as a felon, but as a willing and perhaps even eager maidservant of Wall Street interests.

And I further cringe at the thought that some Republican operative has a copy of one of those speeches and will release it after her nomination is set in stone — thereby turning vast sectors of the electorate against her and throwing the election back into the arms of the Republican Party.

If she has hidden her speeches because they incriminate her and nullify her connection to the American working folks that she says she wants to represent, she had better beware. Once the content of those speeches get out, there may be mobs with torches and pitchforks at her door in Chappaqua, ready to drive a wooden stake through her heart at a crossroads before she ever gets to Washington. 

And if the content of those speeches are part of the reason she doesn’t get to the White House, I’m coming to Chappaqua with my own torch and pitchfork.

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and the adult coloring book craze

My father can out-scribble your father.

And so can my President.

Too much attention to political punditry makes Crank a dull boy. An entire trend almost escaped my notice until I went on a wildly haphazard surf across the Internet and discovered the Adult Coloring Book craze.

If you haven’t heard of it until now either, then both of us need to crawl out from under our rocks and take a look at what’s going on around this planet.

I know this may sound crazy, but adult coloring books are the newest new thing. This is bigger than world hunger. Bigger that global climate change. Bigger than nuclear catastrophes. Bigger than a sackfull of rattlesnakes and another one chock full of squirming and wriggling ISIS agents.  Or as an online publication called Publishing Perspectives puts it, “It’s Springtime for Crayola.”

And not only Crayola. Another online publication called The Independent is reporting that a German manufacturer of colored pencils, Faber-Castell, is huffing and puffing to keep up with the demand for its products.

“Currently, we are running more shifts than usual in our factory in Stein, Bavaria in order to satisfy the global needs for artists pencils related to the colouring trend for adults,” reports Sandra Suppa, the pencil-pushing manufacturer’s spokesperson.

But wait, there’s more!

London’s Telegraph reveals:

Colouring books have become a surprising feature of many bookshops’ bestsellers lists in recent years, with Waterstones previously noticing a 300 per cent rise in sales in just one year. 

Melissa Cox, head of children’s buying at Waterstones, told the paper: “Colouring books are doing really well at the moment, which initially surprised us… and we realised adults were buying them for themselves.”

And right there, ladies and gentlemen, you have it: the Ultimate Explanation for Everything. The windows through which you can peer to see why so many people are taking Donald Trump and Ted Cruz so seriously and civilization is going down the crapper. 

It explains why Trump and Marco Rubio were able to get into a nose thumbing match over whose fingers (and presumably, therefore, whose penis) is smaller. Or bigger. It explains why Trump, and Fiorina, and Palin, and others, thought, or still think they’re qualified for public office.

Most of all, it explains why our nation is going to hell in a garishly embroidered hand basket.

We, and evidently the rest of the world, have regressed into a state of complete and utter infantilism. Our pastimes have devolved — from building furniture in the garage, or souping up hotrods, or feeding the homeless, or translating Cicero from the original Latin, to coloring within the outlines someone else has created for us in coloring books, just the way we used to when we were kids.

Speaking of kids, in must be scary has hell to a nine year old to see see your parents acting more like children than you are. And don’t try to defend this by saying that the coloring books are on “adult themes," which some of them most certainly are. That just proves my point. And scares the kids even more.

The planet — I suspect led by the likes of Trump, Cruz, Palin and other Americans, not to mention Marine LePen in France  — is eagerly, no voraciously seeking to dumb the culture down. That may be because reality is just too tough to conjure with. 

The planet is overheating. The seas are rising, yet water shortages are growing. The global  economy is finally colliding against its Malthusian limits as once fertile farms turn into deserts, forests into housing subdivisions, oceans into garage dumps, and fresh air into carbon dioxide. There are no simple answers to all of this, only complex, difficult and costly puzzles.

So let’s skip all that and instead go into denial by acting like children. My father can beat up your father. My fingers  are longer than your fingers and therefore guess what else of mine is longer. My wife is prettier than Ted’s wife.  My president can nuke the puke out of your president.

Where is this leading? What should we do about it? 

I know not what course others may take, but as for me…..hand me that box of crayons.          

A short ode to Ted Cruz

Of all the obstreperous, bloviating gas bags in Washington, Senator Ted Cruz (Republican, naturally) has just taken the cake with his filibuster to logjam the government. So this is for you, Senator:

I do not like you, Mr. Cruz

I do not like you in the news

Your babbling mouth is full of spam

I do not like you, Cruz-I-am

I do not like you in the news

With your ripoff of Dr. Seuss

You cannot stop Obamacare

So just shut up

And sit  — right there!

Cranky explanatory note: Try as I could, I was unable to find a way to make Cruz rhyme with asshole. I just want you to know that I wasn't denying the obvious.