Going to Oz in a Handbasket

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It's Home Schizophrenia Day, apparently -- I guess -- and I find one of my personalities has started writing this note from the front... doing so, over my own numerous and very strong personal protests to me.

(This is not turning out very well, I said to myself.  I know that, I replied.)

See:  This is about politics and Trump and the aspirations of all the blown-out GOP nut cases and billionaire blowhards to become King of America for a while -- a chance for these marching-band rejects and assorted lame specters to practice their bumbling baton-twirling with our symbolic scepter of state.

(Any Republican winner can continue to treat everyone else like serfs, just like always, except that now, the winner gets Air Force One, and the Big Red Omigod Armageddon Button, to come into gleeful play -- and foreplay.)

This is also about Republicans trying to out-extreme one another... which reminds me how crowded is the field of squealing GOP schemers...  which reminds me we have a veritably incalculable number of tone-deaf and stone-stupid ignoramuses who believe themselves capable of leading and guiding and steering ANY society and country, let alone THIS one, when, in fact, balancing a checkbook and tying their own shoelaces would quickly shunt most of them into the overachiever category in real life...

[ Later, when most of the temple-pounding settled down some... ]

Well, let me start again, and put it this way:

And yet, here I am again, my bare feet covered with cow dung, angry hornets, and throbbing welts.  Of course, I know better -- one of my personalities surely must -- having submerged one of my selves in the last few weevil-ridden rounds of the unending Lesser-of-the-Psychos, Whack-A-Mole game we call the GOP Presidential Candidate Winnowings.

It's a time of aw-shucks homey-ness to the extent we could easily rework the way we pronounce the GOP from gee-oh-PEE, to their more purposefully evocative Gee, Opie!

With each Republican candidate, you can almost smell the antiseptic soapsuds from the candidates' fresh-scrubbed wholesomeness and hear the lazy, care-free whistle of the good old days, and that opening theme-song to The Andy Griffith Show -- back when Republican Centrism and a modicum of agreeable, Mayberry-like sensibility was in full bloom from coast to coast.

For today's GOP candidates, of course, it's single-minded (but brain-free) re-runs of the intrusive, soul-scouring meaninglessness of Big Brother and The Apprentice, all mooshed around and mixed up with scoops and scraps from Survivor and Jersey Shore and Jerry Springer and gawd-knows-what sort of anti-reality, reality-teevee show.

There is so much mind-tearing, soul-crushing nothingness in the GOP that we may need a crash-dive program offshore, from allies who still like us -- all three of them, including Tuvalu and Nauru -- to create batches and batches of anti-Bastard to remedy the Republican Void,  just as anti-matter always used to help offset really bad matter in Star Trek.

I mean, it wasn't that long ago I forewent a relatively real life for an absurdly long stretch of time, going all subterranean-and-snorkeling on this GOP political stuff instead, when 319 GOP candidates for President sorted themselves out, with me breathing it all in deeply, allowing its tentacles to merge with my brain, Aliens-style, while 347 flavors of frozen yogurt went criminally unexplored by me.  (The one personality component of me, that is, who prefers it as being healthier, and tastier, than that Purple Iguana ice cream that's 59 percent fat.)

As a limp reward, your faithful reporter brought back written proofs that all Republicans had been infected with near-lethal doses of Mad Cow disease, highlighted by some new malady in which their brain synapses appeared to have been randomly reconnected and rewired as the disease progressed and worsened.

Hydrama, I have discovered, leads to people making wildly unpredictable statements like, "It's time for people to get behind school prayer, on the playing fields and in the restrooms, along with a brand new push for the Hot Lunch Ladies Strip Club Vouchers Program in all school cafetoriums where pizza and pop will always be vegetables!"

I'm pretty sure all Republican candidates now have to sign a GOP pledge, and take the oath of some orifice or other, on this exact subject and hundreds of other equally important, equally clear mandates of crucial mumbling from the people, before throwing their perceptual top-hat lunch in the perceived ring of the virtual world of their vivid personal, and very Presidential, aspirations and other snake-bit hallucinations.

I mean, I still can't feed or care for myself for any number of hours, or hold anything still with shaking uncontrollably, or hollering, after hearing the names of Santorum, Bachmann, Perry, Cantor, Cruz, Christie, Huckabee, Bush (any of them!), Paul (any of them!), Cheney, Rubio, Walker, Trump, Romney, Graham, Jindal, Arpaio, Palin... Newt Gingrich, for heaven's sake!?  Herman Cain?!  Are you *&$#@ kidding me?!

[ Later that same day... ]

OK, I'm fine.  Honest. I just have a low threshold for clueless people with more dollars than sense, and with more big-headed ego than brain-space to contain it, and with more sponsors than all NASCAR teams in history, combined.

When you come right down to it, the whole GOP field is a fairyland trip through random reasoning and irrational rationalizations -- a parade of self-duping dupes.  A clot of a clown pile. A tangled knot of knot-headed knuckle-heads.

I mean, any one of these simpleton bozos can take you straight to hell in a handbasket. Actually, to be much clearer, it's a handbasket headed to hell via Oz, because every Republican candidate is on the lookout for the same three things each is candidate is currently lacking:

  1. Brains.
  2. A heart.
  3. Some courage.

And, to beat all, the minute a Republican actually obtains brains, heart, and courage? That candidate, according to the bylaws of the charter, becomes instantly ineligible to be a member of the GOP.

Meaningfully ironic, huh?

So much for the Wizard of Oz. More like the Lizard of Odd, these days.  (Uh: daze.)

To be a Republican anymore, and without any old-school middle ground on which to tread, the new Republican center teeters at the farthest cliff-edge (and cliff-face) of the far right-wing -- bearing a chilled cocktail of narcissism, greed, self-entitlement, and the kind of ho-hum spiritual and moral corruption that only a vehement, blind hatred of fact and red-eyed rage against science could hope to birth.

It's self-deception time again, all across the land -- where politicians are encouraged to prevaricate and equivocate like never before (which is identical to condition known as always).  This is where GOP candidates are supposed to lie, and we all know it.  We are supposed to applaud and cheer, not jeer, and believe all lies, old and new  -- because, in this particular high-stakes game, we beg them for ever-more inventive lies, and beg to be told that everything will be all right.

The best made-up stories get the most votes.

We should just change the name of the elections to The Show-n-Snow Show, and get Ivory Soap, Clorox, Visine, and some manufacturer of cheap white-wash, to sponsor the damn thing.

Yes.  And the Founders are spinning so fast in their graves that we have all the power we need for our cities for millennia to come, if we could only tap the blurring gyrations.

And so it all goes, swirling down the yellow brick road, flying monkeys and all, chasing all the fictional, made-up evil the winners can create, as fast as they can think it up and make it look real.... while the real problems sleep soundly and pounce hard, being well-fed and well-rested.

You there -- no looking behind the curtain!

I mean, talk about your high drama... as well as the unfailing Republican penchant for Hydrama.  (I wonder if any passing GOP candidates will call, here on Home Schizophrenia Day, for anyone to off all my heads, for daring to poke and tickle the Truth.  Probably not -- Republicans are not noted for the amount of irony in their diets... not consciously, anyway.)   

Meanwhile, it's the season for political grazing and nibbling, and back-biting, and biting the hands which feed us, and so on.

We all manage to get by, somehow, on just a few sound-bites, and on the gut instincts of our hard-swallowing gullets and acid stomachs.

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Today's McGruff Bonus -- Help take a bite out of Trump:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/07/23/424703576/donald-trump-on-a-circus-peanut-and-more-food-art-with-a-political-bite