People Who Will Never be President - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Rand Paul



The idiot son of the GOP's crazy uncle Ron Paul just announced his candidacy for President. here is the first reason he will never achieve that goal.

Because the very day he announced his quixotic candidacy, this was the headline over at C&L:

Conservative Group Launches Attack Ad On Rand Paul

Yes, the "conservatives," aka right-wing extremists, aka Republican primary voters hate Rand Paul.

As Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is set to announce his presidential campaign on Tuesday, a television ad tethers him to President Obama’s policy on Iran as part of a $1 million advertising buy painting him as “dangerous.”
The ad is a 30-second spot that will run on broadcast networks and on Fox News this week in the first four early primary states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, according to a person familiar with the buy, who provided the spot. It is unusual for an outside group to try to swamp a candidate’s announcement day, but Mr. Paul has been viewed with deep concern by foreign policy hawks for his non-interventionist views. 

Although, if they really have a problem with Rand's non-interventionist views, they could just wait a week and he'll have completely new positions.
 
 

Seriously, though, Senator Paul has taken a principled stand on every issue, and that stand is "splunge!"
Which, if you remember your Monty Python, means "it's a great idea, but possibly not and I'm not being indecisive!"
MPS just ran a partial list of issues on which Paul has taken both sides, including:

• Defense Spending – he was against it before he was for increasing it.

• Privacy – He says that he wants to dismantle the entire NSA, but then he had to go on record and vote to reform it and instead, he punted.

• Drones – Gee, that 13-hour filibuster he references was back when he was principally against the use of drones, domestically and abroad. He is now in favor of drones domestically and abroad.

He can't even give anyone a straight answer as to his supposed libertarianism, recently declaring “I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.”
Which is not going to help him with any constituency, but might cost him the votes of college freshmen who are halfway through Atlas Shrugged, who were really the only ones inclined to vote for him anyway.


Also, for someone who is supposedly ready to enter the bare-knuckled rough and tumble world of Presidential politics, Rand is remarkably thin-skinned. (see http://wwwirritant.blogspot.com/2013/11/rand-paul-is-whiny-little-crybaby.html)
He's only been a candidate for about two days now, and already stories like this have been popping up:

Rand Paul goes full mansplainer on “Today”: “That would be a better way to approach an interview”

It's another CNBC moment, one day into the campaign as the senator gets nasty with Savannah Guthrie

Rand Paul Gets 'Testy' With Male AP Reporter On Abortion Rights

The Kentucky Republican on Wednesday got into a "testy" exchange about abortion bans with an Associated Press reporter, just hours after clashing with NBC's Savannah Guthrie, whom Paul accused of "editorializing" while trying to correct her interviewing technique.

Geez, this was the Today Show, not Firing Line. Who could possibly get this flustered by a Today Show interview?

Oh, right!

Also, Lindsey Graham hates him, apparently, because he's not a super-macho he-man war-monger like him:

“The best deal, I think, comes with a new president. Hillary Clinton would do better. I think everybody on our side, except maybe Rand Paul, could do better.”

And I think it's pretty safe to say that if you are a Republican, and Senator tough guy prefers Hillary Clinton to you, just go ahead and assume that you will never ever ever be President.

Disgusting people say disgusting things

Somehow, we've gotten to the point where public figures seem to be engaged in a competition to see who can say the most disgusting thing. In a sane society, the only two possible responses to people like Ted Nugent or Micheal Savage would be a) "Oh, that poor man has clearly lost his mind. He should be institutionalized." or b) "Let us all shun this vile bag of ass and drive him from our society. Let him spend his days wandering from town to town being pelted with scorn and contempt."
But of course, this is no longer a sane society so these people are given a forum to spew their filth and then treated with respect by prominent political figures.




So a couple truly disgusting things said by disgusting people caught my eye the last few days.

Thing #1:

Nugent: Obama is responsible for veteran suicide

 “Twenty to 25 of those guys kill themselves every day, and they haven’t told you why and they haven’t told anybody else why but they told me why: because the commander in chief is the enemy.”

How dare you?
Have you really no shame?
Not the tiniest shred of human decency?
You're going to use the tragedy of veteran suicides as an opportunity to score some cheap political, um, I was going to say "point," but there really isn't even any point being made. It's just a cheap shabby insult made using the suicides of men whose service to their nation left them damaged to the point of despair as the set-up for your shameful punchline.

There are any number of reasons that people commit suicide. And for returning veterans, there are all the reasons the rest of the population has compounded with PTSD, serious brain injuries, having seen unspeakable horrors, survivor's guilt, etc etc etc. But no one has ever committed suicide because of who is the President. That's just fucking stupid. And it's disgraceful, indecent and beneath contempt.

Also, it's a fucking lie. No veterans are coming to you, washed-up 70's musician Ted Nugent, and explaining to you the reasons why they are planning on committing suicide. If they were, and you weren't preventing it, you would be an even worse scumbag than you already are. And that hardly seems possible.

Thing #2:

Micheal Savage said this on the public airwaves recently:

“The white man is a quiet man and a peaceful man,” Savage said, “and right now the white man is very, very quiet, and very, very peaceful, and like many dictators before him, Barack Obama thinks the white man will remain quiet and subdued forever. Hitler made that mistake; Hitler boasted that his supermen, his Hitler Youth, would easily wipe the floor with the GI Joes that were being sent over…. But it was the white man who defeated Superman in World War II. Let me tell you something else, you push the white man only so far, you’re going to have a reaction like you’ve never seen.”

Jeezus, didn't these people used to at least try to veil their racism? Also, if you're going to assume the mantle of white supremacy, which you clearly are, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare the other guy to Adolph Fucking Hitler.

And you're really going to pretend that Hitler's Ubermenschen weren't  also white men? White men get the credit for defeating the Nazis, but somehow don't get the blame for BEING the Nazis?

And when has the white man ever been quiet and peaceful?
When he was colonizing Asia and Africa?
When he was forging a new nation built on the twin evils of slavery and genocide?
Maybe when he was shooting up a college town because girls didn't want to date him?

Maybe when the continent of Europe was soaked in blood for a couple centuries because various groups of whire men couldn't agree on which version of Jesus to follow?

Or maybe it was when he murdered several million Jews, Roma, and anyone else who didn't fit his image of what a perfect white man should be?

Pictured: quiet men of peace.

Yes, white men are currently very very quiet and subdued. Unless their favorite team loses a basketball game.

Or they encounter an unarmed black teenager.

A piece of my childhood just died.

Lon Simmons, beloved Bay Area sportscaster, dead at 91

I spent many an afternoon and evening listening to Lon Simmons call Giants and 49er games on the radio. 

Rest in peace, Lon.

Depressing Headline of the Day

Crime may not pay, but apparently bigotry does:

Indiana Pizzeria at Center of ‘Religious Freedom’ Debate Raises $150,000 Online in One Day

Memories Pizza, a pizzeria that has found itself at the center of a gay rights debate in Indiana, is back in the news today, as an online fundraiser for the beleaguered ‘za joint has raised over $100,000 in under a day. On the fundraising site GoFundMe, a campaign started to “relieve the financial loss endured by the proprietors’ stand for faith” is closing in on $150,000 after about 18 hours online.

 

People Who Will Never be President - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Carly Fiorina

Carly Fiorina says chance of presidential run 'higher than 90 percent'

Odds of success: less than zero.

So you were unable to buy yourself a Senate seat from California and you figured, "what the hell, might as well take a shot at the White House?" Well, hjave fun, but let me just explain why that isn't going to work.

First of all, you have exactly one selling point - your business experience. Which might actually get you some votes in a Republican primary if that experience wasn't running Hewlet-Packard head-first into the ground. Also, the teabagger base thinks they hate "fat-cat businesspeople." I know, I know, they consistently vote for politicians whose policies further enrich these very fat cats and "unburden" them from pesky regulations and laws and rules and what-not, but if you actually listen to these slack-jawed, heavy-lidded colonial cosplayers, they really think they're voting Republican to, in part, stick it to the man!

Also, while we're on the subject of your time at HP, you earned the nickname "Fire 'em All Fiorina" by shipping jobs overseas as fast as you could. That's not going to play well with pretty much any demographic. Especially since you laid American workers off AFTER they had agreed to take pay cuts, then made them train their replacements.

And that, no matter what else may be on your resume', is the distillation of your business experience.
Your political experience consists of having held zero elected offices, throwing away millions of your own dollars in a quixotic bid to unseat Barbara Boxer, and the "Demon Sheep" ad.





But if you still have any doubt, here's the number one reason why you, Carly Fiorina, will never be President:

Bill Kristol thinks you can win.

Bill Kristol: Email May Defeat Hillary — or So May Carly Fiorina

Tuesday, 31 Mar 2015 05:09 PM

!

 But hey, look on the bright side. He's been wrong about everything his entire life, he's bound to get one right one of these days!