Ambition makes you look pretty ugly

This is an entertaining rant but it asks a diverting question.

I don't get it. I just don't fucking get Mitt Romney at all.

Don't get me wrong--I don't understand the idea of wanting to be president at all. It's tons of work, there's never really a fucking second when you're NOT on the job, at least a hundred million people who you're technically supposed to represent are going to hate every fucking thing you do, and there's the possibility that you'll be the person responsible for incinerating half the people on the globe at any given moment. So, yeah--shitty, shitty job.

But back to Romney. Of all the fuckers in my life who have run for president, I understand him least of all.

He's got all the charisma of a comatose iguana, and he's trying to be a politician. But there he is, trying like hell to get elected to the highest office in the land.

And the hell of it is, the guy's got, like, a quarter of a BILLION fucking dollars, and he's been running for president non-stop for the last ten years. President of the United States is one of the least fucking desirable jobs in the entire world (see above), and he's been after it for a decade.

Dude. Take a fucking vacation.

Is it really even remotely conceivable that any person could actually both 1) want to be President of the United States and not 2) also be a severely sociopathic menace to himself and others? The immediate response that comes to mind is, well no clearly there is no other way to explain these people. But to answer in this way is also to admit that we willingly allow ourselves to be ruled by the most hollow and least human among us. Why do we even bother at all?

It helps a bit if we think of Presidential candidates as what they really are. Let's remember that the emotionally damaged individual delivering the speeches and posing for the pictures is but one element of a mega-conglomeration of consultants, lobbies, professional associations, industries, money launderers, murderers, and thieves elbowing its way around the halls of power in search of favors. The candidate himself/herself is really just the brand. Kind of the way the Pillsbury Doughboy is just an imaginary mascot for a division of General Mills Newt Gingrich* is just a hollow ad for a slightly different brand of the GOP power mill.

So try to keep focused on who and what is behind each candidate rather than on just who the candidates themselves appear to be. Otherwise we spend all season meaninglessly probing the psyches of the sorry souls who allow themselves to be used as hollow props by the machines they represent. We already know what such people are, don't we? They're the living example of their own professed belief in corporate personhood.




*I am aware of that Newt may in fact be merely an imaginary mascot for Newt Gingrich Publishing and Punditry INC which is only a slight variation on the point I'm trying to make. Regardless, he is indisputably doughy.