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I supported Wesley Clark and Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, and for bloggers driven by ideology and idiots on Daily Kos intoxicated by TV charisma, this pairing was more or less incomprehensible, but for anyone looking around for an honest candidate, it was obvious. Kucinich and Clark were the only honest Democrats in the race.
Did it really matter?
Suppose there's a candidate (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton) who bullshits almost constantly (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton), but promises low taxes, world peace, free medicine, cheap gas, new frontiers in renewable energy, tolerance for gays, more jobs, better jobs, better schools, a huge defense establishment, and ... did I mention low taxes?
Doesn't it make sense to vote for a candidate who promises you a package of wonders for cheap, in the hope that the laws of physics and economics and even the axioms of mathematics will undergo a miraculous transmogrification immediately after election day, and our elected Messiah will transform five loaves and two fishes into a feast for everybody?
No.
It makes about as much sense to elect Obama or Clinton or Bush or McCain or that other Clinton or Reagan or that other Bush as it makes to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to a candidate who promises to simplify the laws of physics into one easy-to-remember formula that any idiot can understand, on the basis of mathematics that everybody knows is bullshit.
The Presidency of the United States really is a job for a rocket scientist, meaning somebody outstandingly more intelligent than you and me, and if we can't find anybody more intelligent than you, at least we have to try, and the obviousness of this maxim for almost everybody is convincingly demonstrated by the fact that we haven't elected a President without an Ivy-League diploma since 1984.
So almost everybody more or less accepts the fact that we live in a monstrously complicated world, and nobody but a genius can sort out all the conflicting advice that constantly rains down on every President, and somehow maintain the equilibrium of our monstrously complicated nation. But genius expresses itself in an infinite number of categories, and because we are weak, foolish creatures, we keep electing geniuses in the category of bullshit.
It gets worse.
As recently as 1996, we could still find a genius-bullshitter who was also appealing enough on TV to get himself elected, but no such individual appeared in 2000, and the era of Siamese Presidents was inaugurated by the mutant-hybrid Howdy-Doody-and-the-Devil frontman-puppetmaster combination of George W. Bush and Karl Rove, now replaced in the Oval Office by David Axelrod and Barack Obama.
These new twinsies have already managed to dump trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into black holes only thinly disguised as stimuli and bailouts, with no end in sight, and nothing like an honest explanation of any of it even expected by anybody except a few out-and-out drool-buckets at the very bottom of the category of idiots who elected the current monstrosity-hybrid of a bullshit genius.
I also like voting for geniuses, as long as they're honest, and only a few months before the beginning of the Democratic primary season, I still had two to choose from, although the Rhodes Scholar Wesley Clark fit a lot more obviously into that high-falutin' category than the indomitable little ex-mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, but Dennis Kucinich is so honest, and his honesty keeps so much bullshit from getting in his way, that now his incredible clairvoyance about the many boondoggle-bailouts looks infinitely more like genius than the bullshit-twin-geniuses we foolishly installed in the Presidency, along with all their fumbling, bumbling Ivy-League assistants.
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