Many readers have sent me this one.

Click on image to enlarge.

Ron’s latest.

Lotta noise . . . LOTTA noise about “country” and “the American people” and “greatest threat” and on and on and on. But none of those is the point; it’s not about what’s best for freedom, or for democracy, or for the country, or for the people, or for the planet. It’s all about partisan power.

Although other “parties” do exist, such as the Communist, the Socialist, the Green, The Freedom, and so on, they don’t matter come election time. In fact, all the megabucks spent on campaign adverts and primaries and travel and conventions and elections don’t matter either. It all boils down to less than half the eligible voting public bothering to even GO to the polls on election day and then 45% of those with their left foot nailed to the floor and 45% knee-jerking to the right, usually casting a vote not FOR their candidate but AGAINST the opposition’s.

We’ve developed a stalemate between two intractable factions, and the only way we can ever get anything past partisan politics is for somebody from outside to come along and bloody our collective nose, and then we over-react to the situation and get ourselves into a wordsoup geopolitical quagmire over whatever it was that caused the troublemaker to suckerpunch us in the first place.

I’m weary of the Trump Bluster Festival, and I’m contemptuous of the Clinton Cliché Carnival. It all comes down to the Left versus the Right in an eternal tug-of-war over acquisition and preservation of power. None of the people who’ll be on the stage this Tuesday really wants the job of PotUS. Only a fool would seek that level of scrutiny and ridicule and condemnation. Hell, I’ve been thinking about running for political office myself so that I can find out exactly what I did during my 20s. The mere act of claiming to want to be PotUS is a disqualifier.

Most of the people leaning on those lecterns will be there sucking around for a cabinet position. Rand Paul knows he’s never gonna be elected. Same with Pataki, and Carson, and Fiorina, and Graham, and Kasich, and Santorum. But the earlier they drop out of the race, the less valuable is their influence and the weaker their chance of becoming Director of This or Secretary of That or Chief of Whatever.

To Soetoro, the problem is not ISIS, but conservatives. Cankles even said it when asked who was the enemy: she said, “Republicans.” One side produces accusations out of their asses and takes comments out of context to set the other side up as the villain, but when the dust settles and the bills come due, each side is as guilty as the other of government growth and deficit spending . . . they just spend the money they don’t have on different things based on diametrically opposed ideologies.

Our Pipsqueak-in-Chief believes that America is the greatest source of conflict in the world today and the worst offender in the destruction of the biosphere we all depend upon. His plan is to punish the US through a series of draconian military cuts, coercive greenhouse-gas agreements, and dismantling of capitalism so that “developing” nations can have smartphones and blue jeans and heart attacks.

Those who would replace him insist that the biggest threats to our civilization are self-feeding socialist entitlements, mass unvetted immigration, and radical religious fundamentalism. The typical plan for them is to beef up military spending and have everyone carry loaded firearms around all the time.

The truth is that the biggest threat to our safety is the gridlock caused by unblinking, unyielding, uninformed, unconcerned partisanship. The solution involves serious reduction in the size and power of federal government, an end to PACs, a ban on lobbyists, and term limits on both houses of Congress . . . . just for starters.

A long time ago, Roman emperors had a man riding beside them in parades and appearances, whispering in their ear every few moments, “Remember, thou art only human.” (Actually, it was during a triumph or an ovation for a victorious Roman general. Just me being pedantic – GOC) It’d be nice if someone walked along behind senators and congressmen and presidents and cabinet members reminding them that THEY are the servants of the people, not the other way around.

Apparently we have elevated political posturing and political correctness to supplant baseball and football as our most popular sports. We prefer wasting our time and energies scrimmaging over climate change and debating gun control rather than eliminating an enemy whose primary goal is dismantling of our culture and detachment of our heads from our shoulders.

Most of those-who-would-be-PotUS candidates resemble the men who built this nation in about the same way that little yap-yap push-faced lapdogs resemble the timberwolves which once ruled the North American wilderness.

At 75 already, I doubt that I’ll live long enough to see the final collapse, but my ears are still good enough to hear the timbers groaning, the stones cracking, and the Constitution tearing, and the smell of decomp is beginning to seep in through the cracks.

Thomas M. sent me this one.