We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
– The Doctor
Life, I have been repeatedly told, is not fair. I accept this, and do not resent it most of the time, because it is axiomatic, and so any effort spent resenting it is a waste of calories. One may as well resent gravity, or thunderstorms, or giant potholes on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. They happen, they hit, you move on … and if you should have a limp on the far side of the encounter, well, that’s what the good folks of Wisconsin would call “tough cheese.”
Most of the time, I said. Every once in a while, though, there is an event so bombastically preposterous that you are left staring at the sky with fearful eyes waiting for the locusts and the rain of frogs. Ever yell at a tree? I did, just this morning. I had to yell at something, because five minutes before I shouted at the utterly indifferent birch bark, I’d found out that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz had announced his run for the presidency, which means I’m going to be required to write about him for at least another year.
In a just and decent world, all that would be required of me in such an effort would be to slam my face into the keyboard, resulting in a work-product that read:
” … 9h&dfxqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq … “
…because that is all this utter, blithering, obnoxious waste of my time deserves. But it is not a just and decent world, evidenced vividly by the fact that a greasy huckster fraud cretin Batman-villain-looking human clown car is not only running for President of the United States, but is actually being taken seriously by the “news” media. That does not mean I have to take him seriously – with every fiber of my being, I do not – but now that he is officially on the board, I am no longer able to enjoy the comfortable fiction of pretending he doesn’t exist.
In the aforementioned non-existent just and decent world, one would think that some essential bedrock personal flaws would disqualify a person from attempting to reach the Oval Office … say, for example, galloping publicly displayed ignorance of a depth and breadth seldom seen on the North American continent. Once again, however, this is not a just and decent world, evidenced vividly by a presidential candidate unable to grasp the basic theme of a children’s story.
Back in September of 2013, as part of the GOP’s endlessly fruitless quest to submarine the Affordable Care Act, Cruz spent more than twenty-one hours yipping and yapping like a poorly-trained seal on the Senate floor. In the midst of this mind-numbing aria, he read “Green Eggs And Ham” by Dr. Seuss, and drove home the point as he understood it to all and sundry: this story means “Don’t try new things” like the ACA.
My daughter will be all of two years old in a couple of weeks. She can’t read, she can’t write, she falls down for no particular reason at least a couple of times a day, her vocabulary is measured in minutes, and she poops in her pants without thinking twice about it. This is all fine – she’s a toddler, and that’s what toddlers do – but my illiterate, clumsy, incomprehensible poop-factory of a child has a better grasp of the moral behind “Green Eggs And Ham” – Try new things, duh! – than the Senator from Texas who would presume to sit in the most important chair in the land.
And he voted against the Violence Against Women Act, and denies the established science behind climate change, and opposes the minimum wage, and wants to privatize Social Security, and opposes not only marriage equality but the very existence of gay pride parades, and supports incredibly racist and restrictive voter ID laws, and wants to drill for oil and frack in Native American reservations along with basically everywhere else, and was an original supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline, and opposes all campaign finance regulations, and opposes net neutrality because capitalism is so awesome you guys, and oh, yeah, he does not believe in the separation of church and state.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ted Cruz is – to all intents and purposes – the true demon spawn of Joe McCarthy, Phyllis Schlafly, several small rocks and an under-watered cactus that nobody ever really loved… and now he is going to be in my kitchen for at least a year. Life is not fair, and this is not a just and decent world, and if I ever needed affirmative, irrefutable proof of this, now I have it.
The 2016 Republican presidential race is officially underway.
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