The Journal

 

Serving the Metropolitan Area

   

Since 1872

 

May 1st

 

K.I.S.S.!

 

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

 

Syndicated by Acme Features

 

          Now... among other such things the Senator left to me after lawyers sorted matters out between myself, George and the revenuers… there were half of Miller's Ridge, some livestock and junk bonds, five of his seven dogs and all of Alan Graham Goethals.

          Not that he passed Al down to me in the will... Thirteenth Amendment takes a dim view of that... but the man who’d just sort of attached himself to Pa then jumped onto me just like a flea, hitchhikin’ ‘long with one of the dogs, probably Otis, one of those sad-sack ones. But useful.  Goethals and Otis, the both.

          When Pa came back from Korea to get married, he'd said he'd go off to law school on the gumment's dime 'cause lawyerin’ paid better than horse farming… what with the automobiles and their crashing and such… and he'd damned well earned so, and that was that. Al, so I've heard, never finished the sixth grade... let alone law school... but was already something of a fixer in and 'round Lexington, helping out University boys and those as lived in dry counties or got a girl in trouble. So, when Pa got himself elected to the Statehouse, then to Congress late in '64 when the peace candidate from Texas beat down Mr. H2O, he took Al with him as a sort of part time staff, leaving him plenty of free time to seek out other opportunities, which he did, being the Al he was and, if his liver hadn't given out, I probably would’ve behaved myself better and wouldn't have left Congress, so wouldn't be writing down such treason as this today. But with the man probably sellin’ fire insurance to Nero, down there in Hell, I've got to make a confession. Don’t believe the propaganda… not only are things in Washington as bad as most think, some of 'em are worse!

          Those Als who ran things there in Washington behind the scenes were sons of bitches, every one of them, but they played by rules. Rules they made, still, rules you could count upon and the Trumps and Bernie-boys of the world be damned. And that was when real issues still dominated the table... Vietnam and money, oil and the welfare state, civil rights and money, money. Weighty matters... pondered by weighty men like Tip O'Neill and Everett Dirksen. Then the issues dried up for awhile, so politics became personal. All this end-of-history bulldada proliferating and people stopped cutting deals and began short-attention spannin' and sticking noses in where they didn't belong so’s to distract the public.

          Anyway, Al's take on the art of politics was this: Joe and Shirley America don't vote for... they vote against a party or a candidate if they've a mind to, if he gives 'em reason. It's like the TV late at night... most people too damn lazy to change the channel unless the station they're watching does something foolish to make 'em.  Oh-eight and -sixteen elections… case closed!

          If you want to get elected to office, now, find somebody or something voters in your district despise, then unload both barrels. We like our poisons neat these days... welfare nwords, illegal foreigners and foreign foreigners with leafblowers who sell drugs or blow themselves up now and again. The Bible, taxes and deficits, Kardashians, football, flag burning, fag burning, not to mention the price of gasoline whilst doing so. The plague-crashed e-con’my, and more new variants on old diseases, over there in Africa and Asia, knocking on our border wall like a bill collector, once the bill comes due.  Not to mention a few million vacant McMansions habitated by criminals, rich or poor, a legal system as makes suspects have to go to trial rather than be strung up in the town square. We like our leaders mean and windy... and, of course, with good hair… so long as they keep whining that they wouldn't be so negative, 'cepting the other guys did it first.  So that makes them victims.  Mean ‘n windy bipartisan victims!

          Like this New York shrink Gerald Schoenewolf, wrote in his manual called "The Art of Hating": "Objective hating affirms life, whereas subjective hating affirms destruction and death."

          Like the jackasses writin’ their swing state of Florida out’n the party for crowdin’ to the front of the primary line.  When what’s Catfish is setting all primaries… ours, too… will occur in order of voter turnout the last two years’ back, top to bottom.  Won’t happen, though.

          S'OK to blame all our plagues and problems on objects like foreigners (Ukrainians excepted)... s'long as liberals tone down mention of our own banks and corporations involved in the drug and sweatshirt trade or conservatives whack Mexibots without extending their umbrage to lazy housematrons or agribusiness, as sucks 'em in like dust bunnies up a Hoover.

          Speaking of felonies and misdemeanors, we're still running air-conditioners full blast to lavage the stink of William Jefferson Clinton, Dubya and Osama… not to mention our doddering incumbent and his pals from Ukraine ‘s’well as Mister Trump and his Russian and Turkish toffies… out'n the White House.  Fuckin’ Turkey!  I'd probably have let ‘em slide had any one of ‘em showed backbone on the crime bill, health bill, Glass-Steagall or NAFTA. New World Order or Chicago Mafia strings aside, these ex-Presidents had fundamental misunderstandings upon human nature... what they thought reasonability and compromise, meat-eaters (foreign and domestic) saw as a sign of weakness, same as with that other Rockefeller boy, James Earl Carter. Rather than thanking him for presiding over eight years of peace (more or less), Federal devolution, passing trade bills that demolished the hated working class and facilitating a transfer of wealth from poor and middle income folks to rich that the Bush boys or Viagra Bob Dole never could have put over in a thousand years, the elephant boys sharpened their tusks and gored Clinton’s, well... Gore.  Just for, as the comedian said, having creepy sex with a Jewish girl on Easter Sunday.

          I still don’t quite understand the rationale behind Obama’s healthcare scam, I just voted ag’in it because of his goin’ on TV with Mitt Romerney, sending the poor off to jail for not succoring the health insurance buzzards while extending the tax cuts to billionaires and the insurance companies again, and again, and again!

          Remember Ira Magaziner, back in the day, hauling those thousands of pages of his and Hillary's health care monster to its dispatch in little red wagons? He'd said: "If we made it simple, it wouldn't work." The Senator, quite properly in my view, said those employer mandates both parties attached meant employers would just ship all their jobs off over, out to Mandalay (which they did, anyway). Same thing about the crime bill, got its neck stretched between the gun control and midnight basketball. Which is why I'll plead guilty to being a K.I.S.S. fanatic... not quite like them guys in tongues and makeup as used to be married to Cher, some of 'em, that Hank, my 46 year old mechanic still worships (and whom Virtuecrats of '70's asserted were "Kids In Satan's Service!") but, rather, a true believer in an obvious political philosophy...

          Keep It Simple, Stupid!  Like Austin brushing aside the flat tax for poll taxes or reducing the number of Cabinet departments from sixteen to five.  Since this Ron White guy says you can’t fix stupid, the best course is to join it… or appear to do so.

          Myself… eight, maybe nine.

          In a Parnell administration, I'd sign only what was simple... none of these tax cuts that expire, for some, in 2023, in 2025, for others, plus them as appear, disappear and then appear again like Grouts in the "Souljacker" videogames... and I wouldn't sign any law unless the Congress also passed a repeal of two useless old laws.

          "Someday we may again have a president who cares about the country's economic decline, about its stricken schools, about poverty and sickness," wrote Anthony Lewis, after the First Gulf War. "Someday we may have a president who will rally us to care."  Not to mention a body who can sit down and cut a deal with the oppositionary partisans so all these aspirational visions stop winding up as expirational polygons.

          Maybe... so long as that gentleman isn't such an idiot as to buck the wisdom of Alan Graham Goethals. If I do throw my chapeau into the ring, I'll promise scapegoats aplenty from all sides... thieving, lying insiders and so-called terrorist outsiders beating the pond with a stick of rolled up special interest money.  Fast too, so the poll numbers go up before people begin thinking with their heads instead of their spleens and I can get to go on television where I’ll have somebody with a teleprompter telling me what Aleppo used to be.  Democratic overseas slave labor snakeheads, Republicans cozied up to oil shiekhs. Political correctness and political scalliwaggery... welfare bums from both ghettos and Wall Street, the Pentagon or over in Maastricht or Geneva or wherever old Joe Smoal's boys sharpen their teeth, so’s the better to dig them into our necks as we sleep.

          I learned life’s lessons well from Al, then added a few twists of my own... if you run against both wings of the buzzard, that's twice as many feathers, fleas and scapegoats... ergo, twice as many votes!

 

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS

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