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 dimsy
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. AuH2O, 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 propaganda – not only are things in Washington as bad as most
think, most 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 Washington be damned. And that was when real issues to
be addressed by real solutions 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 – all of it setting us up for the present.
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, oh-twelve,
Obama... less foolishness. Oh-sixteen, twenty, twenty-four... the more. 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. Bibles, Korans and Koreans; 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. Objects of distraction getting stranger and
stranger... windmills, seashells, that guy down in Georgia wanting to fight
Mongolians while the Presidential pleasure dome’s still rubble? 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.
With the NATO
dissuasion and Mongol invasions, S'OK to blame all our plagues and problems on
objects like foreigners (Israelis and 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, Papa and Dubya Bush, Obama and
Osama been golfin’… not to mention our doddering interstitial
incumbent and his successorial and predecessorial pals from Project 2025… out'n
the White House. I'd probably have let
‘em slide had any one of ‘em showed backbone on the crime bill, health bill,
Glass-Steagall or NAFTA as opposed to declaring war
on the MidEast and Costa Rica, shutting down the gumment and even firing our airline and nuclear security
for a while until somebody said it was a bad idea. 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, Slick Willy having had 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! But wiping it out
without a substitute, as also with our defective food stamp rules and
regulations (I wouldn’t mind tossing out the taxpayer HiHo’s
for the down-lows as need things like protein, vitamins and minerals so as to
work their way out of their poverty). But agin’... replace
‘em with what?
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
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 2027, in 2029, 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!
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PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |