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
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 |