Political Cartoons!

***Mayor's Note: I know that The Donald announced earlier this week that he wasn't running. I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, and just couldn't bear to part with it. While The Donald isn't running and that greatly saddens me, I still think this is a pretty good piece about political candidates for office.***



Donald Trump is NOT running for President. He’s merely taken a page from the great “runner-in-chief” Newt Gingrich, and is fully reaping the rewards of a similar campaign. Honestly, that right-wing money is just laying there for anyone anti-Obama to take, it’s not hard. I’m not talking about those Tea Party kooks either, I’m talking those moneyed interests that have billions just laying around. If they’re not diving in to them from lofty heights, they’re pushing them out in to “Grass-roots” buffoonery and the like. So, yea, Donald Trump isn’t running, this is just one long exasperating commercial for The Donald.

I thought we were all in on the joke there for a bit. Just like the days when The Donald was hocking stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut or whatever other products having to do with absolutely nothing with real estate that he managed to find time to do commercials for. To say he is a character is doing a disservice to the multitudes of half-serious people that run our country as “politicians” and star in our motion pictures as “actors“. Who’s to say that America isn’t in love with cartoons? We’ve elected more than our fair share of cowboy’s, farmers, generals and the like. Hell, we endured 8 years under a pretend cowboy, so honestly, The Donald as a legitimate GOP candidate isn’t as far fetched at first blush.

But it is sad that this is our lot as a society. There’s constant talk of having “adult conversation”, but then some right-wing doofus whips out an over-sized pink mallet and swings it around, then slips on a banana peel crashing to the floor.

It seems like after Watergate, that we just couldn’t handle legitimate evil being unmasked. It was too real, or too devastating to the nation psyche that people are liars and crooks, even sitting president Nixon wasn’t immune from the clutches of evil. Then cartoon Jimmy Carter gets elected, and so begins our love affair with the characters.

Which is not to say it’s such a bad thing when the country’s doing great. As it’s done surprisingly from time to time. Yet, there always seems to be a massive hangover. The late 80’s, early 90’s, just recently with good ole’ W, those morning-afters are hellacious! Then we bounce back through the magic of the American Spirit!

I’ve gotten off track. The Donald is a cartoon, and it’s dangerous that he’s even being taken seriously. It is also no surprise that he is a GOP favorite as they seem to be the majority shareholder in the cartoon candidate manufacturing factory. You can just close your eyes and imagine them rolling off the line now: Palin, Gingrich, Huckabee, Regan, W., Bachmann, on and on. This is just recent memory. If it’s not a self-serious old white guy beating the drum of the same ole same ole’, it’s a cartoon (not to say the old white guy isn’t a cartoon in and of itself, it’s the devil you know kind of vibe).

The great thing about the GOP, is that once you crack their bullshit shell game, it’s all easy. They’re sound bite machine generating, closeted, cynical, nonstarters. They’re not serious about fixing anything, or they’d hop in to the ring by now. Exploratory committees? Come on, stop pussy-footin’ and get in there! It says something that the first republican nominee debate was pushed back due to a lack of legitimate candidacy, then when the debate actually happens you get two characters up there mocking each other.

Maybe this has less to do with the cartoon characters and more the inflexibility of the right wing ideology. Cartoon characters, on the other hand, are the most flexible of all characters, so watching The Donald squeeze his clown shoes in to a right wing tasseled loafer has been comical enough. Now he’s pro-choice. His foreign policy mirrors his vacuous real estate development business. The only real political capitol he’s gotten is proclaiming he got Obama to show his birth certificate. I guess this is how you bridge the gap to encompass the fringe of the GOP, but that’s not nearly enough to propel anyone through an entire presidential campaign.

To see the right-wing punditry help The Donald shoe-horn his way in to legitimacy is where I started drawing the line. I’ve read that The Donald knows a thing or two about emerging from Bankruptcy, which of course would make him the perfect person to end this deficit baloney! So I guess that The Donald can also just out and out say that America is solvent, and if you start to argue, he’ll just cut you off and leave the room? Or if you bring up facts, he’ll outright ignore them and challenge the legitimacy of your fact finding when he just doesn’t plain believe you. Compelling attributes for the person who will be the face of this nation for four years. OR if he does say something, only to back down from it later by saying he didn’t say it or mean it in the context it was given!

See this is great for a cartoon character, who is not bound by the rules of reality! Why is the only important question being asked of The Donald is “What’s up with his hair?” That’s not important right now, nor will it ever be relevant to any situation that arises on the world stage, or on the campaign trail. What doesn’t he literally put his money where his mouth his and release his financial records? Are we as a country not going to be truly ready for the mammoth sized stacks of money he has? I think we all know his value is inflated so what’s the deal Donald?

Perhaps The Donald IS the perfect person to run our country, I mean, why not? What better represents the tired sagging ego of our greatness than this cartoon character? Hulk Hogan isn’t going to seriously run for president any time soon, so again, why not? About half the country is still trying to shoe-horn this country back into a fantasy land of 1950’s cold war nostalgia. We need these larger than life buffoons taking up valuable air time, delegitimizing the current true threat to us: the fledgling economy and this never ending recession.