The Politics of Clowns

It is almost not fair to make fun of presidential candidates.  They are making it so easy.  If you can’t take anything but cheap shots at certain folks, then what value is in your words?   Still, it is a temptation hard to resist.

So, I have spared no expense in hiring a couple of KlownTown’s finest to watch my every word, and keep me honest.

It is almost impossible to find a picture of Donald Trump on a good hair day.

1. Candidate Hair– The field of candidates on both sides of the divide is filled with marvelous examples of clown hair.  I am left wondering how they achieve such effects.  Assuming Rand Paul is not wearing a bad toupee, how does he get his hair to look like a squirrel who fell into a vat of yellow wood-stain shellac and then crawled out and died on his head?  I think his father proved before him that too much Libertarian political purity has a profoundly pickling effect upon your head, and leads to making what hair you have growing out funny.  Donald Trump obviously takes his hair off every morning and steam presses it on wrought-iron ironing boards in a thoroughly Republican flat-tax flattening sort of arm motion.  It’s too bad he is in the habit of taking his hair off at the neck, because the ritual flattening is having a bad effect on the “maybe-I-shouldn’t-say-that-out-loud” centers in his brain.  The Democrats are not immune to the clown-hair scourge either   Bernie Sanders obviously uses my grandfather’s bald-guy low-maintenance approach to hair-styling.  Step out of the shower, rub a towel across the top of your head, and you are ready to roll with that straight-talking brand of no-nonsense socialism that you can get by with because everyone is looking at how the towel Bozo-ed up your hair and distracts them from listening to your actual words.  (Okay, the Klown Kops caught me.  Bozo is not a legal verb.)

I bet you didn’t know that Ted Cruz went to Ringling Bros. Clown College for two years.

2. Candidate Words– Yes, the greater part of the clown-offences committed by candidates have to do with words.  Some, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have a marvelous glibness that defies understanding.   Cruz can go on talk shows and talk with two different tongues at the same moment.  He is smart and Ivy-League-educated, but when he denies climate change he says he is not a scientist (which absolves him of using scientific reasoning in his arguments) but he says the science is not yet settled (which he routinely backs up with facts and statistics that are not true).  Here is a noble statesman who is of Cuban descent and speaks no Spanish.  He was born in Canada but renounced his Canadian citizenship so it wouldn’t interfere with his presidential aspirations.  So, where the heck is he from, and why did we elect him in Texas?  Even Republican Senator John McCain calls him a “wacko bird” for his combative Me-against-the-world political maneuverings.  Who would possibly make a better president?  At least, he is certainly capable of keeping the cartoonists and satirists happy. (The KlownTown Kops are reminding me that I have already passed 500 words and too much politics on the internet is a very bad thing… so maybe I must leave the rest of this topic for another day.)