You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Elections

I like the spectacle of it all. It's a wonderful waste of time providing a meal ticket to all kinds of colorful characters. A bit like Wrestlemania, but with less believable acting and more outlandish plotlines. Later in the locker room Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik congratulate eachother and shotgun a few beers before melting away into the night. Then the cycle continues.

Who's pulling the strings? Not sure. I think there's lots of people who think they do and might to a certain degree. Ultimate it seems more like some kind of evolutionary mechanism, or some sort complex group dynamic. You know, selecting for the kind of opportunistic turbo-weasels narcissistic enough to run for public office in the first place. Or the kind of persons who aspires to be unelected bureaucrats. You name it.

Sort:  

Oh, kinda half related. Found a page of some unnattributed satire floating about. I remember it circulating a few years ago and liking it enough to bother printing it out:

The Night before the Oklahoma rally I met with my campaign manager, Robby Mook. Robby was in charge of the campaign computers, but he was so smart in many ways he was like a computer. He had bad news. "Oklahomans see you as an aloof New York intellectual," he explained. "They'll never vote for someone like that. You need an image they can understand and respect."
"What if I ate a big hunk of beef on stage?" I helpfully suggested. "We need to think bigger," said Robby. "I've consoluted the Algorithm. It told me that Oklahoma voters love cowboys I liked where this was going. "It also told me that what they hate most is ... cattle rustlers."
"Robby, you're a genius," I said. We spend that night crafting my new persona, a persona we believed would win me the election. The next day, I sauntered onto an Oklahoma stage wearing a full cowboy outfit, firing a pair of six shooters in the air. "Howdy," I said to the crowd, "I'm Sherrrif Hillary." I received the biggest applause of my whole career.
"If there's one thing I hate," I announced, "it's varmints. And the worst varmints of all are cattle rustlers. Make me your president and I'll put a bullet between the eyes of every rustler in this state. " For Emphasis, I bit a chunk out of a hunk of beef.
The crowd roared. They loved it. A chant started: "Death to rustlers! Death to rustlers!" Then a scuffle broke out in the front row. Three men dressen in denim tackled an hogtied a small, weasely-looking fellow. They dragged him up on stage.
"Ms. Clinton," one man said, "this fella here is a rustler. He stole three of my prize cows last spring. If you kill him right now, everyone in this room will vote for you. The crowd began a new chant: "Blood! Blood! Blood!"
The bound man pleaded with me. "Yes, I stole those cows," he said, "but I only did it because my family was starving. Please, spare me. I'll never rustle again." My life and career have been defined by hard choices. This was perhaps the hardest choice of all. My phone buzzed. A text from Robby. It read, "The Algorithm says: the rustler dies." "I'm sorry," I told the man as I raised a pistol "It's not me. It's the Alorithm."
I squeezed the trigger

I love it! Still don't know if it's from an actual book just a commendable piece of literary forgery supposed to mock political biographies. Either way I'm still getting a kick out of reading it and felt like sharing it.

 3 months ago 

It looks like it's from a book and this part (2 pages) are on Steemit!

https://steemit.com/life/@blakemiles84/clinton-book-excerptish-the-cattle-rustler

It sounds satire to me.

Neat! Only have that page shot as a print-out. It's great writing imo.