Party Poker Blog

"America is a one-party state, but just like Americans they've got two of them."
Some British political journalist

There's so much damn stuff I need to regurgitate per politics but am lacking the time. So I'm just gonna throw out a quote or two for now.

If I were you, I'd head over to see Otis at Rapid Eye Reality as he's been live-blogging the primaries all day and the comments are oodles of fun. See if you can't put a fellow blogger on political tilt, why don't you?

Yikes, has anyone seen this craziness coming after Hillary?
The C-word as a political tool



Sometimes I wonder just how insane you must be to covet our countries highest position. It's clear that the Clinton's live to campaign. It's in their DNA.

So I found this snippet per the campaign process and thought I'd pass it along. It's all I've time for, sadly.

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In his recent memoir, Alan Greenspan says he's been pushing a constitutional amendment of his own devising. It reads: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office."

Per campaigning:

It's not pleasant to think of the life they lead, these Americans who would be president, from the first hints of dawn to well past midnight, this life of endless demands, this succession of superficial sociability, in which you smile and smile and pop your eyes wide open in delighted wonder at the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of faces and places that circles before you, and you haven't the time or leisure to settle on a single one.

Charming countryside, pretty little towns, sprawling centers of commerce and industry fly by and you haven't a moment to enjoy them or learn their tales. You rush to meet hundreds of people a day and never have a meaningful exchange of words with any of them.

From the backseats of freezing cars and vans you're hustled into overheated coffee shops and those packed school gymnasiums with the stink rising to the rafters and then the oppressive hush of corporate meeting rooms, where your nose starts to run and a film of sweat forms under your wool pullover, and you press the outstretched hands that carry every bacterial pathogen known to epidemiology.

You open your mouth and you release the same cloud of words you recited yesterday and the day before. And in the Q&A, when you stop to listen, you hear the same questions and complaints from yesterday, the same mewling and blame-shifting, all imploring you to do the impossible and through some undefined action make the lives of these unhappy citizens somehow edifying, uplifting, and worth living. And you always promise you will do that; you have no choice but to tell this kind of lie.

The man or woman who seeks out such a life and enjoys its discomforts is not normal. Not crazy necessarily, but not normal, and probably, when the chips are down, not to be trusted, especially when the purpose of it all is to acquire power over other people (also called, in the delicate language of contemporary politics, "public service" or "getting things done on behalf of the American people").