A Mercifully Brief Listicle For People Who Are Sick To Fucking Death of This Election Season, And Some Other Political Thoughtlettes

1. Judging by how fiercely she’s keeping them private, I can only presume that those speeches Hilary Clinton gave were all her freestyling the filthiest variations on the Aristocrats joke ever heard on Wall Street. [Political History Fact and Totally Not SEO Bait to Help Boost 1OTM’s Page Views: The Aristocrats joke was invented by Alexander Hamilton at a political dinner in 1804. The butt of the joke, Vice President Aaron Burr, didn’t find it funny and killed Hamilton in a duel. {Hello and sorry, Broadway lyrics hunters. Hit your backspace key and try the next link in your search results.}]

2. I really wish we’d stop pretending that the government is going to do anything about guns in this country; what offends me most is Republican members of Congress and their allies blaming it on insufficient spending on mental-health services, which they then do nothing to raise in the budget. I know, I know — what if we actually did ramp that spending up and properly took care of all of America’s mentally ill, but then these assault-rifle massacres still happened sometimes? That would be so embarrassing for Congress if all they did was make life not a living hell for like 40 million of our fellow citizens.

3. Considering how easily they squashed a grassroots insurgent Presidential campaign fronted by an elderly Jewish socialist from the smallest state in New England, I was so stoked to watch the DNC kick the ever-lovin’ shit out of the Republican machine this November, but then Trump had to go and ruin all my fun.

4. I hear this is true everywhere, but American leftists really do have a long tradition of fighting with anyone who isn’t the exact percentage of left as them, don’t they. I guess that’s why we get unyielding purity tests on one side and condescending calls for pragmatism on the other side of the same party.

5. Culturally, Donald J. Trump is clearly a self-replicating virus of rampaging assholism that may take us on a 28-Days-Later hellride whether he wins the election or not. As an actual elected official? I can’t see him getting anything done in Washington without a 9/11-level disaster that cows everyone into obedience. People often forget that America elected Jimmy Carter because they were sick of Washington’s shit; he came in as an asskicking outsider, who then got almost nothing he wanted to achieve done and was left to twist in the wind by his own party in the 1980 election.

6. I’m going to enjoy voting for Hillary, knowing that I played a small part in making sure that a goodly chunk of America’s elderly but virulently bigoted relatives will die knowing that the last white man to hold the White House was that complete failure Dubya. I plan to make this a staple of my goodbye remarks for every deathbed I visit until it no longer applies.

7. “It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semiautomatic handguns,” says suburban mother of two who later shot and killed both of her children with one of her many semiautomatic handguns.

It’s grimly entertaining to creep a multi-murderer’s Facebook wall: https://www.facebook.com/cbsheats

8. Paul Ryan baffles me, but at least I can understand why Ben Carson supports Trump — without him, Dr. Carson would still be standing in the wings of that NH primary debate, waiting to hear his name called so he could walk onstage.

9. I was never a big Gawker reader, but the thing that bums me out about the news of that site’s demise is that none of the stories I’ve seen refer to Hulk Hogan’s sex tape as the one where he repeatedly uses The Worst Racial Slur to express hope that his daughter marry a rich basketball player if she must date African Americans. Has the Streisand Effect been neutralized by some billionaire libertarian shitheel’s shadowy legal campaign? That was really what the Gawker lawsuit was about, not Hulk porking his best friend’s wife.

10. Mexico will happily pay for a border wall if it will definitely keep us gringos out after Trump’s policies and leadership reduces the US to a post-apocalyptic shithole.

11. Whoa, the Russians used Cozy and Fancy Bear to hack the DNC email servers? That’s like hiring Tony Montana and Darth Vader to burglarize your county library — such complete overkill that it should underline how invested the Kremlin is in the results of this election. This is much more interesting than any of the Sanders-related DNC emails I’ve read in that Wikileaks dump, which mostly show that Democrat apparatchiks would make lousy ratfuckers if they actually had the nerve to try it.

12. I was appalled by the video of Alton Sterling’s death. Then I was appalled by the video of Philando Castile’s death. Later that afternoon, I was appalled by the video of Dylan Noble’s death. The day after that, I was appalled by videos of those Dallas policemen’s deaths. So, do we do something about guns and race now, or do we just accept that Facebook and mainstream news sites are about to put Bestgore.com out of business?

13. Wait, the police have robot bombs now? They must be powered by a turbine hooked up to Issac Asimov’s furiously spinning corpse.

14. Want to scare your racist uncle? Tell him that, if Hillary wins, she’ll nominate Obama to the Supreme Court. I wouldn’t mind seeing this actually happen — a black Constitutional professor becomes the first person to nail the Congressional/Executive/Judicial hat-trick? In your fat fucking face, Taft!

15. How is it that Trump supporters can crow one moment that he’s an anti-PC straight-shooter who calls it like he sees it — which just so happens to be what they’re thinking but don’t say, because … they know most people will think they’re a total asshole if they do, I guess? — but then the next moment, they can insist that he was just joking when he says something so beyond the pale that even our shitty news media has to give that sound byte their best gaping-Alfalfa face?

16. As decent as Obama has been, I probably would have been a lot happier if Eliott Spitzer had spent the last eight years nailing hookers in the Lincoln bedroom when he wasn’t busy leading the free world, wiping out billion-dollar fraud and exposing TV talking heads like Maria Bartiromo as the soulless, clueless shills they are. The last four minutes of this clip are still amazing television, the political equivalent of Ace Frehley dropping a smoke bomb into his Les Paul Custom and wailing for four straight minutes. I love that Dennis Vacco, the GOP also-ran who Spitzer embarrassed by unseating him as New York Attorney General in the late ’90s — the first time an incumbent NYAG wasn’t re-elected in something like 70 years — is presented like a credible, impartial eyewitness to Spitzer’s supposed personal vendetta.

17. Is it better or worse to have a Presidential candidate publicly collude with foreign powers to win an election instead of doing it in private, like Nixon and Reagan did? As much as I want to know what Clinton said in those Wall St speeches, I want to know where Trump’s money really comes from ten times as much now.

18. I wish this primary season had lasted another six months — I really enjoyed watching the Clintons shit on people whose votes they’ll need in November because they don’t seem to grasp that social media has turned every appearance they make into a semi-automatic A/V environment. Kiddo, we’ll always have Paris, and that glorious week that started with Bill getting into a shouting match with BLM activists, then Bill DeBlasio and Hillary made a “C.P. Time” joke and ended with Bill “joking” that Berners want to shoot every third person on Wall Street. If those beleaguered captains of industry can’t do things like bundle mortgages that they know will largely be defaulted on, sell them to retirees, municipalities and other suckers as primo investments and then short their own product to make a killing on the worthless garbage that they made, why, they might as well be systematically murdered. Haw haw haw, y’geddit?

19. Sit down, young third-party enthusiasts, and let ol’ Uncle Milo tell you a story: In 1992, a homespun billionaire sociopath named Ross Perot tapped into a national zeitgeist that quickly made him so popular as a third-party candidate that he was actually leading incumbent President Bush in some pre-convention polls, with Gov. Clinton a distant third. Perot and his VP were included in the TV debates, a first and only time for third-party candidates. When the rubber hit the road in November, however, Perot got about 19% of the popular vote, to Bush’s 37% and Clinton’s 43%. Didn’t win a single state nor electoral-college vote, but he sure spoiled Bush’s campaign real good.

Now, compared to Ross Perot, Gary Johnson is about as charismatic and Presidential as the second-best finance manager at your nearest Audi dealership, and Jill Stein demands the level of respect you would otherwise save for the substitute teacher you occasionally had in junior high who smelled of brittle-smiley mid-life-career-change desperation and the fabric-haunting ghosts of patchouli and weed. It would be interesting to have them in the debates anyway — I don’t know if Johnson would siphon off votes from the Rockefeller-Republican candidate or the guano-Republican candidate. Probably a little from both. If either pulled an Admiral Stockdale, the added election-day drama of the vote split(s) would still be worth it.

20. If we’ve learned anything from Star Wars sequels and the 2016 Republican primary, it’s that fascists don’t innovate if their old ways still sorta work.

21. On the next payday at your job, everyone gets their paycheck except you.

So you go to the staff accountant and say “I want my check” and the accountant says “Hey, we ALL want our checks!” He just keeps saying that to everything you say to convince him to give you your check, making any constructive dialogue impossible. You don’t get your check.

So you go to your boss and demand your check, but Shelly in the sales department overhears what you said and yells “What, you think you’re the only one who deserves to get paid around here???” and a bunch of your coworkers agree that you’re being really selfish for wanting your check. One of them assures you that if you just wait long enough and keep working hard, your check will be given to you someday. Your boss agrees with the group and adds that you’re being really aggressive and rude. You still don’t get your check.

Then the cops are called because you’re making your coworkers uncomfortable and the cops shoot you dead when you reach for your wallet to pull out the ID they just asked for. They’ll tell Internal Affairs that they felt threatened and will get their backpay for the days they were suspended while IA investigated your shooting. You never got your check.

Your replacement at your job doesn’t get her check either, and the cycle begins anew.