A jaundiced eye

I must be getting cynical, or is that just self-aware? The candidates now are:

1. Mitt Romney, a doofus who looks like a Brylcreem ad from the Fifties, or maybe one of those Certs guys who couldn't possibly make a bubblegummer nervous — or else Yet Another One of Those Guys Who Should Have Gotten The Nomination. He seems to have brains and a sense of irony, if not actual humor.


2. John McCain, who, in a well-ordered universe, would have gotten the Republican nod in 2000 and spared us all the misery of Iraq. Now, he looks like a bitter old man who smiles when he pulls the wings off horseflies.


3. Hillary Clinton, a postmenopausal irrelevance who reminds us that with a good attorney, friends in high places and a patsy to take the fall, anybody can beat an insider trading rap. Spare us eight more years of Bill doing Rodney Dangerfield, "Take my wife. Please!"


4. Barak Obama, a golden-tonsilled Presence in the Pulpit who has a remarkable gift of gab, but seems not to realize how to connect his vision with the dark and brooding Cloverfield playing out in front of his eyes. Or even that eventually he has to do it. Can you see the Joint Chiefs being inspired by Obama? Or Putin worried by him? This is a formula for disaster. The last dictator who seriously underestimated a sitting American doofus was Saddam Hussein (and maybe Osama bin Laden the time before that), and the consequence was that Hussein reaped a whirlwind of unguided military competence. God help us all.

Under the circumstances prevailing at this moment, I'd have to vote for McCain, and I really, really don't want to do that.