I suppose since we're about three weeks away from the Iowa caucuses and some other similar amount of time away from the New Hampshire primary,* I could/should start paying serious attention to national politics again. I sort of gave it up at some indeterminate time after the Trump election in 2016, just because it all became so baffling. I was a highly motivated voter in 2020, of course, but being invested in the day-to-day tick-tock of which side was doing what to whichever other side and who was getting the better of whom on scripted "interviews" on nightly hourlong cable news shows stopped being worth the effort when the topic was only ever toTaLLy OutRaGEoUs thing that dipshit president said, supposedly to be edgy but usually just because he didn't understand. It's hard to take institutions seriously when at the center of all of them is a baby giraffe dressed in a man suit. Everyone can tell it's a baby giraffe. A baby giraffe looks nothing like a man. It has like four demonstrable instincts,** zero reasoning skills. We all say "baby giraffe" openly, we know explicitly what it is, but still all the news coverage had to (and apparently still insists on) pretend it's an actual human man and not a baby giraffe in a man suit.
So it's understandable to want to eventually look away from a thing, a complex, a self-feeding industry of politics, news and advertising revenue that lacks the ability to even take its own bullshit seriously. Somewhere in there, they all stopped pretending they were presenting "we want you to trust this" and became overtly and solely "this is what we want you to watch between commercials for diabetes drugs and where you can sell your gold for cash fast."
It's even harder to get back in to when there's an incumbent president as the field is already cut in half. Add to that the freakin' weird Republican side, which for the non-incumbent party is usually a grab bag of national names (senators and governors), quixotic single-issue zealots, deluded no-hopers and one or two self-financed self-appointed libertarian messiahs. But this time, it's almost like there are two incumbents because the giraffe in a man suit has apparently identified all of the challengers as cheetahs and has stayed away from the process, but still somehow dominates the polling. It turns out institutional inertia in the political public mind and in the media can carry you a long way for a campaign collecting gobs of money and not actually spending any.
I've been giving the GOP race for the nomination the occasional side-eye. There's no use in paying any attention to Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy, two root-level unserious knobheads and utter charlatans of different stripes but the same pattern. What is the point of even considering someone for president when, if you were to ask them, they would tell you Donald Trump is the better choice? Would you hire someone if one of the job interview questions was "would you be better at this than a baby giraffe in a man suit?" and their response was not even just the slightest hesitation, which in itself be automatically disqualifying, but an unequivocal "absolutely not, I'm all in on baby giraffe"? Of course you wouldn't, not even for the memes. Because you know, when it came down to it, the baby giraffe in a man suit is automatically better memes anyway.
I've been paying attention to Chris Christie, someone who knows he won't win but has absolutely been committed so saying "look, I used to fuck with the baby giraffe in a man suit, but you can't let it have real power again. Think of the carpets."
The problem of course is that Chris Christie fucking sucks. He's not an obvious moron, which is more than can be said of the DeSantises of the world, but he's also a gross, venal, petty, cruel, shortsighted fuck-weasel of the specific New Jersey variety. He's exactly where he deserves to be and I guess you could admire the fact that he's making the most of a nothing position. I won't, but you could.
I notice things are starting to get interesting because all of a sudden, a lot of people really fucking hate Nikki Haley. And I get it. She has bad ideas and says them out loud in public, a lot. But if the knives are out for her in the press, that means she's doing one things others in the race can't ignore: costing them money. OK, also polling better, but that almost always translates into better fundraising.
I'm actually fascinated to see what the GOP does with a woman as their main challenger/potential frontrunner. The misogyny in the national party became one of its main, overt weapons during the Trump campaign of 2016, which primarily held together at the end of the day as an anti-Hillary campaign. It's not just Republicans who couldn't stomach a female president, but just enough independents (and more than one converted Democrat) on the fringes to eke out an electoral college win despite the popular vote whomping Trump had to endure.
It'll be one thing to watch Haley navigate the increasingly violent chop to the waters she's heading into. I have to think that, if party voters do see her as the best way to beat Biden without the baggage of Trump, it will be because she's successfully able to portray herself as beholden to the GOP base, the very hetero-male skewed base; that she could be at the top of the pyramid but still somehow know her place. And then it'll be another thing to maybe see how hard she punches back if, by some unlikely string of circumstances in the next 10.5 months, she actually wins.
My kids are all voting age now. One of them will be voting for president for the first time next year, and I've told them all the same thing: however it seems, you don't know anything until the voting actually starts. Then it's storylines and horse races in the press. It could play out exactly the way it seems or something you can't even imagine could become suddenly the most important thing, you never know. There are reasons I remember the name Paul Tsongas.
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*I'm writing this on a very old MacBook Pro that will no longer update its operating system, so now Google Chrome thinks every single search is a security issue, complete with a warning page I have to click through to confirm, yes, I really want to go to wikipedia or whatever. So I could do a whole second search for the New Hampshire primary dates, but I mean, is that what you even come here for? Information? I think we've reached an understanding, you, me and the MacBook Pro.
**Eat leaves, procreate, heads-up for cheetahs, neck-fight rivals. That's it.
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