Liars, Flop-Flippers Etc...

One of the principle tennants of my personal political philosophy is that anyone who decides to run for national office, especially president is, ipso facto a worthless bum, a liar, a fraud, a power hungry goon, and more than likely psychotic. What sane person would ever want that job? What honorable person would ever want to campaign for it? I am constantly suprised that among our populace it isn't an article of faith that anyone running for president is going to (by necessity) lie over and over and over.

It is impossible for any candidate to be correct - let alone be in agreement with a majority of the population - on the sheer number of issues. Not only that, given the preponderance of litmus tests as shortcut indicators for how they'd implement policy, can you blame any candidate for either lying about their position if they have one, or nuancing a position if they just don't care? If candidates actually said what they thought, no one would get any votes, or at least not get enough to actually win any particular election.

So when people start talking about "character", I immediately want to say ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME? The guy is running for president, it's obvious he doesn't have any! If he had any decency at all, he'd go out and do something useful with his time, especially something he might be qualified for. So Kerry and Edwards should be lawyers, Shrub should be a bartender and Cheney should be a sports commentator. I think we'd all be better off.

I know it sounds like I'm trivialising the grave times in which we live, but I'm not. My point is that for some reason, our culture has internalised the notion that our elected leaders are supposed to be "better" than us, in some way. This hero worship is dangerous, at least in my mind, because the same line of reasoning leads to divine right of kings, which we should despise. Instead, we should look at their ability to formulate and implement policy that would be good for the country. It's an elective office for a reason.