You Must Be Taller Than the Clown to Ride the White House Tilt-A-Whirl

If he or she gets elected, which candidate would have what financial effect on you?

I can answer that question in three sentences: If any of the candidates who are most likely to be elected get elected, you're screwed. However, there are also some candidates who would keep you from being screwed if they got elected. But they aren't going to get elected, so you're screwed.

Who are these jacklegs, highbinders, wire-pullers, mountebanks, swellheads, buncombe spigots, boodle artists, four-flushers and animated spittoons offering themselves as worthy of America's highest office?

Do they take us voters for fools? Of course they do. But are they also deluded? Are they also insane? Are they receiving radio broadcasts on their teeth fillings telling them they'd be good presidents?

Clinton, Bush, Fiorina, Sanders, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, Huckabee, Christie, Santorum, O'Malley, Jindal, Graham, Pataki, Chafee, and Trump.

That's not a list of presidential candidates. That's the worst law firm in the world. That's a law firm that couldn't get Caitlyn Jenner off on a charge of Bruce Jenner identity theft.

Has the office of the presidency diminished in stature until it attracts only the leprechauns of public life? Or have our politicians shrunk until none of them can pass the carnival test – "You Must Be Taller Than the Clown to Ride the White House Tilt-A-Whirl"?

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that – after all is said and done and the smoke has cleared – the two candidates for president are probably still going to be Clinton and Bush.

Members of the electorate will go into the ballot booth, see those two names, and think to themselves, "Gosh, I'm getting forgetful. I did this already"… and leave without marking the ballot. Voter turnout will be 6%.

The shuttle from the local old-age home will send a few senile Republicans to the polls. A Democratic National Committee bus will collect some derelicts from skid row. And we will have the first president of the United States elected by a franchise limited to sufferers from Alzheimer's disease and drunken bums.

By P.J. O'Rourke (writing for the Stansberry Digest)

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H.L. Mencken