The Man Who Would be King

. . . So Tim, the man who would be King--that's our Tim, Tiny Tim--the hunk who used to be our Governor, the very mention of whose name makes your heart race, the same Tim who never saw a tax he liked nor a user fee he could not tolerate, who left the State about . . . oh, six billion dollars in the hole, none of which was his fault because he always made it clear that he was opposed to spending more than you had, and that is why he cut taxes, is running for President.

It isn't easy to become President. There is that budget thing, of course, and other people want to become President, too. Our very own Michele, the Belle of Stillwater and Anoka, something of a hunk in her own right, is looking extremely presidential, in an odd sort of way. And then there is Newt--he wants to be King, too--as soon as the vows of celibacy return to him.

The field is crowded with unannounced candidates, including a Burger King, who wants to be King. Herman Cain is a name to be reckoned with, I reckon.

Anyway, in the field of people like that, Tim Pawlenty has to carve out an image, a leadership position, a throne to call his own. He is starting in Iowa, a state very close to his heart; it being a place he has not chosen to be Governor of. Not yet, but he does love Iowa!

Tim has announced an exploratory committee. He hired people to help him explore. He hired Benjamin Foster, for instance, who was just arrested for what Iowa techically calls, "Being Stinking Drunk and Trying to get Into the Wrong House in the Wrong Town". But, of course, Ben is just 24, and not used to being lost trying to break into the wrong house.

Think of it as a misstep. It is going to be a long Republican primary.
.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

SmokeSound

Search This Blog