that time i retired from politics

Image courtesy of xkcd.com. Because I'm too lazy to create my own web comic just for this post, and that dude is hilarious, isn't he? Also, I know this doesn't really have anything to do with politics. BUT HILARIOUS.I’ve decided that I can’t do politics.

Not only will no one ever allow me to run for anything once they’ve spent 30 seconds looking me up on Google, but to be honest I just can’t maintain the level of mouth-foaming it seems to take to be a part of the whole political spectrum. Republicans and Democrats seem like two identical twin brothers fighting over which one of them gets to be Preppy and which one gets to be the Goth. I can’t support that. You’re both gorgeous little poo-flinging monkeys. 

And I admit that I’m kind of a goader. Which spell-check is insisting isn’t a word, but which I insist means “Lovable guy who just likes to make funny comments and then has to watch his friends from both sides of the political spectrum take up knives and try to cut each other.” You can see why I need a shorthand for it.

I swear, I don’t set out to stir things up on purpose. How could I? I’m too busy posting endless streams of this stuff to really think about the long-term implications. I’m pretty sure some of my posts cause cancer. I’m already organizing a 5K. But really, if you’d just wear sunscreen … it’s 30 seconds of your day, people. Only you can prevent comment cancer.

Maybe it’s my middle-ground nature, but I decided a couple of years ago that I was a Libertarian. I lean a little to the right, but I think I’m pretty firmly in the middle-ish area of politics, and Libertarianism seems to fit me. For starters, I think government should have nothing to say about what is and what isn’t a “marriage.” I think pot should be legal, even though I’ve never tried it. And I think that IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE WHO BECOMES PRESIDENT. That’s just a conclusion I’ve drawn from 40 years of being an American, but I think there may be a pie chart that backs me up.

I could be wrong, too. Maybe there are advantages to having a President from one party over another. But I’m guessing that if I took some of the political rhetoric from the past 12 years, removed the names and words like “liberal,” “conservative,” “Democrat,” and “Republican,” then fed each line to you one at a time, you’d still only have a 50/50 chance of guessing which line applies to which political party or President. Those are the same odds you get in Tic-Tac-Toe. Does NO ONE notice they’re all saying the same stuff?

Anyway, I can’t do politics. I don’t have the juice to spend the kind of time it takes to dig up the quotes and polls and facts and figures and birth certificates and tax records it takes to show the world that a douchebag is a douchebag. I’m just going to stand aside and poke at both of the amorphous blobs that are our two major political parties with a stick. I may encourage them to breed, and then take command of the hybrid ball of hate that forms, leading it on a journey to conquer the Middle Kingdom. I will call him Billy.