Remember!

In 2020 in the Presidential election it will be The Great Bolo versus Brute Bernard! Which way will you vote, America?! In whose beefy paws will you place the fate of the USA?!

Choose wisely!

On one side, The Great Bolo!

On the other, Brute Bernard!

Remember...the US Presidential election, like rasslin', is REAL! Don't be fooled! Get out and cheer for the good guy! And recollect to vote, dammit!

Votin' is for reals, people.

You Got Some Splainin' To Do

"U.K.! You got some 'splainin' to do!"

Excuse the possibly vague American TV reference.

But I have a question for my British readers. (I know yer out there.)

Here it is:

In the recent National Polls in the UK, the plurality went to the Conservatives. OK. I'll give them that much.

The Conservatives won 306 seats in Parliament.
Labour won 258 seats.

The Liberal-Democrats won 57 seats.

Now...the popular vote showed that the Conservatives ended up with 36.1%; Labour with 29%, and Liberal-Democrats with 23%. All understood.

However, when it came to forming a government, why did the right wing party (the Conservatives) get to head it? This makes no sense to me, at all. Both Labour and the Liberal-Democrats are supposedly left of center parties. Why didn't the left of center majority form the government while leaving out the far less popular right of center party?

I'm not saying that the stupid US so-called "two party system" is superior. Far from it. Give me a parliamentary democracy any day over this farce we have here in the States. But just explain to me why at least 52% of the population who were obviously voting for a leftist form of rule had to allow the 36% who technically came in second to form a right wing government. This makes no sense to me, especially when even the seats in Parliament went to the major left wing parties by a score of 308 to 306. Slim majority, yes, but even by that measure they have the upper hand.

Why did the Liberal-Democrats feel honor bound to form up a government that will have rightist policies when a solid majority obviously didn't want right wing policies and had voted so? This seems as if the UK parliamentary system has degenerated into as big a farce as the joke our corporate masters play on us here in the USA.

What gives?

(And, yes, I realize that there are smaller parties around--and that many of them also tend to tilt left.)

"The Conservatives? Are you daft, woman?"

The Bad Guys of My Youth

Conservatives I could respect:

Back in the day, there was a brief period during which the political right in the USA could have said with truth that it had a few decent folk among its numbers. Yes, there were always racist, greedy yahoos in there, but there were also some decent thinkers and writers.

When I was a kid I used to enjoy reading the stuff these guys produced. I never agreed with it, but I enjoyed reading it. These few fellows apparently had good reasons for the stands that they took. What I mean to say is that they weren't arguing their positions out of venality, but out of solid logical thinking. They believed it and were willing to be relatively civil about defending those positions.

Most of these people either quietly retired from the public scene, died, or were unfortunately shoved out of the way for the likes of what we have now among the American right wing of so-called thinkers. Today, we don't have cats like James J. Kilpatrick and William F. Buckley, Jr. Instead, we have a group of hate-mongering creeps who are nothing but neo-fascists and modern day Nazis who have all of the fine tuning of a bloody hatchet.

Well, I reckon that's okay, in its way. In my youth those gentlemen of the right never convinced me of their positions, but at least I had respect for them. And at least I had the impression that they had some measure of respect for their leftist analogs. Their replacements are nothing but monstrous creeps deserving of my contempt and needful of physical destruction.

Wonderful portrait of William F. Buckley by the amazing Drew Friedman.