Desperate times call for desperate fissures

Thoreau said that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The rest are trailing in the polls.

Democrats are louder and more aggressive than usual, fearmongering with warnings of death, draft, unemployment and uncured paralysis, and sending so many lawyers to Florida that “no child left behind” is on hold, and “no ambulance left unchased” is in full swing. Oh yes, some of them are also throwing pies at girls. This can only mean one thing: Election Day is nigh, and they’re behind. Possibly, this election is like quicksand – the more you flail, the faster you sink – And, boy, are they flailing.

Teresa Heinz Kerry is at the forefront. Her latest preposterous meandering was to say that Laura Bush has “never had a real job,” making teachers, librarians and mothers everywhere rejoice to find out they’ve never had to work. Heinz-Kerry later said she was sorry, but, just like an Ike Turner apology, it’s tough to accept because you know that, tomorrow, another slap is coming. This may be the first election to be lost due to a candidate’s wife. At the polls, many voters will decide that America needs a “First Lady,” not a “Mommy Dearest.”

For Florida, the news keeps getting worse. The “Orange State” is about to get a little pulpier, because the former vice president – and man who left his heart, not to mention sanity, in Broward County – is on the way to campaign for John Kerry. Watch out, Florida: “Hurricane Gore” is heading your way, carrying with it a storm surge of 1,200 lawyers. This particular hurricane is an anomaly, because it has two eyes, both fixed and dilated, and if you look closely, you can see cartoonish spirals swirling around in them caused by years of bitter frustration, sleepless nights hand-counting ballots in his basement, and delusional “cabinet meetings” with a Labrador retriever, two potted plants, and a cardboard cutout of Robert Reich.

The usual obvious fakery is in full swing as well, which, on John Kerry, is as easy to spot as a counterfeit $20 bill the size of a beach blanket and made out of tinfoil. Kerry decided that the support of gun owners in the swing state of Ohio needed to be shored up, so he did what any Ohio hunter would do – went to the LL Bean section of his closet, tore the price tag off his “old hunting outfit,” and headed out to a Youngstown area cornfield. Eventually, Kerry, the anti-gun, pro-animal rights candidate, emerged, clutching his still smoking 12-gauge irony as his hunting partner carried a dead goose. If the goose had to listen to one of Kerry’s vacillating diatribes while in the cornfield, chances are that the bird’s fatal gunshot wound was self-inflicted.

Separate from the campaign itself, but still relevant as a symbol of the Democrats lack of ability for any self-expression not involving some form of slop, Ann Coulter’s speech at the University of Arizona received a tasty interruption as a couple of bongwater bathers threw custard pies at the conservative columnist. Like most liberal points, they mostly missed their mark. Conservatives are often labeled heartless and mean, but the left is usually the one oppressing free speech, even if it requires two men hurling baked goods at a hundred pound woman – probably the greatest exhibition of masculinity those two pinheads will ever engage in.

Election Day will soon come and go, but hunker down and prepare for weeks or months worth of cries of “disenfranchised voters.”

What exactly is a “disenfranchised voter,” and how can somebody like Jesse Jackson know exactly how many of them there are, since the whole point of the thing is that they were denied the right to be counted in the first place? No, I’m starting to imagine that the “disenfranchised voter” some Democrats refer to is a 42-year-old man, perhaps living in his mother’s basement, angry at a world that has not given him a decent life, not to mention a girlfriend, but can’t make it to the polls because mom’s using the car that day.

This voter is “disenfranchised” because there aren’t mobile voting units (which will be the next great proposal) to go around like ice cream trucks, to allow people, who don’t know what’s going on, to exercise a right they wouldn’t have if the majority of voters didn’t know what was going on – the cusp of which we’re flirting with dangerously, and it’s spreading to states other than Florida. Who would have ever thought that disenfranchisement would become a franchise?