People, I love Oprah Winfrey too, but can we please shut up about her running for President? Never mind she’s said she’s not interested. Even if she were to embrace the idea, please just say no to this nonsense.
Have we learned nothing from President Reality TV “Star”? This country doesn’t need some vaunted “outsider” who doesn’t understand how government works. That isn’t the person to “fix things”! We don’t need someone who doesn’t understand that the Attorney General is not the president’s personal attorney but rather the nation’s attorney. Someone who doesn’t know enough not to fire the FBI director investigating his campaign. No! We need someone who knows our institutions and our traditions. Who knows why we have the laws that we have and why we have the traditions that we do.
Here is what this country needs: a boring old politician. Yes, I said it! I know that’s anathema to the populists in the heartland. It’s not what the kewl kids are saying or the conventional wisdom among political pundits, but it’s the straight truth. We need someone who knows government and therefore knows how to govern.
Here is who I want for president in 2020: a boring old Senator who’s held office for a while.
I think President Obama would agree with me. He’s said his biggest disappointment was that he was unable to change the culture of Washington. That’s a tall order for anyone, but particularly someone with as little experience inside Washington as he had. As much as I adore Obama, and as much as I think we are a better country for his two terms in office, the reality is, he was unable to accomplish a lot of what he and the voters wanted because of unprecedented resistance from Republicans. And I can’t help but wonder if he might not have been better equipped to run interference around the roadblocks put up by old-timers like Mitch McConnell if he’d had more time in the Senate to forge relationships.
That will be left for the historians to decide. But the bottom line is, people like Oprah Winfrey, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and even Mark Cuban have no business running for the highest office in the land. Start small, if that’s your ambition. Run for the House of Representatives, or state office. Learn the ropes. Then come talk to me.
Right, left, center — I don’t care. It’s disrespectful to the office. Yes! It is! It disrespects the work of government to think anyone can waltz in and “fix things” just because we like their TV show or want to have a beer with them or find their personalities pleasing or can identify with their personal struggles or find ourselves nodding in agreement at their latest Entertainment Weekly interview. That isn’t governing. It’s a path that leads directly to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho and if we don’t want to end up an Idiocracy we better nip this shit in the bud now.
Southern Beale 
Brava. Brava. Brava.
From the other side of the aisle… Thank you.
Wow, at long last Bipartisanship! LOL
Awesome!*
So, THAT’S what was going on at the Golden Globe! I thought it was some lifetime achievement award thing. Not, “no”, but “Writhing in SATAN’S rectum in HELL, NOOOOOO!”.
Damn. People are so goddamned smitten by celebrity.
* democommie attempts to curtsy on bum ankle and goes down like the Titanic
I haz a squee!
Agreed. The Dems have several. Hopefully we will agree and unite with some passion on one of them.
I don’t think she’ll run, she’s not insane like Trump is.
She’s said she’s not interested. She’s way too smart to wish this on herself! But good grief, The Rock wants to run, he’s said so .. aagh. That makes my head hurt.
You know what I want? I want for the immigrant current ex-governor of Cali to be able to say, “You’re Fired!” just one more time–like he did at the end of “True Lies”.
When I first heard about “The Rock” my first reaction was to wonder why a gay male porn star had started using the definite article before his name.
I agree, we need someone who knows how government works and knows where all the skeletons are. But that is not always a recipe for success. LBJ had dirt on everyone; knew how things worked but we still got Veet-nam.
If we have to have another celebrity then I want Dolly Parton.
Most know how government works. It forces strangers to pay it.
The Vietnam War (The United States part of it) was something Johnson inherited from Kennedy and his Ivy Leaguer advisers who Johnson relied on too heavily – I think he, unfortunately, felt intimidated by their Harvard-Yale origins when he was their intellectual superior. He was also afraid of being accused of “losing Vietnam” because he knew Republicans and the press that would help install Nixon in 1968 would attack him on that basis.
Johnson was guilty of many things in Vietnam, but he was hardly the only one who was. It was the relative neophyte, Kennedy, who made the crucial steps into that atrocity.
Led there by the Dulles brothers, who saw all things Communist as a threat to America … biggest foreign policy blunder of post-war America.
JFK… hangover/preceded by Eisenhower and McCarthyist “inward” hysteria, which was preceded by the post WW2 French still suffering from colonial attitude.
When judging The Good Guys or The Better Guys, I recommend accounting for their environment.
It’s amazing how many people fail to grasp this. People who would insist on a knowledgeable and experienced plumber to fix their sink, or a knowledgeable and experienced mechanic to fix their car, see no problem with choosing an amateur to handle the tremendous complexities of the federal government and the dangerous challenges of foreign policy.
Fortunately, after all the problems caused by Trump’s lack of experience, it’s likely that proper qualifications will be a major election issue in 2020.
On a tape I’ve got somewhere, of Jonathon Katz in his role of “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist”, theres a bit where he asks Gary Shandling if he’s got anything special going on in his life. Mr. Shandling says, “Yeah, I’m turning 50 this year and I’m having my first colonoscopy.”. Dr. Katz says, “Let me say just one thing about that. Have it done by a professioanl.”. Mr. Shandling’s reply, “Yeah, I thought 7:30PM, Saturday, was an odd time.”.
Dear Ms. Southern Beale:
Going only by the little bit of commercial teevee that I watch that stupidity you asked people not to engage in is getting attention.
Oprah has done some good, she’s also got some VERY fucked up ideas about how life works for almost everyboy other than her. I want a PotUS who gets that we’re not all able to be what they are and do not WANT to be what they are. We want to get up in the morning and go about our lives without having to wonder how our government is fucking us on a daily basis or what idiotic pronouncements have been made by “The LEADER of the Free World” in the last hour. We also want somebody who has a fucking clue about how shit works.
Should be “about how life works for almost EVERYBODY other than her.”.
I kind of liked “everyboy” though … 😉
I see you have another Megachurch groper over there in Knoxville, I think.
Not the same as the Memphis one?
My bad. There was one in Knoxville (or its environs) last spring–it gets a bit confusing trying to keep track of these idiots.
Obama… “better equipped to run interference around the roadblocks put up by old-timers like Mitch McConnell”
Yes, Obama retained significant naivete to the end … even to the last few months when the feds did not (adequately, timely) investigate and indict Donald Trump. Certainly Trump’s international mob activities justified federal investigation. (But I more blame New York State and City corruption for not apprehending, convicting, and sentencing the Trump Crime Family decades ago.)
Regarding political insiders lacking track record in local elected office:
1. Darrel Issa. Trump. (others not now coming to mind.)
2. In theory, a long-retired “business leader” might have undergone ethical transformation, but the public can’t risk relying on claims of self-enlightenment. And due to cuckservative love of the jackboot, notorous “business leaders” such as the Kochs, Pope, Coors, Adelson, DeVos, Blankenship, et al have never felt need to even pretend to claim ethical reform.
Well, actually, the Obama Administration tried to work with all of the secretaries of state to make sure their election systems couldn’t be hacked and everything had become so toxic by then, wingnuts were freaking out about it being Obama throwing the election to Hillary. This was in August 2016. They tried to run tests and Red States started freaking out.
Here’s a Politico story, headline “Federal Help or Power Grab?” Right wing media started spreading outrageous conspiracies about this, aided by FB and Twitter bots and Infowars misinformation. It went way beyond just Georgia, by the end of August there were something like 30 states screaming OBAMA IS TRYING TO RIG THE ELECTION.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/election-cyber-security-georgia-227475
Yeah, but bothsidezdoit!
I keep hearing about what criminals EVERY democratic pol since always is/was/will be the same sorta scumbag that the GOP has fielded since about 1932.
Democrats, in general, and the DNC–for at least the last 8-12 years have been unwilling to “tell it like it is” when dealing with the GOP. First order of business is to call them out fore the lying, rapaciouos, fearmongering, warpartyin’ mofos that they are and HAVE been since mid 1960’s–at least.
Kamala Harris.