The Billary Factor

Things are looking grim, projects are dropping on me like serves from the canon that Goran Ivanisevic calls a racket. And I’m no Agassi with a seemingly precognitive return. In short I don’t have time for this blog, but I find myself unable to stop, like a chronic alcoholic or the gambling neophyte who won big on their first Vegas bet. The alcoholic will lose his family and end up extolling the virtues of the Lysol cocktail while the gambler will mortgage his house three times and sell his dogs for medical experiments in an attempt to cover his markers, PETA be damned. What happens to the blogger who can’t help but mash the keys in a semi literate fashion? Not many examples exist to make an informed wager so suffice it to say that Neanderthals went extinct because they lacked the vocal ability of Sapiens. Or so some opine, the ones that think the thick browed robust hominids were mere brutes. There is another school of thought, one that maintains that those blessed with the occipital bun and increased cranial capacity saw the jabbering monkeys all around them, guessed where the future was going and welcomed the end with sweet relief. So what happens to the typing monkey who can’t shut up? Nothing good will come of him, of that we can be certain.

Time for some Billary talk. I found myself outside this evening in a lull between the Tennessee Alabama game and the start of the World Series. Perhaps an hour at most, just enough time to let the adrenalin mellow and blood to fill in the deep nail marks left in my palms. I was greeted by the site of a shiny new Kerry Edwards sign in my neighbors overly green and plush lawn (paid for with repeated applications of expensive exotic fertilizers). Politics makes for mean times but this was an avatar of pure madness. My neighbor, a hard charging Bushite, with a Kedwards sign? Impossible. He had named his sons Atwater, Reagan and Ollie. Thereby putting a terrible burden on his youngest boy which he explained away by saying it would be a character building thing. I thought the sign must be a joke so I yanked the thing out of his yard and headed to his garage.

You can generally find my neighbor in his garage drinking cold bud lights out of an ancient refrigerator and sitting in a folding nylon chair, it is all he really needs to do. He started a small manufacturing company and while the income isn’t stellar it is enough to free him from such mundane tasks as staying sober and commuting. The fiend was where I expected him to be but he was obviously delving into something harder, his glass was full of watery looking red liquid I took this to mean that he was dipping into the Stoli. His heavily lidded eyes and empty vodka bottles confirmed my suspicions.

He nearly gagged when he saw me with the sign, but rather than being grateful he seemed agitated. He is one of the 80% of Americans who are positively sure people are out to get them and I had just joined his list of the unfriendly.
“What are you doing with my sign?” He demanded.
I explained to him that I was certain someone was playing a raw political joke on him. His mood lightened, one less person who is out to slit his throat I guess, and he began explaining things to me.

He averred that a vote for Bush was a vote for Billary. He spoke of rumors that Clinton’s bypass was well timed to avoid most of the campaigning for Kerry. The idea, he proposed, was as follows: The Democrats lose this election and in four years Hillary and Bill run more or less together thereby circumventing the constitutional amendment against a President serving more than two terms. A no brainer, Bill feels your pain and all the Republicans have to offer is Dick Cheney in the scariest Halloween costume of all time, himself. It is well known in DC that most children cry when they make a stop at the Vice Presidents house on All Hallows Eve, the candy may be expensive and Swiss but every piece is covered in a thick slime of Iraqi grease. It is worse than all that, according to my hard sipping neighbor. The malleable Bill would be nothing more than an unfilled rebate check, once Hillary had the power things would change. She would crack tight on immigration like a snapping turtle who felt threatened. This would drive up the American wage and the price of vegetables would skyrocket. “Oh” he cried “Why won’t Hillary let me buy cauliflower? My boys need it!” He then implored me to help him spread the word and drive while he stole every Bush sign that could be reached in a fifty yard sprint. I left him there simpering about the coming vegetable crisis, crying into his vodka. “The fool” I thought “There’s baseball game on!”