Famed author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson once said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
The weird have come home to roost, as the current presidential campaign has devolved from amusing sideshow into terrifying reality—complete with the grim realization that this country’s electorate is tasked with choosing a president from a pool of doomsday-conjuring candidates on both sides of the aisle.
The Republican and Democratic candidates both seem to have been manifested from the irate comments section on YouTube, with childish insults, fear mongering and vague idealism replacing the bland talking points of years past. Billionaire bloviator Donald Trump treats Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio et al. like schoolyard underlings, forcing them into shaky-voiced defense mode—little brothers trying in vain to stand up to their brutish older sibling.
In the Democratic mix, Bernie Sanders, who has every idealistic twenty-something feelin’ the Bern’, is flush with glowing promises set to fix everything from healthcare to college tuition—with his unnerving solution for everything being taxes, taxes and more taxes. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s message is lost in spam mail and the dual shadows of Bill and Benghazi.
As the candidates head to South Carolina this month for the next primary, I worry that we have ventured too deep into the abyss and there is no turning back now. One of these members of the presidential rogues’ gallery will rise from the muck and lead this county into what will undoubtedly be (at least) four years of (at best) national embarrassments and (more likely) national disasters.
We only have ourselves to blame. In this age of hyper-irrationalism, the extremes of this country’s worst personality traits coalesced to produce candidates better suited for street corner rants than State of the Union addresses.
