No wonder the poor bastards from Generation X have lost their sense of humor about politics. Some things are not funny to the doomed, especially when they've just elected a President with no sense of humor at all. The joke is over when even a victory is a downhill run into hardship, disappointment, and a queasy sense of betrayal. If you can laugh in the face these things, you are probably ready for a staff job with a serious presidential candidate. The humor of the campaign trail is relentlessly cruel and brutal. If you think that you like jokes, try hanging around the water cooler after midnight with hired killers like James Carville or the late Lee Atwater, whose death by cancer in 1991 was a fatal loss to the Bush reelection effort. Atwater could say, without rancor, that he wanted to castrate Michael Dukakis and dump him on the Boston Common with his nuts stuffed down his throat. Atwater said a lot of things that made people cringe, but he usually smiled when he said them and people tried to laugh.
It was deep background stuff, they figured, of course he didn't mean it. Hell, in some states you could go to prison for making threats like that. Felony menacing, two years minimum, Conspiracy to commit Murder and/or Felony Assault with intent to commit Great bodily Harm, minimum 50 years in Arkansas and Texas, also Kidnapping (death)), rape, sodomy, Malicious disfigurement Treason, Perjury, Gross Sexual Imposition, and Aggravated Conspiracy to Commit all of the above (600 years minimum).... and all of this without anybody ever doing anything. Ho, ho. How's that for the wheels of justice Bubba? Six hundred fify-two years, just for downing a few bucks at lunch and trading jokes among warriors...
Richard Nixon was not a Crook. Ho, ho.
George Bush was innocent. Ho, ho.
Ed Rollins bribed every Negro preacher in New Jersey to hold down the black vote for the Governor in '93. Hee-haw.
James Carvillle set Hamilton Jordan's heart on fire and then refused to **** down his throat to save his life. Ho, ho.
That is the kind of humor that campaign junkies admire and will tell their children--for the same perverse reasons that make me confess to my son, over breakfast, that I blew John Kennedy's head off in Dallas.
You have to be very mean to get a laugh on the campaign trail. There is no such thing as paranoia.
"Confessions of a Political Junky" -- Hunter S. Thompson