S14: 90 Wks Until Indecision 2016 - Top 14 Odds-On Favorites to Win Presidential Election (90 Weeks Out)

So hey, not too excited about doing this list this week, because politics is stupid, and also for as a man full of arbitrary rules, one of the arbitrary rules I decided upon was to review the odds for who would win the 2016 election every 10 weeks in advance, meaning this week – at the 90 weeks until… moment – we get to review who are the odds-on favorites to be our next American President. And the list is fucking depressing.

Obviously, all homage owed to HST who did the gonzo journalism/drunken politics thing at a prominent level. Unfortunately, most of the “quirky” political pundits are not all that quirky in a true quirk sense, but mostly just pretending to be quirky. That’s sort of the age we live in – we pretend to be clever and everybody goes, “Oh man, how clever.” Or we pretend to be creative, and people pretend along “Wow, what a creative genius!” It’s like old school pro wrestling kayfabe where everybody is in on the gig, pretending in the same silently agreed upon ways, and we all remain mostly unentertained, held in place, and waste our whole fucking lives perpetuating bullshit.

Therein lies my problem with most of these “odds on favorites” because NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM is an inspiring individual in any sense of the notion. It’s mostly like a whole bunch of marketing pitches for like Coke and Pepsi, and the assorted marketing pitches attempt to slowly prove themselves the best marketing pitch for either major soda brand before there is a final pair of opposing commercial campaigns which we all get to choose after, “Which of these two sodas do you find less disgusting?” This is our American political process at the national level at this point.

But nonetheless, this is where I live, the bullshit system I live under, so I might as well write stupid shit about it. Usually I like to think of writing as a cathartic process which helps me feel better, or untangle the tangles of shitty existence as they pertain to choking up my internal psyche. Unfortunately this Presidential project – INDECISION 2016 – won’t make me feel better, most likely. Odds are pretty heavy against that possibility.

Speaking of odds, it is against the law for US bookmakers to have odds for events that are decided by vote. So I had to go international, and decided the best source was a degenerate book from Ireland that I won’t mention by name because those fucking sites pay good money to get mentioned by shitty blogs, and I’m not giving them free publicity. But the one I chose is fairly infamous for having listed odds on Obama getting assassinated at one point, amongst other fucked up possible situations, so if I’m going to be forced to embrace this project, and I’m going to condemn the fake kayfabe clever writer/good candidate bullshit neon hologram that is 21st century America, then I might as well go with the most fucked-up possible bookmaker. Plus, these people had a pretty wide set of choices. So here are the top fourteen candidates, by odds, with 90 weeks to go. I’ll revisit these odds every ten weeks up until the election (should I not abandon this project entirely, which is probably more likely than most of these people even getting on the ballot).

#1: Hillary Clinton – 11 to 10 odds to win President 2016. Clinton has positioned herself for this ever since not getting the nomination in 2008, by first seeming like not a loser at all by taking Secretary of State under Obama, but then also getting out early enough so that she can distance herself from whatever he’s done that might get the sheeple masses bahhing in negativity. But the entire reason she came up second in 2008 fits even more so now – that she’s too much of an insider/regular same ol’ bullshit candidate from the political elite aka the 1% aka the lizard overlords in alliance with the grey aliens. Obama’s wave of euphoria was not just because everybody was like, “Oh shit, a BLACK GUY!” but also (mostly) because his entire marketing campaign was the change thing – change, something different, no more of the same ol’ shit. Of course, it ended up being the same ol’ shit. That’s not going to stop someone trying to successfully campaign for President 2016 from saying that Obama might have been too much change, and maybe we need something more level-headed and traditional, but foreward thinking. I don’t know, you make up the bullshit they’ll say, but ultimately it’s going to be Coke and Pepsi again, and Clinton has worked for decades not to necessarily make herself an inspiring and wonderful figure that will initiate a new realm of wonderful American humanitarianism on earth, but positioning herself as the de facto main power broker within her chosen political party, which will – once she pushes aside other weak ass contenders like Beast Mode stiff arms – put their entire weight and money behind her in the push to have a fucking President honor their investors’ desires. And her being the favorite makes sense to me – mostly because of the list of horrible choices the other flavor has right now – and I was gonna bet a fake $100 every time I did these updates, but I’m not gonna bet on the frontrunner to start this, because early bets are the best time to take a shot, not back the favorite. You save that for your smart bets later in the process.

#2: Jeb Bush – 7 to 2 odds. And having Jeb Bush be early front-runner for Republican is a fucking joke too, because the big argument against all these fuckers in 2008 was, “Fuck man, we’ve had either Bush or Clinton for the past 20 years… we can’t possibly be having a free and open oligarchy can we?” That sentiment was a huge factor in Obama’s hotshot rise. At the time, I wondered if that wasn’t just a scapegoat process to have a fall man in office to take the hatchet for all the fucked up things that were going to happen on the international geopolitical stage and financially. I’d say the right has tried to do exactly that too, but Obama’s been able to deflect that to a certain extent from being regarded as universal truth. Of course I live inside the filtered bubble of America, so who the fuck knows if I’m even being fed true data? Nonetheless, eight years of Obama, and we’re right back to a very possible Clinton/Bush battle, which seems so utterly ridiculous it’s hard to even make jokes about. This is where we are though – fed limited choices, and berated for not being more excited about those limited choices. And if Clinton’s biggest liability is being saddled with whatever mean, horrible things the right can attach to her through Obama, as well as her husband, then fucking Bush’s biggest liability is his last name – which runs through over thirty years of historical liability at this point. And yet, as with all marketing campaigns, both sides will probably just try to twist our perception of their liability as an actual strength that we just don’t understand SO THEY’LL TELL US OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL WE UNDERSTAND IT CORRECTLY.

#3: Marco Rubio – 10 to 1 odds. Probably not a legit contender but will play the Republican role of “minority choice” so that they can pretend to be reaching out to all of America with the open arms of prosperity. Rubio is the shining star of their genetic clone crop of Hispanic-themed business cyborgs. Unfortunately, cyborgs don’t play well in the sticks because they are too robotic and lack that down home folksy humor that like to put depleted-uranium bullets into brown people.

#4: Chris Christie – 12 to 1 odds. Christie has already shown a few times he is a joke, so the longevity of his marketing campaign to be Soda King will depend mostly on that old Three Stooges bit where they ask for volunteers to step forward and everybody else steps backwards. That is to say, Christie will only be as successful as much as his competition obviously fucks up to keep him relevant by default.

#5: Scott Walker – 14 to 1 odds. And this is a top contender for Republicans? Wasn’t he the dude that had folks occupying the capitol building in Wisconsin, ready to set shit on fire? What the fuck man, is this the best we can do? This guy is the fifth-best candidate at this point?

#6: Rand Paul – 16 to 1 odds. Rand will follow his father’s MO of staying in the race longer than anybody else by playing strong to the fringe element. He actually might be too clean-looking for the fringe element even, because the fringe element is dirty, grimy, covered in the trickle down greases of industrial economy but maintained psychically by a steady diet of AM radio. In recent years that AM radio diet has been complemented by cable “news” stations, but with TV you actually get to see the person, and Rand Paul does not look like a grizzled old carpeting & tile small business owner like his dad did. He looks like an asshole who teaches at the local university.

#7: Mitt Romney – 16 to 1 odds. I guess Romney actually already met with the Koch brothers, and deemed himself not a viable potential marketing campaign for Republican soda this time, his marketability having been used up too far beyond a re-branding effort in 2012. But for whatever reason he was still listed on the contenders list at the sketchy betting site I got them from, so I still write a few token words about his rich, white ass.

#8: Elizabeth Warren – 18 to 1 odds. Warren seems to be the early Facebook meme for mainstream alternative folks leader, according to my own personal realm of data input. People are excited about her because she has good anti-1% quotes that can be impact fonted onto an image and shared as some sort of psychologically pleasing fake act of resistance. That shit don’t count for actual votes inside Diebold machines though, and though she’s a much more visually palatable version of Dennis Kucinich, that off-brand, watered down revolt through bureaucracy gets stomped on in the primary process by well-funded traditionals like H.R. Clinton. However, in the Democratic party process, people like Warren serve the important function of pretending the voice of the downtrodden is actually still taken into consideration.

#9: Joe Biden – 33 to 1 odds. Oh man, I think Joe Biden’s gonna be an amazing candidate, because he doesn’t really seem to give a fuck at this point. Al Gore was all business and serious as fuck when he wanted to be President in 2000, and that tends to be the VP way – to act like you’re the most perfect person to step into the role because you’ve basically been an understudy for years now. But Biden is one of the first returning VPs after an 8-year President that is not the natural frontrunner. This is gonna put Biden into full Biden mode, battling for his own relevancy, and if anybody can bust out the down home folksy bullshit, it’s Biden. He actually will probably be the highlight of the primary campaigns, so long as they don’t try to convince him to lay back for H.R. Clinton. (I am probably going to refer to her as “H.R. Clinton” from here on out.)

#10: Paul Ryan – 33 to 1 odds. This guy sucked in 2012, was the Republican hotshot version of rushing somebody through quickly while they seemed hype to the public, which is how the Dems handled Obama in 2008. But that hotshot ate Ryan up, and he looked a chump next to Biden in the VP debates of 2012. He also has the dead eyes of a man with zero soul left, having compromised himself so deeply already that all he can do is smile and pretend and regurgitate his programming.

#11: Ted Cruz – 40 to 1 odds. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a politician in all my 42 years of being a human that looked more like a complete fucking asshole than Ted Cruz. No candidate makes me wish we lived in a more chaotic land of car bombs and public stabbings and prison revolts swallowing executive sedan cavalcades in campaign passing than Ted Cruz. If George W. Bush is Wal-Mart, and Obama is Target, then Ted Cruz is the fucking Dollar Tree, and though I get most all my composition notebooks, transparent tape, tea candles, and glow-in-the-dark wristbands for the children from the Dollar Tree, I’m still not quite ready for my nation’s President’s marketing campaign to be Dollar Tree. Now if we got one of the sassy ass ladies who work at Dollar Tree to be President, that’d I’d get behind. Maybe President should be like jury duty, where we just draw a group of 250 random people to enter the nomination process, and we whittle them down to a winner. The quality of candidate would be much higher.

#12: John Kerry – 40 to 1 odds. This Muppet eagle-looking motherfucker got blitzed out by George W. Bush. How the fuck you gonna lose to George W. Bush in 2004? That was a lay-up election, but Kerry failed (even if there might’ve been outside money Citizens United commercial goaltending involved). No way that guy gets back through the process. I’m not even sure if he’s said he wants to, being too busy trying to save American face around the world all the fucking time. Clinton sure bailed out at a perfect time, didn’t she? She’s the one true player in this field right now, the Triple H to a bunch of jobbers.

#13: Bobby Jindal – 40 to 1 odds. Jindal is prone to verbal mistakes, but he’s also a non-white guy (though he recently made headlines by saying he was white) in the traditional sense of what “white guy” means. He was able to conquer the political landscape of the deep fucking twisted up south in Louisiana, and is probably the one true “minority” candidates the Republican party could push out that doesn’t look like the political equivalent of saying “but some of my friends at work are black.” In fact, I’m throwing my imaginary $100 down this time around on Jindal, at 40 to 1 odds, because of all the fucking losers and odds-and-ends that are not frontrunners at this point, he’s the only one I can see not actively fucking it up too easily.

#14: Michael Bloomberg – 40 to 1 odds. There were a slew of 40 to 1 candidates, and I cherry-picked them as I felt like writing about them. I put Bloomberg on here in the last spot because he is the epitome of what is wrong with American politics. He’s been both a Democrat and Republican, and now considers himself an independent I guess. But he also was an obvious component of the 1% elite and wealthy that the Occupy movement was protesting against, and he lived in penthouses right around the corner from the park those protests were boiling up in. Bloomberg is a proven pigfucker, and the fact he’s even considered this much of a longshot which is still this high of a choice amongst the entire spectrum of American choice is monkey signifier that America is fucked, doomed, and fuck whoever ends up being President in 2016.

S14: 91 Wks Until Indecision 2016 - Top 14 Third Party Popular Vote-getters Who Are Still Alive

Part of me deciding to *attempt* to *create* this *content* each week in anticipation of another painful and pretentious American Presidential election is to evaluate my own nonsense with relation to political preferences. (Life should be about evaluating your own nonsense, all the time, because none of us have gotten this shit untangled completely. Few even get close. One is lucky to even make progress to be honest.) And my basic political preferences can easily be broken down into two points: A) I always vote third party if available on the ballot; B) if not available, I vote for whoever is not incumbent. Always, no takebacks. I feel like we could use more choices in this shit, and if I throw my piddly pretend-make-a-difference vote at some third party schmuck, then maybe it gains momentum. I also feel like if we’re going to have to keep dealing with the same two parties, I’d rather neither of them become entrenched, at any position, so always switch them, keep them unsettled, fuck them.

So for this week’s dumb list I decided to do some maths and see what living human beings had gotten the most love in Presidential elections from outside the two mainstream parties. Tallying straight votes made the spreadsheet explode a little much, so I limited it to percentage of the popular vote (none of these people got any electoral votes), and let them accumulate it, so I could see what living, breathing, still existing upon earth human beings were the most (but not real) viable alternatives. In my mind, I hoped this would be no-nonsense black ladies and gay natives and crazed anarchist poet-philosophers and that type of stuff. Sadly, the results sort of reaffirmed the two main parties had echoed so strongly through the popular vote that even with our alternative choices, it’s not really all that alternative. But here are the top 14 living people who accumulated the most popular vote percentages in Presidential elections of the American variety.

#1: Ross Perot (Reform Party; 18.91% of vote in 1992, 8.4% in 1996) – Your all-time top alternative choice is a billionaire white guy. I remember my dad still being alive and being pretty stoked to vote for Perot even though he thought Perot sucked, just because it was somebody different than a D or an R. A lot of my distrust of wealthy people is inherited from my father’s ramblings, and while nothing in my life’s experiences has contraindicated these paranoias, I do actively work to not let it paralyze me like it did my dad. Perot is still alive, still a billionaire, but has mostly not used that money to push the Reform Party as a legitimate third choice, probably because you don’t become a billionaire by wasting money on bad investments. The Koch brothers have shown it’s far easier to purchase established brands and make internal changes than it is to create an entirely new political brand. People are wary of change (unless “change” is the new slogan of a traditional brand).

#2: John Anderson (independent candidate; 6.61% of vote in 1980) – Anderson had been a long-time Republican congressman from Illinois when he ran for their nomination in the 1980 election, which of course the partial memory of history tells us Reagan won, and cowboyed his way into the hearts of all Republicans everywhere as one of the greatest heroes the world ever saw, culminating in him spin-kicking the Berlin Wall onto Mikael Gorbachev. But John Anderson established himself during that 1980 nomination process as a firebrand alternative to traditional Republicanism, so much so that he was encouraged by supporters to run for President as an independent, since many folks were pretty blah-bored with Jimmy Carter and Reagan. He crossed a significant obstacle by actually getting himself included in a Presidential debate, which Jimmy Carter then refused to take part in because it was too demeaning to be on-stage with an illegitimate third-party contender, and ultimately Reagan became Reagan. Still though, with all the Reagan worship, it’s interesting to see that there was obvious lack of inspiration in him in the beginning of his run as Presidential Persona, which led to one of the largest single-election third-party vote tallies in the past fifty years.

#3: Ralph Nader (Green Party mostly; 0.56% of the popular vote in 2008, 0.38% in 2004, 2.74% in 2000, and 0.71% in 1996) – Nader made a fairly consistent stab at third-party presence, but that didn’t really amount to anything bordering on credible until the ho-hum 2000 election, where voters were like, “Fuck, Al Gore or George Bush, huh?” Nader gained enough of a contrarian-to-the-two-parties following that the Democratic machine had to dust off and bust out the “don’t waste your vote” guilt trip media barrage on potential Nader voters. That 2000 election though saw the controversy of an extremely close vote in swing-state Florida, where Bush won by 537 votes. Nader was blamed for swinging the vote in favor of a dimwitted brushfire attendant, so that we didn’t get the mundane lizardbot many “smart” people felt we should have deserved. I’ve never personally understood the “throwing your vote away by voting for somebody who won’t win” thinking because essentially you could use that exact same logic to not have more than one choice, since somebody’s going to lose. I voted for Nader in that election, and being I’ve heard some super-sketchy “off-the-record” things through the streets about Al Gore, I never would’ve voted for that dude, ever, in a zillion years. I think it’s hard to just straight apply, “Anyone who voted for this person would’ve actually voted for this D or R candidate instead if not given the choice” because a lot of people teeter at the edge of completely jaded but some fucked-up third party shithead gives them a momentary lapse of nihilism where they briefly believe in the meritocracy myth and that we can take incremental steps towards progress, which the two main parties never do. (Well, Obama sort of specialized in exploiting that psychology in 2008, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue.) By the time Nader ran in 2004, he seemed motivated more by ego than principle, and geopolitics instilled a strong fear in most voters that they better tow the two-party line or risk DEATH TO OUR ACCUSTOMED WAY OF LIFE. Pretty much DEATH TO OUR ACCUSTOMED WAY OF LIFE: R vs. D is the only game in town now.

#4: Ed Clark (Libertarian Party; 1.06% of the popular vote in 1980) – Libertarians have generally been the hottest third-party candidates, and the fact two third-party candidates were able to get over 1% of the popular vote in 1980 is further testament to Ronald Reagan not being the inspirational figure in foresight that he became in faded hindsight. Clark had gotten over 5% of the vote in the 1978 California governor race, as a free market sort-of-Republican type, which is what a lot of the Libertarian Party has been exposed as in the past decade – big business types not happy with how much they can get away with. The notion of Libertarianism meaning individual liberties and less government intrusion on civil life has always played a backseat to less government intrusion on business taxes and oversight of sketchy shit. In fact, you know who Ed Clark’s running mate was in 1980? David Koch – one-half of the notorious Koch brothers.

#5: Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party; 0.99% of the popular vote in 2012) – Johnson was Republican governor of New Mexico who felt Republicanism wasn’t quite the right fit, so did the “business-minded white dude Libertarian” switch as well. Most notable part of this is the fifth-largest popular vote percentage-getter still currently alive did not even get a full percent. This shows how deeply entrenched the two-party system is, to where what is basically a clone of the Republican candidate, just with a little more charcoal to his charcoal grey suit, can’t even siphon off a random percent of the vote. Part of that is because Obama vs. Romney was very much positioned as another MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANS BEING CLOTHED & HOLDING ELECTIONS showdown where any vote outside of those two would literally jeopardize the future existence of American humanity. And while that is exaggerated in tone, that’s basically how this shit gets presented to people. It’s also how it will get presented to us again, IN NINETY-ONE SHORT WEEKS!

#6: Harry Browne (Libertarian Party; 0.36% of the popular vote in 2000, 0.5% in 1996) – Browne was a white dude who talked about shit like “the economics of freedom” and worked in marketing and advertising, which is essentially all a political campaign is anyways at this point. Still, it wasn’t enough to make himself relevant, even in the shitty Gore/Bush election of 2000, probably because Nader siphoned off a good bit of the Libertarian Party’s core base of people who go to vote, thinking “man, I hate all these assholes.”

#7: Ron Paul (independent candidate; 0.04% of the vote in 2008, 0.47% in 1988) – Ron Paul built his base brilliantly off an anti-establishment sentiment, even though he never really felt strong enough to make a move off the establishment, never breaking cleanly from the Republican Party. It’s interesting in looking through these old elections at how the Libertarian Party lost relevancy the same time a Tea Party influence started to exist, and how David Koch was a Libertarian VP candidate in 1980. It’s created this false alternative within the party, which has actually shifted the party as a whole further towards that fringe. This fringe element will make its hardest push for legitimacy through Ron’s son Rand (lolol) in this election cycle, as Rand Paul has all the same pseudo-libertine business-friendly notions his pops did, but doesn’t look like a scary old man who might accidentally use the n-word.

#8: Patrick Buchanan (Reform Party; 0.43% of the popular vote in 2000) – Buchanan is an angry white guy who still has a voice on that weekend “white people talk about news shit” show on PBS. I find him sometimes funny on that, but only relative to watching a “white people talk about news shit” show on public broadcasting, which usually lasts for about 43 seconds maximum if I’m more than 5 minutes away from any Joy of Painting with Bob Ross episodes. Buchanan was the post-Perot Reform Party’s attempt to maintain relevancy in the 2000 election, which ultimately led to Buchanan clamoring that he might’ve affected the Florida outcome as much as any other third-party wasted vote. Ultimately, that’s his Presidential election legacy – that he MIGHT HAVE indirectly influenced a sketchy vote, but probably not probably some other guy.

#9: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party; 0.4% of popular vote in 2008) – Hey look! It’s another white dude in a suit and tie with strong economic opinions for you who ran as a Libertarian! At least this one looked stupid one time in the Borat movie though.

#10: Jill Stein (Green Party; 0.36% of popular vote in 2012) – I have voted Green Party when they’re on the ballot because I’m anti-poverty and like “fuck coal mining” in my personal life. But I actually looked into their structure in the state of Virginia, and even for a fringe third party, there’s all these rules and lines you have to follow; and the people I emailed with were fairly condescending and short and annoying. I think that comes with the territory with politics – you are always going to be dealing with somebody who is so confident in what they think that they want to push that onto everyone else. I always have a problem with that, being far too esoteric for that type of shit. Ultimately, that’s what politics is though, which means we’ll always have limited choices, and true loungers will never represent the people to any extent because true loungers got better sense than to give a fuck about running for political office. This may not be entirely true on the local level, which I say because I probably have a friend who might read this who has ran at the local level and I’m trying not to hurt their feelings, but yeah it’s true on the local level too actually.

#11: Michael Badnarik (Libertarian Party; 0.32% of popular vote in 2004) – This guy is a horrible AM radio talk show personality, and you can never convince me that AM radio talk show personalities are worthwhile human beings. “News” or “sports” or whatever, none of them are worthwhile human beings. The only two exceptions I’d make is if there is a local country AM radio station with a call-in show where people sell old refrigerators and livestock and shit like that, and you consider the host of such a show an “AM radio talk show personality” then I’d let that pass. Also if there is a Spanish-music station that has a call-in show that I only understand every seventh word, I’d have to say I don’t understand Spanish fast enough to condemn that person either, although I usually don’t pick up on too many references to “pinche” or “gringo” or “chivos” so my leniency is gonna pretty thin.

#12: Lenora Fulani (New Alliance Party; 0.07% of popular vote in 1992, 0.24% in 1988) – This is the first candidate I would say I actively like. Ms. Fulani was the first African-American to get ballot access in all 50 states, as well as the first woman to do so. The New Alliance Party – which no longer exists – was born from the Patriot Party, which itself was born from the original Rainbow Coalition put together by Fred Hampton in Chicago in the 1960s. I was reading about hillbilly white anti-government types recently who actually used to lean pretty hard left before becoming co-opted by fear, and there was this video I found of fellow Black Panther Bobby Lee speaking with, building with, and cultivating a coalition with southern twanged out folks in Chicago. Poor folks are trained to hate other poor folks, or at least be afraid of each other, which allows hate to ferment. And then whatever huge percentage of people who are fooled by demographical trick-knowledge into thinking they’re middle class become afraid or want to help only one part of that poor people pointed against each other equation, while simultaneously berating the other part of the poor people pointed against each other equation for being too goddamned ignorant. So many pawns, so few squares.

#13: Andre Marrou (Libertarian Party; 0.28% of the popular vote in 1992 election) – Another white dude, but at least Marrou is gained notoriety for being one of the few Libertarians actually elected to national office, as Congressman from Alaska for the 1985-1987 session. As it being an Alaskan battle, I think it important to point out he succeeded a dude known as Doc Fritz to get the office, only to be beaten by a former cop called Claude “Swack” Swackhammer. After losing, Marrou moved to Las Vegas, perhaps the ultimate Libertarian paradise on this here earth.

#14: David Bergland (Libertarian Party; 0.25% of popular vote in 1984) – If you are into numerology and how our shared reality is woven through mathematical “facts” to reinforce our subjugated state, then you’ll no doubt see the ironic significance of the “Libertarian” candidate for President receiving a perfect quarter of a percent of the vote in that ominous year of “1984” which conjures up Orwell’s worst nightmares as actual living reality. Hahaha, I don’t actually know what that last sentence means, just talking nonsense since this is the internet. But with 1984 in mind we do actually have a pretty weirdly cryptic and creepy NSA system utilizing this program called internet to keep track of a lot of shit. It depends on them being able to analyze raw Big Data with the right software, and really the only limitation is time. Thus by writing as much nonsense gibberish into the internet as you can, which says things, or maybe doesn’t say things, or maybe you google translate old Martha Stewart recipes into a different language, then into another, then back to English and post that on your website to seem like maybe it’s coded talk, or maybe important, or anything, the program has to waste time going through it, even though it’s just a chill peanut butter pie recipe that went through Turkish then Mandarin then back to English. Such acts are far more important than voting, even voting third-party. Voting is not an action any more – it’s a passive acceptance of inaction. So promise me you’ll try to shut the fuck up about how important voting is in 91 weeks when we have THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER! Yet again.

S14: 92 Wks Until INDECISION 2016 - Top 14 Fake Presidential Candidates Named After Writers

I woke up this morning getting ready for work with the news on because that "YOUR WORLD IN HOWEVER MANY SECONDS" thing on CBS makes my attention-deficit brain feel some type of way, and then they had Rand Paul on there already talking controversial talk things in anticipation of President 2016, and it really freaked me out that there's literally a dude named after Ayn Rand running for actual President of America, like that's not something in a sci-fi movie from 1985 starring Roddy Piper and Yaphet Kotto but a real thing in real life. But I also realized it's exactly 92 weeks until Election Day, so I figured I'd better start giving you weekly updates headed into that MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF ALL-TIME (which it will be marketed as, I guarantee it - like it will be science and polar bears and middle class homelessness against predator drones and terrorism and animated flag gifs). So this week (hahaha, like I'm even gonna remember to do this shit again) I'd figured I'd pretend there were 14 guys named after writers who were running as well, that would be preferable to Rand Paul.

#1: Burroughs Vachon - Named after William S. Burroughs, some sort of cajun/creole fucker from Louisiana, who I guess is sort of libertarian but refuses to identify by that shit. For example, he always makes a point of saying he's for "decriminalization of drugs" rather than legalization because "whenever lawyers get involved, it's gonna suck, and then probably involve business, and any time you make a business of something, it's gonna be controlled by assholes."

#2: Fanon Washington - Named after Frantz Fanon, last name from slave ancestors taking last name of great nephew of first President of the United States. Fanon thought about changing away the last name but decided to wear it as a means of embarrassing his ancestors' "owners". Eventually has to drop out because of physical incident that put Al Sharpton in E.R.

#3: Kerouac Bernard - Named after obviously Kerouac, but just some chump ass college dude who changed his name to it, so it's not like he actually had to ferment with the madness of the actual name his entire life, meaning it's an assumed identity as opposed to one that has been burnished into your very essence, every molecule feeling the judgment and bias of everyone who learns your fucked up name. Trust me, I know - I've been called "Raven" since birth.

#4: Du Fu "Duffy" MacMillian - Named after T'ang era Chinese poet, but raised in hills of Kentucky so sort of ended up being Duffy because you know, motherfuckers can't say weird shit like that out in the sticks. Your name could be some slurred variation on a epithet, but not something foreign-sounding. Du Fu is an "individual constitutionalist" meaning he supports the personal constitution of each individual, but also doesn't really know what that means. He owns all the Poor Man's James Bond books though.

#5: Atwood Paul - Rand Paul's fourth cousin, paternal grandmother's side, but with same last name somehow, named after Margaret Atwood, and endorsed by old growth forests, who support Atwood's efforts by uprooting their largest two kin in every voting district in America, who stand outside the polls on each side, looking all intimidating as fuck, cock diesel tree muscles like they're gonna choke all humans to death, but then all they do is put kids up in their limbs and swing them and people are like "Oh man, Atwood Paul's campaigners are great" and they all want to vote for Atwood Paul, but then conventional candidates get them outlawed and have police cut them with chainsaws but since they are come-to-life trees and not regular trees they bleed human blood and it's pretty horrible, nobody ever forgets it for thousands of years.

#6: Moore Hammond - Young lady named after Alan Moore (the dude that wrote the word part of V for Vendetta), who you would think would be all revolutionary and weak Guy Fawkes masks and Anonymous would support her and all that, but actually she's just a chubby (no diss - she's still beautiful) comic book nerd running under the Green Party banner because I don't know, the Greens are okay I guess.

#7: Borges Luis Acosta - Named after Jorge Luis Borges, just the last name part because the middle name is his uncle's name too, and his last name was his father's and his father's father as well, because that's the type of world we live in. Borges Acosta at first is pretending to be a respectable Republican Latino because that's what he thought he was supposed to be, but then he got snowed in at an airport with Ted Cruz one long Wednesday layover, and decided that America destroys natural Chicano beauty, so he joined up with the Brown Berets organization in an attempt to make Aztlan a reality again, through the immigrant vote, which is not actually an immigrant vote at all. This of course is too confusing for most Americans, so they just assume he's crazy, and nobody votes for him. Also none of that really excites me as I write it, mostly because that last name Acosta suggests Oscar Zeta Acosta, who is a personal hero, and I'd rather do acid and shoot guns than care about politics or make up stories about fake Presidential candidates. My birthday is next week - somebody mail me mushrooms.

#8: Miller Stone - Named for Henry Miller, because his parents were freaks if you know what I mean. Raised in conservative Utah in most unconservative ways, has two pet orangutans that he calls Hugh and Mann and he takes them everywhere so that when he gets bored with whatever public event he has, he can give them a sign they understood (because they used to go camping a lot in Bryce Canyon together, like a lot - all the fucking time when he was in college because college kids were so full of shit) and the orangutans would go into the crowd wreaking havoc, and he'd yell, "HUGH! MANN! HUGH! MANN! HUGH! MANN!" and they'd fuck a bunch of shit up then come back and Miller Stone would go, "Sorry folks," and exit stage left.

#9: Dostoyevsky "D.D." Murdoch - Named by his father after the famous Russian author, because his father was a horrible super-literate drunkard, like used to exist all over but don't any more because of Ed Sullivan and rock-n-roll and cheap factory-produced piss beer and all that crap that's made America not America, you know? The young Dostoyevsky had to work at an auto parts factory to help make money to care for his drunkard father (who was suffering from kidney problems and eventually liver cirrhosis as well in the end, not to mention undiagnosed PTSD from the war before they knew PTSD was some real shit you couldn't just be like "suck it up, man"), and studied at the local library in Cleveland before going to community college and then regular privileged kid college and then getting a graduate degree is some sort of sociology shit. As a kid everybody called him D.D. because the other name was too hard for kids, and D.D. stuck because it made him seem not like a pompous ass intellectual but a chill dude, so whenever he was on panels with Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek, he'd stand out as a chill dude. Plus Vice magazine let him have a column for a while during their "let's pretend to be legit but not legit" phase WHICH THEY'RE CURRENTLY STILL IN.

#10: McCarthy Jenkins - Named after Cormac McCarthy, because his dad was the basis for a minor character in Suttree. In fact, there's about a hundred legends of the rural south that Cormac McCarthy based all his minor characters in that book on. There was nothing special at all about McCarthy Jenkins, other than he thought he'd run for President, claiming he was all about "manifesting jobs" through "cloud-based manufacturing" except it had nothing to do with digital products. He literally wanted to trick the Chinese into building factories on clouds then have use the HAARP beams to make windstorms that blew them over U.S. waters in the Pacific Ocean.

#11: Burroughs Mankin - Also named after William S. Burroughs, but from northern California. He didn't really want to be President; he was just a performance artist who wanted an excuse to "go viral" except he never did, just making kinda funny but awkward videos from his apartment with about 134 views each.

#12: Thompson Duke - Named after Hunter S. Thompson, and Duke wasn't even his family's last name but his dad was such a huge mark for HST that when the young Duke was born in the hospital to his father and mother in the mid-1970s, his dad said, "His name is Thompson Duke" like in Raoul Duke, but the doctors were like, "Lol, sir you and your wife's last name is Entwistle, not Duke", but his dad was adamant (and on angel dust - and also the docs didn't actually say "lol" because that didn't exist back then yet) and held a kukri machete to the throat of the registrar/notary public/nurse lady or whatever the fuck that does the birth certificates until she did that name on the birth certificate. Entwistle was remembered as screaming, "CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT KIND OF DOUCHE MY SON WOULD BE IF HIS NAME WAS THOMPSON ENTWISTLE? C'MON BRO, HIS NAME IS GONNA BE DUKE, IT'S GONNA BE FUCKIN' DUKE, BRO." Thompson Duke's dad never died, in fact he lives on a small compound in Belize to this day, because it's like Central American brown people, but they speak English still.

#13: Percy MacArthur - Named for Walker Percy, famed Southern writer that I don't know at all, but some dude on Twitter suggested him. Unfortunately for Percy MacArthur, not too many other people know Walker Percy either, so they just thought "Percy MacArthur" sounded like some sort of  Montanan industrial tycoon from the late 1800s. It didn't help MacArthur that he wore a monocle, although it was at least made of that lens material that goes slight tint shade in the sunlight, but then that was even weirder, a motherfucker wearing like monocle sunglasses, talking about being President.

#14: Shakespeare Greenheart - Named after Shakespeare, and this is actually a name I made up for a collection of sonnets that I mailed to some hoity-toity poetry publisher, but they haven't officially rejected yet, so I haven't officially self-published it instead yet, so I'm pretending it's a fake Presidential candidate in order to plant the notion of  "Shakespeare Greenheart" into your head. This is how you do next level digital era marketing - you create obscure characters that don't actually exist, then bury them at the bottom of lists that nobody reads. But when the book actually comes out, robot algorithms see the phrase cross-referenced in different places, and then I'm gonna sell a million books of poetry in 21st Century, and get a gold sheath for my dick, and move to Belize and raise fighting goats and have to pet orangutans just like Miller Stone.