Bathroom Monologue: Losing Politics

If we say he’s leading in the polls, then voters will have less incentive to go vote.

If we say he’s behind in the polls, his supporters will see him as weak.

If we appeal to his supporters, we’ll be seen as pandering to his base.

If we court undecideds, his base will feel abandoned or taken for granted.

If we’re considerate to his opponent, we essentially forfeit the race.

If we attack his opponent, we’ll be seen as cruel and dodging issues.

If we spend time addressing an issue, we’ll be seen as avoiding another issue.

If we discuss every possible issue, we’ll get nothing done and overwhelm the audience.

If we discuss his character instead of the issues, we’ll be seen as annoying and shallow.

No matter what we say, his opponent will call us liars.

Bathroom Monologue: The Newsroom Day One of Two: The Attack

“When exactly was the United States of America a moral nation? When it interred a million Asians? When it only went to war against the Nazis because it had been bombed? Or perhaps it was in our golden days, when it was slaughtering natives and receiving shipments of blacks to pick cotton. We didn’t go to war for moral reasons. We went to war because we wanted Texas, or didn’t want Spain interfering with our interference in Cuba, and the newspapers were right there toadying. Benjamin Franklin was the first great American op-ed writer and he was such a stooge for the establishment they almost let him write the Constitution.

“This illusion! This illusion you have that the American public was ever informed. There was more than a century when the only reliable way to get a presidential candidate’s platform was if he happened to visit your town. And the Founding Fathers knew people were ignorant and never expected better from them, and so while they enshrined freedom of the press, they also institutionalized the Electoral College for Congress and a Presidency – a private crop of people who would select another private crop of people to decide everything while most of the country tried to survive the flu. Maybe, maybe the second private crop of people decided things for moral reasons, or maybe they fed into a Military Industrial Complex that Lyndon Johnson warned the entire country of live on television and still no one did anything meaningful about.

“So tell me when America knew what it was doing. Was it when we were scalping the natives for government credit? Was it when we were enslaving anyone even descended from an African? Was it when we dropped an atomic bomb on private citizens? When did we qualify as the greatest country in the world, who is the greatest country in the world now, and why on earth would we want to be that thing again?”