Total NOPE

     Meet The Press is on the TV in the next room and they're talking about the possibility of Mr. Bloomberg running for President.

     There's more No there than I can say -- the poster-boy for smiley-faced overreaching government, the man who sold "stop and frisk" police procedures right out of the "Papers, please?" scene in a WW II movie to New Yorkers, a nanny-of-nannies who puts salt on his saltines while demanding your French fries be served without it and all this is before you get the the real hot-button issues?  Oh. hell no.  Hillary would be preferable and if she wins, I'm gonna be shoppin' for somewhere to run when things get too bad.

     Everyone running for the Democrat nomination wants to turn a large number of gun-owning citizens into some kind of Federal criminal, with the only question being, "felon or malefeasant?"  But only one of them has hands-on experience in the kind of police-state tactics it would take to make that work, and in making them palatable to a population of people who could reasonably be expected to be skeptical.

     Meanwhile, most of GOP's hot prospects are sellin' various flavors of Return-to-Jesusland* and shippin' out the Dangerously Brown (a difficult trick -- y'know how there are so many guns in the U.S. that no power could ever grab 'em all?  Imagine if those guns had volition didn't want to be found...).  I'll grant that there are serious, good reasons -- including humanitarian ones -- for a more secure and better-patrolled border; it's this business of plannin' to comb through the population and root out a "dangerous element" often referred to as "parasitic" that stinks on ice to me -- and it should to you, too.  Do you recall what kinds of societies had any success at that kind of thing?  Do you realize what it takes to make it work? (Ahem, "Papers, please?")  Did you sleep through World History class?

     This is one of the lousiest candidate pools I have ever seen. Mr. Bloomberg is the worst of them -- worse than Mr. Sanders, worse than Mr. Trump.  If he enters the race, I may have to vote in the Democrat primary just so I can vote against him.
_________________________________
* Except this country never was. The American Revolution can be cast as a kind of dialogue between the Enlightenment/Age of Reason ideas that pushed it and the Great Awakenings that bookended it.  From that angle, the Establishment Clause of  First Amendment represents a brilliantly common goal: neither party was desirous of a State church.  Thus the United States was explicitly made a safe place for believers and nonbelievers of every stripe.  This is a delicate balance and has been maintained with varying degrees of elegance and civility though the years.  We should fear any politician who feels a mandate to Do Good -- especially if he or she believes it was granted by Divine authority.