It Hurts to Say Goodbye...Because I'm Smiling so Big

I watched the savant of sanctimony Pat Robertson walk out of the 1988 GOP primary with nine percent of the vote, having captured the party delegations of exactly four states. In 2008 I watched the sultan of smug, Mike Huckabee, go to the elimination that math promised him even though he "majored in miracles," securing about a sixth of the delegates that eventual nominee John McCain would win.

But I can't ever remember looking forward to watching a candidate suspend a campaign as much as I am to Senator Elizabeth Warren's all-but-inevitable annoucement. Even a brief list of her gaffes, fibs and political nonsense would stretch my word count well into four digits. Lying about Native American heritage, lying about her kids attending public school, lying about being fired for being pregnant, lying about...well, you get the picture. The reactor-level smarm of asking the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court to read aloud a question about whether or not his reputation would recover following the impeachment trial, rather than having the guts to say something like that in her own voice and words. The Klaatu-like inability to connect with or react to ordinary human beings in any way that marked a feeling of connection with them. The vacuous speciousness of her "I have a plan for that" mantra describing an assortment of shallow talking points that might work in a science contest diorama of Earth but not in the one everybody really lives on.

I am under no illusions about the ballot choices facing Americans in November. The incumbent, a man who can't get out of his own way for more than 18 hours and whose narcissism and childish ego simply will not allow the national conversation to have anything other than his own exalted self as the center. A man who insists on slapping a thick coat of buffoonery over a few legitimate accomplishments and who thus demands again and again that you remember he is of unfit character to hold the office wherin he sits.

As for whatever rough Voltron slouches out of Milwaukee in July, created Toei-like from the mess hammered together from a pretend-Democrat Socialist, a couple of bored billionaires, the two-term mayor of America's 306th largest city and twenty-plus others not good enough to beat them? No thanks. The only political party of which I've ever been a member is almost dead solid certain to supply a candidate for whom I could never vote. Given the sea in which she swims, would a President Warren really be that much worse than a President Booker, Gillibrand, Harris, Inslee, DeBlasio, Swalwell or Williamson would have been had the stars aligned for them and shot deadly meteors at the entire roster of their opponents? Probably not.

But she is uniquely oleaginous in enough ways, as hinted above, that it will be a pleasure to not see her name when the votin' comes 'round. Yes, as stated before I am merely waiting for the Libertarian Party to put a name on top of the ballot I intend to mark. And certainly, the ability to vote directly against her would have been satisfying. But even more satisfying is learning that the members of the senator's own party will not even present me with that choice. Waving goodbye to a relentlessly scheming simulacra made of relentless ambition and little else is a lot of fun. But, lazy as I am, it will be even more fun for my former fellow Democrats to do it for me.