They still want the job?

If I haven’t made my sentiments clear before this, let me set the record straight.

My sentiments are with Barack Obama, I want him to be our next president.

Barack has my sentiments, but both candidates have my sympathies.

I’m sure it sounded like a nice gig, back in 2007, when this interminable campaign started.  Just end the war, stop wasting our treasure on feuding Arabs, run the tired Bushites out of town, put in a decent health plan and a reasonable energy policy, and know that whatever you do, you’re gonna look golden.  Mike Huckabee could have won this thing and come out looking like Abe Lincoln, just by contrast.  This was an act you wanted to follow.

That was then, this is now.

Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t like to curse on a family site like hypocrisy, but I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t speak the truth in plain English.  We are in the middle of a shit storm of biblical proportions.

Yes, my fellow Americans, the tide is high and rising.  This week it drowned Wall Street.  It’s not Wall Street anymore; it’s Wall Sewer.  The storm surge swamped our financial markets, turning great corporations into dreck and dollars into dookie.  Trillions of assets were wiped out in a moment, companies became worthless, commercial paper became toilet paper.  The feces hit the fan and the government had to buy what spewed out.

That’s right, we now own that mess.  You and I, the mortgage-ravaged, petroleum-beggared, stagflation-bankrupted American people are now the proud possessors of the landfill once known as “The Financial Markets.”

Yet the two guys who wanted to be CEO of this once-great nation still want the job.  It boggles the mind and warms the heart.

Things are no better abroad.  The war in Iraq winds down, slowly, ever so slowly, as the war in Afghanistan cranks up faster.  They are bombing our embassies.  North Korea is looking more wobbly than ever.  The Russians are eating our lunch in Eurasia and making trouble in South America.  New Cubas are popping up like mosquitoes after a hurricane.

And speaking of hurricanes, Ike.  And the season isn’t over yet, anymore than the depression is over yet.

But John McCain and Barack Obama still want the job.

I love my country.  I consider myself a patriot, I never forget that I won the genetic lottery when Grandpa Paul got on a boat and landed in Ellis Island.  But if I was offered the job of president right now I believe I’d have to decline the honor.  I don’t have the fortitude; I know we’re circling the bowl and the pipes are backing up.  I’m just not plumber enough to handle it.

But Obama and McCain both want to dive in.  Still.  Capitalism has cancer, Washington is constipated, Main Street is nauseous, the World has the trots, the prognosis for the next four years dim to disgusting.

How fortunate, then, that we have men like John McCain and Barack Obama!  Because despite it all, despite the thankless task of taking over from the now-proven most inept administration since Hoover’s, and in the very eye of the typhoon of crap now swirling above our heads, they both want to be our next president.

They still want the job.  I hope.

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