Who Are These People?

It's not surprising that Nixon is starting to look good to you after all these years because, by today's standards, he would be considered a liberal. I remember the first televised presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy. Kennedy looked impressively healthy and Nixon looked like death warmed over. At the time, people thought that it was because Nixon wore makeup and Kennedy didn't, but I read later that wasn't the case. Everybody wears makeup on television, but Nixon didn't know that and came unprepared, while Kennedy brought his own makeup people with him. Nixon's people tried to coble something up at the last minute, but they didn't know what they were doing, and that's why Nixon looked so bad.

I haven't been watching the current debates and, from what I've heard, I haven't missed much. Instead of an honestly discussing principles and issues, all they do is take turns insulting each other. I believe that's what's known as a "pissing contest". Most of what you said about the debates is lost on me because I don't know any of the candidates by the pet names you have given them. Actually, I don't even know most of them by their real names. I looked up Ted Cruz on Wiki yesterday and couldn't find him at first because I got him mixed up with Tom Cruise the movie actor. My hypothetical wife knows most of the actors and can even recognize them when they are playing a different part years later. I have trouble recognizing them in different scenes in the same movie. If a guy or girl comes out wearing different clothes than they did in the last scene, I have to ask my hypothetical wife if it's the same person.

I suppose I'm going to have to start paying attention because I have to vote for one of those turkeys next month, and it sounds like my man Rand is out of the running. I could almost vote for Cruz except that he has citizenship issues. He was born in Canada, which would seem to disqualify him right then and there, but I understand it's more complicated than that. I think his mother was an American citizen who moved to Canada, or at least was living there when Ted was born. That would normally make him an American citizen, but I understand that his mother had him naturalized as a Canadian, and then he later switched back to being an American. I don't know if that fulfills the constitutional requirement that he be a "natural born citizen", and his opposition is bound to make an issue of it, if they haven't already. It's like these people really need something else to argue about!

I also looked up Marco Rubio, and he isn't half bad except for his position on immigration. He wants to give amnesty to the illegals, but he accepts that the American people just aren't ready for that yet, so he proposes a three or four step program that will give them amnesty a decade or two from now, by which time he hopes nobody will care about it anymore.

As usual, whoever I vote for, I will consider it a vote against somebody else, Trump in the primaries and Hillary in the general election. I am tempted to vote for the one considered to have the best chance of beating Trump, but how do I know that isn't what they want me to do? Maybe the only reason Trump is there is to make somebody else look good by comparison. That would be Hillary in the general election, but I don't know who that might be in the primary. What I've got to do is figure out who they want me to vote for, and then vote for somebody else. That would be easy if there were only two candidates instead of a dozen or so, but I'll have to do the best I can under the circumstances. It's my civic duty.