America is enamored with our celebrities. We are the most powerful and wealthiest country, and we, as a whole, have a lot of disposable income and free time to see movies and follow the actions of celebrities on social media. That is fine, it’s a vacuous but harmless hobby. What, in my opinion, isn’t so fine is the way we have conflated celebrity and politics.

Ronald Reagan was a fine actor. I remember watching him when I was a little boy, on Death Valley Days. It was a western, and Reagan played a cowboy who always seemed to save the day in half an hour (minus commercial breaks). On the strength of that show and other stage appearances, he was elected governor of California. He eventually won the office of President of the United States. From my point of view, he was a terrible president who did the nation a great deal of harm. I won’t go into that here, but, suffice it to say, being an actor wasn’t adequate preparation for the presidency. And we had  Bill Clinton, who appeared on the Arsenio Hall Show, playing a saxophone, in 1992 while running for his first term as president. He was well-received, and it helped him win.

Now it has become de rigueur for all serious presidential aspirants to include several appearances on various nighttime comedy and variety shows. President Obama did it. Hillary Clinton did it. Even “Pump and Dump” Trump did it. It never hurt their standings in the polls. I get it. It humanizes the candidate and shows his or her pleasant, sociable side.

Just because I get it and it helps the candidate doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with it. Government has nothing to do with celebrity. Richard Nixon was a fairly dour candidate who wouldn’t have made much of a celebrity, but, aside from Watergate, he was a pretty good president. A big aside, I know. It’s like the Mrs. Lincoln question. You know it. But Nixon made the great, unprecedented China outreach. Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency. In other words, in today’s political climate Nixon would have been a Democrat. “Silent Cal” Coolidge was not celebrity material. Neither was Gerald Ford. But they were statesmen, and they were very competent at their jobs.

Now, Kanye West has made noises about trying to run for president in 2020. So have several other celebrities, notably Oprah Winfrey. I won’t say what I think of Kanye, but OPRAH! would be quite a candidate. She is highly accomplished, extremely smart (a true V.S.G.), and her heart is in the right place. She has made some forays into junk science, however, which call into question her judgement. And she has no governmental experience.

I have come to believe that experience in government, preferably many years of it, is necessary to become a successful United States President. Government is like nothing in private industry. And to be successful in it, you need to know how it works. And there is a lot to learn. And a lot of people to know. And a lot of knowing the right people to know and to have in your administration.

We do not need another president who has to start from the bottom in learning how to govern. That sounds self-evident, but apparently it isn’t, or we wouldn’t have Pump ‘n Dump Trump as our president. Granted, it would be difficult to find a person less suited for the presidency. Arguably, you could pick a name out of a phone book and find a better president than Pump. But even so, I think that experience is so crucially important to the highest office, that it would be like a college freshman taking a job as a professor. Yeah, maybe he could fake it for awhile and eventually learn how to do it, but we really don’t need to take that chance. There are enough qualified candidates out there of all political persuasions that we don’t have to elect another one that will lower us even further than we already are on the scale of stable democracies.

I have been writing blogs for the T&G, both in the current WordPress and in two other formats previous, for several years now. I have made politics my main topic, because that is something I know a bit about that has a lot of interest for people, regardless of your opinions. I have been thinking lately about what a farce politics are, at least in America.

Anybody who runs for a public office in America has several traits in common. A healthy ego, a love of speaking, and an ability to spin and deflect. There are some who seem to believe that they are God’s gift to the public. There are some who are dishonest and corrupt.

The congressional Republican Party has degenerated into a band of opportunistic, mendacious predators, targeting those whom they are sworn to serve as their prey. They are mostly men, but some of them are women. Most of them are relatively elderly, especially in the Senate. That doesn’t make them good or bad, nor does the fact that most of them are Caucasian, and a great many of them are very wealthy. That is okay. What is not okay is when these people who are supposed to be serving us, the public at large, are working instead for the wealthy, the large corporations, and the billionaires who fund their campaigns.

What has happened since the appointment by the Electoral College has been that the Republican party and its nativist, racist, reverse-Robin Hood supporters and elected officials have felt safe enough to come out in the open.

The new tax law  gives a helping hand to those who don’t need it.   It steals from the poor, sick, and elderly and gives to the wealthy investor classes and large corporations. Oh by the way, it gives Trump’s family a gift of over a billion dollars. Not to mention that we haven’t seen his tax returns. Not to mention, too, that “crooked” Hillary Clinton released eight years of tax returns to Politico magazine. Get this: Hillary Clinton was SO CROOKED that she was the only major candidate in the 2016 presidential race to release her tax returns. Terrible. Really, the way I feel about it is that many of those who demonize Hillary Clinton don’t even deserve to lick the soles of her shoes. She has given so much and has gotten such negativity from the press and the public at large. And yeah, she made money on her speeches. She deserves every penny of it.

What has happened is that American culture has gotten so dumbed-down that most people in the country couldn’t pass a sixth-grade civics test. The left flocked to a socialist grifter, and the right flocked to a fascist wannabe grifter. The only candidate qualified for the job didn’t get it. Now, we have a nuclear nightmare as a possibility as a result of our American political wisdom. We have a nativist isolationist racist misogynist serial sex assaulter as our president. This is largely because the Republican party depends on an uninformed electorate to vote in its candidates, who in turn vote against the interests of their voters. How high a priority is education to the Republicans? Why don’t we look it up. We need to make civics lessons mandatory in our schools. All these mandatory tests that the politicians are making our young people take to graduate high school need to include a civics test. If you don’t pass, you don’t graduate.

There’s an old saying that rings so true to me: Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me. If our ignorant voters have their way, we might keep getting screwed until there’s nothing left.