Good to see Alan Grayson

Join the Driftglass Book Club.


From one of the fundraising emails Representative Grayson sends me five times a week:

... 

I looked at those Iowa polling numbers again and again, and I asked myself what possible rational explanation there could be for them. And then I realized that there is no possible rational explanation. Only an irrational one.

And it’s not the candidates. It’s their voters.

Let’s see. Severe highs and lows. Violent mood swings. One day, a person thinks that someone is the messiah, and a week later, the devil. And did you see the audience during the Iowa Republican debates? Violent temper tantrums. Inexplicable angry outbursts.

Hmmmmm. What does that sound like?

It sounds like manic depression to me.

All of those manic depressives, about a third of the vote, were forced to choose among Romney, Santorum, Paul, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Huntsman.
...
So now I understand it. Romney won the paranoid vote, everyone who thinks that the brown people are trying to steal all their stuff. Why? Because no one is more white than Mitt Romney. As I said earlier today, it’s as though Romney is on a strict diet of sour cream and cottage cheese, small curds only.

Perry and Bachmann split the schizophrenic vote, all the people who hear a voice in their head, and think that it’s God. Because Perry and Bachmann can listen to the radio whenever they want to, even when it’s turned off.

Ron Paul got the obsessive-compulsive vote, the folks who think that America is like some kind of mechanical wind-up toy, and the Articles of the Constitution are the gears.

And Santorum ended up with the manic-depressive vote. Maybe because they like the way that Santorum cries in public. Boehner was their second choice.

By the way, I’m not the first person to notice this about the other side. Noted Nixon-hater Philip K. Dick actually wrote a novel about this in 1964, called “Clans of the Alphane Moon.” Except that Dick placed that story in outer space, not Iowa. Minor difference.

Nicely done,  Representative  Grayson.

Next week: "The Day the Icicle Works Closed" versus the "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" -- when is a dystopia not a dystopia?

And I'll drop you some lagniappe as soon the uptick in the American employment statistics upticks to include me :-)