BY MAX BURBANK | Hillary Clinton made history Tuesday night, clinching the Democratic presidential nomination and becoming the first woman in United States history to lead the ticket of a major political party. The primary season is over — but the shouting will continue straight through November, and there will be a lot of it.
In the long slog leading up to this victory, it was easy to imagine Clinton and Sanders as preschoolers with scary, oversized old people heads, having a playground slap fight:
“It’s mine, mine, MINE! I’m the ‘sumptive nominee of Democrat Day Care. Bernie, the Associated Press said so! You have to lie down and be dead!”
“You shut your mouth, Hillary! Super Delegates are strictly for cheaters and they’re all gonna change their minds and vote for me anyways!”
“If Super Delegates are for cheaters and you change their minds, then YOU’RE the cheater, CHEATER!”
“Only ’cause you were cheating with them already! You MADE ME DO IT, so it’s YOUR FAULT!”
“Nuh-uh, Bernie, and when I’m President I’m going to make you sit at lunch with Debbie Wasserman Schultz!”
“Joke’s on you, Hillary! When Goldman Sachs was handing out lunch money I was busy attaching an amendment to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 requiring banks to use stricter H-1B hiring standards to ensure bailout funds weren’t used to displace American workers!”
“Oh my God, shut UP, Bernie Sanders! I’m the NOMINEE!”
“Not ’till the CONVENTION, Hillary Clinton, and if you do win, which you won’t, I might just take my ball and give it to Jill Stein! She’s NICE!”
Design by Michael Shirey
It would have been cute and funny, if this slap fight wasn’t taking place on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Plus, these kids have homework, a group project that’s due very soon. Surprisingly, the assignment isn’t “Win a playground slap fight,” it’s “Defuse a hydrogen bomb.” All the other kids on the playground have the same homework, but instead of working on it, they’re in a big ring yelling “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!” They’re all red-faced and sweaty and after the fight is over it’s going to be very hard to go home and focus on their homework before it blows up and annihilates everyone and everything they’ve ever loved. And okay, yes, this analogy is getting a little thin. But only a little. It’s still a bit more chunky than anyone ought to be comfortable with.
Sanders is meeting with President Obama on Thursday, but as of press time had not conceded. Democratic supporters on both sides have understandably bruised feelings, and by understandable I mean petty and stupid. If the general election were between Clinton and Sanders, there’d be important differences of policy, worldview, and character to weigh.
It isn’t.
In order to properly assess just what’s at stake, let’s run a little thought experiment. Say you took a fat, scruffy, rabid orange monkey, and stuffed it down the turret of an M1A2 Abrams tank. Now the Abrams is a very sophisticated, extremely dangerous mobile weapons platform, and monkeys do not know anything at all about how to operate them. Don’t let that make you feel safe, because that monkey is going to be in the driver’s seat for a minimum of four years. It’s going to get very frustrated and angry and throw all kinds of monkey tantrums all kinds of times. Best case scenario, it gives itself a heart attack or stroke the first week it’s in there. Despite its obviously self-authored Doctor’s note, it’s not a young monkey. It’s overweight, out of shape, it suffers from a smorgasbord of untreated mental health issues, and I think I may have mentioned, it has rabies. Also, some people are saying maybe syphilis. I don’t bring that up because I don’t really know enough about it to discuss it. I can’t agree or disagree with people saying the monkey has syphilis. A lot of people are talking about it, believe me.
Barring a speedy demise, we have what I like to call the Paul Ryan scenario. See, Ryan is pretty sure the poor little guy will never figure out even the first thing about how a tank works. It’s all alone in there and even if it had someone to teach it basic tank operations, he wouldn’t be able to learn because he only speaks monkey.
As far as that monkey is concerned, anything anybody might have to say to him about tanks is just meaningless, irritating noise. Ryan figures Congress can drive the tank by remote control. In about eight years, all you have to do is clean a gargantuan amount of monkey excrement off every surface and dig it out of every nook and cranny a monkey with abnormally tiny, stubby fingers could jam its poop into, which is pretty much all of them. It’s going to be unpleasant, time-consuming, and very expensive — but you might not have to throw the entire tank away. A lot of it could be salvageable.
Here’s something I know about this monkey, though, and if Paul Ryan doesn’t know it, there’s some serious denial going on. It may be entirely ignorant on the subject of tank operations, but it’s a savant when it comes to destroying remote controls. No form of control has ever been successfully been placed on this monkey. Its father sent it to military school, and somehow it managed to come out worse.
They say given enough time, a monkey could type the complete works of Shakespeare. Well, the monkey in my thought experiment is not inclined towards literature. He’ll be spending his time slapping buttons and pulling levers until he figures out which ones will punish anyone who questioned it’s monkeyhood. Explosions will almost certainly be prioritized over aim.
So suck it up, Democrats. Maybe you think the presumptive nominee is a neocon corporate shill. Maybe you think the Bernie Bros don’t deserve a single concession after all their abysmal sexist crap. Maybe you’re both right, but the slap fight has to be over now, because as a nation we are seriously considering GIVING A MONKEY AN ABRAMS TANK!
See, the monkey is Donald Trump, right, and the tanks is the presidency, and I know in the first paragraph Trump and the Presidency were a hydrogen bomb, but…is anybody listening? Democrat, Republican, yet-to-be-named magical third party alternative, if you ever get a nominee you are totally, 100% happy with, all that means is you don’t know enough about the nominee. The kind of person it takes to become a major party nominee or president is not someone you should be entirely comfortable with. But we owe it to ourselves to make sure it is a person.
Because a monkey with a tank is a very dangerous thing.
