I’m In The Running!

“ATTENTION!”

Ladies and gentlemen, and any of you young ’uns old enough to have a vote but not quite sure what to do with it! Your attention, please. I have an announcement to make.”

(Pause for effect; deep breath, square shoulders, head up…)

“I am formally and desperately seeking the Presidency of these here United States and will gladly accept my party’s nomination pertaining thereunto.”

Or your party’s. Anybody having a party? Want me to drop by and campaign?

You think I’m kidding, right? Truth is, I got to looking at the news—despite knowing better—and it seemed like everybody else was doing it, so why not? How about you? Signed up for this POTUS parade yet?

All one has to do is take a look at the gaggle getting all the pub to discover that there are several mules seeking entrance into this Kentucky Derby, as it were. It is certainly not my intent to disparage the competition, but please allow a couple or three observations.

1. Maybe I missed it all those years ago, but I sure thought James Bond killed off Rosa Krebb in “From Russia With Love.”

2. I’ll tell you here and now that if a certain one of them old boys beats me in, The West Wing will be remodeled and renamed The Dunkin’ Donuts.

3. And I’m truly fearful for an entourage member of another, because if he’s elected, some hairdresser’s about to be arrested for treason.

Or ought to be.

But blowing out somebody else’s candle is not going to make mine burn any brighter, so let’s get down to my Presidential platform. I know it’s around here somewhere…

We’re only going to hit on a couple of major issues here, because I already have a pair of trusted advisers in place: Ma and Jake the Hermit.

Why Ma? Because she may not always be right, but she’s never wrong.

Jake? Head of all things Secret; he’s so good at staying hidden that if you can find him, you can have him. No returns, please.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really understand this initial issue, which seems to polarize anybody running for anything. So I called up each and every recollection my cranium would provide, then conducted a controlled experiment—on gun control.

Admittedly, I’ve only been handling guns for half a century, but in that brief time, I never could remember one acting up. Pistols, rifles, shotguns… every single one I ever owned, borrowed or begged was perfectly behaved.

So I went to the safe and laid out some of the recently acquired stuff. (You know how this new generation is…)

A week later, they were still lying in the same place. Not one had even changed position! Neither hilarity, hijinks nor jihad…

Let us proceed to the next step.

Initially, none of these hand tools was loaded, so I thought I’d shuck in a few shells.

Week later, same result: nothing.

And after polling approximately a hundred of my closest redneck relatives and friends—with a plus/minus poll error ratio of 0 percent because ain’t none of them smart enough to lie—I got the exact same results from each one: ain’t none of my guns out of control!

Hmm…

Giving the electoral competition benefit of the doubt, I thought perhaps their issue was not the guns themselves, but that they all had their garters twisted over the four fundamentals of gun safety, which do deal in varying degrees with controlling one’s gun. But that couldn’t be it, because in listening to their harangues it became evident that none could tell a bore from a boar or knew that semi-automatic was not something you had to mash a clutch to operate!

Therefore, please allow me to state my stance on gun control, and simple-mindedly equate it to decades of no longer getting loaded myself: don’t make me drink beer and I won’t make you quit. Don’t try to control my guns, and I won’t force you to buy a bunch and work up a set of rules for them.

For, you see, there’s this set of fundamental principles called the Constitution…

And, at the long-last end of my experimentation and rumination, the answer became painfully obvious: it’s not about the gun. It’s about the CONTROL.

No, and thanks very much.

You may disagree, and welcome to it. If you want to give up your shooters, feel free. For a while at least. And please drop me a line, because me and a bunch of other good ol’ boys would love to sort through them, cash on the barrel head.

After all, guns are like biscuits: never met one I didn’t like!

And let’s see, was there something else that needed mentioning? Oh yeah, this immigration deal…

First off, I ain’t going nowhere. Me and my buds will be right here. Which means that if you vote me in, I ain’t abusing your trust and immigrating nowhere. (Hang on a minute; one of my advisers is attempting to pound something into my noggin.)

Oh, it works the other way, you say? It’s all about folks coming here? Well, then…

I say verse them well in the Constitution and Clint Eastwood. And thoroughly saturate them in the tenets of “work” and all it pertains to. After that, we’ll see what my advisers have to say!