RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Tuesday, February 17

S14: 90 Wks Until Indecision 2016 - Top 14 Odds-On Favorites to Win Presidential Election (90 Weeks Out)

So hey, not too excited about doing this list this week, because politics is stupid, and also for as a man full of arbitrary rules, one of the arbitrary rules I decided upon was to review the odds for who would win the 2016 election every 10 weeks in advance, meaning this week – at the 90 weeks until… moment – we get to review who are the odds-on favorites to be our next American President. And the list is fucking depressing.
Obviously, all homage owed to HST who did the gonzo journalism/drunken politics thing at a prominent level. Unfortunately, most of the “quirky” political pundits are not all that quirky in a true quirk sense, but mostly just pretending to be quirky. That’s sort of the age we live in – we pretend to be clever and everybody goes, “Oh man, how clever.” Or we pretend to be creative, and people pretend along “Wow, what a creative genius!” It’s like old school pro wrestling kayfabe where everybody is in on the gig, pretending in the same silently agreed upon ways, and we all remain mostly unentertained, held in place, and waste our whole fucking lives perpetuating bullshit.
Therein lies my problem with most of these “odds on favorites” because NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM is an inspiring individual in any sense of the notion. It’s mostly like a whole bunch of marketing pitches for like Coke and Pepsi, and the assorted marketing pitches attempt to slowly prove themselves the best marketing pitch for either major soda brand before there is a final pair of opposing commercial campaigns which we all get to choose after, “Which of these two sodas do you find less disgusting?” This is our American political process at the national level at this point.
But nonetheless, this is where I live, the bullshit system I live under, so I might as well write stupid shit about it. Usually I like to think of writing as a cathartic process which helps me feel better, or untangle the tangles of shitty existence as they pertain to choking up my internal psyche. Unfortunately this Presidential project – INDECISION 2016 – won’t make me feel better, most likely. Odds are pretty heavy against that possibility.
Speaking of odds, it is against the law for US bookmakers to have odds for events that are decided by vote. So I had to go international, and decided the best source was a degenerate book from Ireland that I won’t mention by name because those fucking sites pay good money to get mentioned by shitty blogs, and I’m not giving them free publicity. But the one I chose is fairly infamous for having listed odds on Obama getting assassinated at one point, amongst other fucked up possible situations, so if I’m going to be forced to embrace this project, and I’m going to condemn the fake kayfabe clever writer/good candidate bullshit neon hologram that is 21st century America, then I might as well go with the most fucked-up possible bookmaker. Plus, these people had a pretty wide set of choices. So here are the top fourteen candidates, by odds, with 90 weeks to go. I’ll revisit these odds every ten weeks up until the election (should I not abandon this project entirely, which is probably more likely than most of these people even getting on the ballot).

#1: Hillary Clinton – 11 to 10 odds to win President 2016. Clinton has positioned herself for this ever since not getting the nomination in 2008, by first seeming like not a loser at all by taking Secretary of State under Obama, but then also getting out early enough so that she can distance herself from whatever he’s done that might get the sheeple masses bahhing in negativity. But the entire reason she came up second in 2008 fits even more so now – that she’s too much of an insider/regular same ol’ bullshit candidate from the political elite aka the 1% aka the lizard overlords in alliance with the grey aliens. Obama’s wave of euphoria was not just because everybody was like, “Oh shit, a BLACK GUY!” but also (mostly) because his entire marketing campaign was the change thing – change, something different, no more of the same ol’ shit. Of course, it ended up being the same ol’ shit. That’s not going to stop someone trying to successfully campaign for President 2016 from saying that Obama might have been too much change, and maybe we need something more level-headed and traditional, but foreward thinking. I don’t know, you make up the bullshit they’ll say, but ultimately it’s going to be Coke and Pepsi again, and Clinton has worked for decades not to necessarily make herself an inspiring and wonderful figure that will initiate a new realm of wonderful American humanitarianism on earth, but positioning herself as the de facto main power broker within her chosen political party, which will – once she pushes aside other weak ass contenders like Beast Mode stiff arms – put their entire weight and money behind her in the push to have a fucking President honor their investors’ desires. And her being the favorite makes sense to me – mostly because of the list of horrible choices the other flavor has right now – and I was gonna bet a fake $100 every time I did these updates, but I’m not gonna bet on the frontrunner to start this, because early bets are the best time to take a shot, not back the favorite. You save that for your smart bets later in the process.

#2: Jeb Bush – 7 to 2 odds. And having Jeb Bush be early front-runner for Republican is a fucking joke too, because the big argument against all these fuckers in 2008 was, “Fuck man, we’ve had either Bush or Clinton for the past 20 years… we can’t possibly be having a free and open oligarchy can we?” That sentiment was a huge factor in Obama’s hotshot rise. At the time, I wondered if that wasn’t just a scapegoat process to have a fall man in office to take the hatchet for all the fucked up things that were going to happen on the international geopolitical stage and financially. I’d say the right has tried to do exactly that too, but Obama’s been able to deflect that to a certain extent from being regarded as universal truth. Of course I live inside the filtered bubble of America, so who the fuck knows if I’m even being fed true data? Nonetheless, eight years of Obama, and we’re right back to a very possible Clinton/Bush battle, which seems so utterly ridiculous it’s hard to even make jokes about. This is where we are though – fed limited choices, and berated for not being more excited about those limited choices. And if Clinton’s biggest liability is being saddled with whatever mean, horrible things the right can attach to her through Obama, as well as her husband, then fucking Bush’s biggest liability is his last name – which runs through over thirty years of historical liability at this point. And yet, as with all marketing campaigns, both sides will probably just try to twist our perception of their liability as an actual strength that we just don’t understand SO THEY’LL TELL US OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL WE UNDERSTAND IT CORRECTLY.

#3: Marco Rubio – 10 to 1 odds. Probably not a legit contender but will play the Republican role of “minority choice” so that they can pretend to be reaching out to all of America with the open arms of prosperity. Rubio is the shining star of their genetic clone crop of Hispanic-themed business cyborgs. Unfortunately, cyborgs don’t play well in the sticks because they are too robotic and lack that down home folksy humor that like to put depleted-uranium bullets into brown people.

#4: Chris Christie – 12 to 1 odds. Christie has already shown a few times he is a joke, so the longevity of his marketing campaign to be Soda King will depend mostly on that old Three Stooges bit where they ask for volunteers to step forward and everybody else steps backwards. That is to say, Christie will only be as successful as much as his competition obviously fucks up to keep him relevant by default.

#5: Scott Walker – 14 to 1 odds. And this is a top contender for Republicans? Wasn’t he the dude that had folks occupying the capitol building in Wisconsin, ready to set shit on fire? What the fuck man, is this the best we can do? This guy is the fifth-best candidate at this point?
#6: Rand Paul – 16 to 1 odds. Rand will follow his father’s MO of staying in the race longer than anybody else by playing strong to the fringe element. He actually might be too clean-looking for the fringe element even, because the fringe element is dirty, grimy, covered in the trickle down greases of industrial economy but maintained psychically by a steady diet of AM radio. In recent years that AM radio diet has been complemented by cable “news” stations, but with TV you actually get to see the person, and Rand Paul does not look like a grizzled old carpeting & tile small business owner like his dad did. He looks like an asshole who teaches at the local university.

#7: Mitt Romney – 16 to 1 odds. I guess Romney actually already met with the Koch brothers, and deemed himself not a viable potential marketing campaign for Republican soda this time, his marketability having been used up too far beyond a re-branding effort in 2012. But for whatever reason he was still listed on the contenders list at the sketchy betting site I got them from, so I still write a few token words about his rich, white ass.

#8: Elizabeth Warren – 18 to 1 odds. Warren seems to be the early Facebook meme for mainstream alternative folks leader, according to my own personal realm of data input. People are excited about her because she has good anti-1% quotes that can be impact fonted onto an image and shared as some sort of psychologically pleasing fake act of resistance. That shit don’t count for actual votes inside Diebold machines though, and though she’s a much more visually palatable version of Dennis Kucinich, that off-brand, watered down revolt through bureaucracy gets stomped on in the primary process by well-funded traditionals like H.R. Clinton. However, in the Democratic party process, people like Warren serve the important function of pretending the voice of the downtrodden is actually still taken into consideration.

#9: Joe Biden – 33 to 1 odds. Oh man, I think Joe Biden’s gonna be an amazing candidate, because he doesn’t really seem to give a fuck at this point. Al Gore was all business and serious as fuck when he wanted to be President in 2000, and that tends to be the VP way – to act like you’re the most perfect person to step into the role because you’ve basically been an understudy for years now. But Biden is one of the first returning VPs after an 8-year President that is not the natural frontrunner. This is gonna put Biden into full Biden mode, battling for his own relevancy, and if anybody can bust out the down home folksy bullshit, it’s Biden. He actually will probably be the highlight of the primary campaigns, so long as they don’t try to convince him to lay back for H.R. Clinton. (I am probably going to refer to her as “H.R. Clinton” from here on out.)

#10: Paul Ryan – 33 to 1 odds. This guy sucked in 2012, was the Republican hotshot version of rushing somebody through quickly while they seemed hype to the public, which is how the Dems handled Obama in 2008. But that hotshot ate Ryan up, and he looked a chump next to Biden in the VP debates of 2012. He also has the dead eyes of a man with zero soul left, having compromised himself so deeply already that all he can do is smile and pretend and regurgitate his programming.

#11: Ted Cruz – 40 to 1 odds. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a politician in all my 42 years of being a human that looked more like a complete fucking asshole than Ted Cruz. No candidate makes me wish we lived in a more chaotic land of car bombs and public stabbings and prison revolts swallowing executive sedan cavalcades in campaign passing than Ted Cruz. If George W. Bush is Wal-Mart, and Obama is Target, then Ted Cruz is the fucking Dollar Tree, and though I get most all my composition notebooks, transparent tape, tea candles, and glow-in-the-dark wristbands for the children from the Dollar Tree, I’m still not quite ready for my nation’s President’s marketing campaign to be Dollar Tree. Now if we got one of the sassy ass ladies who work at Dollar Tree to be President, that’d I’d get behind. Maybe President should be like jury duty, where we just draw a group of 250 random people to enter the nomination process, and we whittle them down to a winner. The quality of candidate would be much higher.

#12: John Kerry – 40 to 1 odds. This Muppet eagle-looking motherfucker got blitzed out by George W. Bush. How the fuck you gonna lose to George W. Bush in 2004? That was a lay-up election, but Kerry failed (even if there might’ve been outside money Citizens United commercial goaltending involved). No way that guy gets back through the process. I’m not even sure if he’s said he wants to, being too busy trying to save American face around the world all the fucking time. Clinton sure bailed out at a perfect time, didn’t she? She’s the one true player in this field right now, the Triple H to a bunch of jobbers.

#13: Bobby Jindal – 40 to 1 odds. Jindal is prone to verbal mistakes, but he’s also a non-white guy (though he recently made headlines by saying he was white) in the traditional sense of what “white guy” means. He was able to conquer the political landscape of the deep fucking twisted up south in Louisiana, and is probably the one true “minority” candidates the Republican party could push out that doesn’t look like the political equivalent of saying “but some of my friends at work are black.” In fact, I’m throwing my imaginary $100 down this time around on Jindal, at 40 to 1 odds, because of all the fucking losers and odds-and-ends that are not frontrunners at this point, he’s the only one I can see not actively fucking it up too easily.


#14: Michael Bloomberg – 40 to 1 odds. There were a slew of 40 to 1 candidates, and I cherry-picked them as I felt like writing about them. I put Bloomberg on here in the last spot because he is the epitome of what is wrong with American politics. He’s been both a Democrat and Republican, and now considers himself an independent I guess. But he also was an obvious component of the 1% elite and wealthy that the Occupy movement was protesting against, and he lived in penthouses right around the corner from the park those protests were boiling up in. Bloomberg is a proven pigfucker, and the fact he’s even considered this much of a longshot which is still this high of a choice amongst the entire spectrum of American choice is monkey signifier that America is fucked, doomed, and fuck whoever ends up being President in 2016.

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