A Sleepless Night

I really shouldn't let my imagination run loose when I'm trying to go to sleep. Here are the nightmare scenarios that kept me up until the wee hours.

Setup:

The next president dies in office, and his vice president, under the US constitution (which is still more or less in effect, even though it's currently on life supports), becomes president.

Scenarios:

John McCain, the apparent front-runner in the Rethug race, would be 71, making him the oldest president ever, at the the time he is sworn in next January. (By comparison, Saint Ronald was a youthful 69 at the time he took office.) Despite the fact that McCain regularly keeps trotting out his doddering 95-year-old mother to prove that he has longevity genes, he's already had skin cancer and his body has to be a lot less than 100% after his wild youth (I "generally misused my good health and youth" -- source) and those five-and-a-half long years of torture and lack of medical care as a guest of the North Vietnamese.

In order to shore up his support among the mouthbreathing knuckledragging Fundo Xian branch of the party, McCain chooses Huckleberry Hucklebee as his VP. McCain dies and Huckleberry starts in on his campaign to restore Christian principles to the US constitution and, with the compliance of the spineless Blue Dog Democrats and the Dominionist-packed Supreme Court, slides us into theocracy.

And the Dems? Barack Obama is a prime target for assassination (a Google search for "assassinate obama" turns up some 14,000 terrifying hits). Let's face facts: Anyone who does not believe that there is a deep-seated and virulent strain of violent racism lurking just beneath the surface in many parts of this country is living in a fool's paradise. The current wide-eyed comparisons between him and JFK are downright scary when you remember what happened to Kennedy.

If Obama is the nominee, he will just about have to choose Billary as his VP running mate (and vice-versa). By the time of the Democratic Convention the party will be badly wounded by the current infighting that's going to only get worse. The best way to try to heal up those wounds would be to choose your enemy as your running mate and pretend that you have always been best buddies (as Reagan did with "Poppy" Bush, and JFK seems to have done with Lyndon Johnson). Then Obama dies in office. She is president, and she will continue the slide into fascistic corporatism that was started by Ronald Reagan and sadly continued, in large part, by Bill Clinton.

Jeez, I think I need a Xanax/Ambien cocktail...