Neither!

This will be short because everything it says is so obvious.

Do you follow the news? The allegedly shoo-in candidates for their respective parties’ presidential nomination are:

— A man so self-regarding that he believes the purpose of the United States is to make him, personally, happy, a man currently under numerous indictments for crimes that no one denies he committed but his sycophants say aren’t or shouldn’t be crimes. A man who, except for having farmed out judicial choices to competent people, was a demonstrably bad president, rightly ejected from the White House by the voters.

— A man who has shown himself to be manifestly dishonest during a half century on the public grift. A profoundly stupid man who has always done what he was told, in exchange for riches. A man who, like his predecessor, belongs in the kind of public housing acquired not by election but by a jury’s decision. A man who denied the very existence of his own grandchild until it became a political embarrassment such that there was political capital in embracing her. A man who would have a credible plea of not guilty by reason of mental defect should justice somehow manage to find its way to him.

A mosquito has more principle and morals than the two of them combined, and that is a mosquito carrying malaria. And you, dear reader, know it.

I am a lifelong Republican, or was until the Republican Party became yet another wholly-owned Trump subsidiary, like the others run by idiots on money borrowed under false pretenses. It has abandoned sound principles and replaced them with total fealty to Donald Trump.

The next decent thing Trump does will he his first. Yet many people worship him — I do not exaggerate. Many American churches traded their devotion to Jesus for loyalty to Trump. If they are not careful they will spend eternity with him in Hell, listening to him rattle on about how Judgment Day was fixed.

At minimum, if the people who have joined him in their pursuit of eternal damnation succeed in the short term, we will experience a campaign comprising a loud fat man with dyed hair moaning about how he is being mistreated. We all know the type, failures who bore everyone with endless tales of how it is someone else’s fault. We do not think of them as presidential material.

May he be denied computer privileges in prison!

Meanwhile, the doddering disaster-with-attitude that is the barely functioning mortal remains of Joe “Bugout” Biden, one of history’s least popular presidents, will shuffle into re-election. At least he’s not in love with his mirror.

Do we really think the election of the president of the United States should be a choice to select the lesser of evils? Has our process stooped so low that for sheer entertainment value (well, and greed) we make sure that the candidates are serious contenders for the title of most reprehensible person in the country? Is “Not as bad as [Trump/Biden]” the kind of campaign slogan we want to see?

Dear reader, this is important. We are selecting someone who will be the most powerful man in the world, who will literally have control over whether you and your family live or die. You may have forgotten it, but mishandling of a recent disease outbreak has left the country crippled for a generation, probably more. By odd coincidence, both Biden and Trump had major roles in the disaster.

And yet the nation seems to think that the president must be chosen from between these two immoral, unrepentant, defective crooks.

My late friend William F. Buckley famously remarked, “I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.” I will, to use a phrase he liked (and was qualified to say it — I lost to him in poker), see him and raise him fifty: I would sooner have as president a person selected at random from among the pedestrians on the sidewalks of the streets of Topeka than either Biden or Trump. If you think about it for at least a little, you will agree.

Does anyone who doesn’t have money riding on it think that either of these parasites should infest the White House? Is there anyone so gullible as to believe that the tiniest spark of goodness or even decency exists in either Trump or Biden? Have our history and civics education so fallen that we now think of choosing our government is no more important than rooting for a sports team?

We are not a democracy. We are a republic within a democracy, as a safeguard against democratic whims. (It has been chipped at and is in danger of failure.) But we are given a voice. We supposedly should be able to choose.

To choose, it seems, between two of the worst people on the planet, the Putin-wannabe Trump and the Stalin-wannabe Biden.

If we truly do have a voice, we need to exercise it. We need to holler loudly and we need to holler now.

We need better choices. Neither of these criminals will do.