I don’t write about politics.

Here’s the thing I’m not going to actually say but sort of what I would say if I might say something, which I’m not, of course.

Thad should have retired. Before his new 763rd term term is over, if he gets re-elected, his handlers will have to watch him like a sugar-infused toddler near a busy parking lot. He only knows how to bring the bacon home from Washington to Mississippi, and boy howdy, we in Mississippi like our bacon. We get back about four dollars for every tax dollar we send to Washington. If one were to ask me, I’d say that is a pretty good deal…for Mississippi, anyway. In spite of all that Federal money Thad sends home, Mississippi is still the poorest state. If we are dead last, we can still be dead last without federal money. We could be in danger of becoming the super-superlative deadest lastest without Thad.

Chris McDaniel? While I have some Tea Party sympathies, particularly as related to fiscal propriety, The Tea Party always seems to pick the worst candidates to represent it, not a one of whom I have been able to support. I’d rather have Monty Python’s Michael Palin than Alaska’s Sarah Palin, but he is British. And Michelle Botchmann, well, she may not even know where British is but she can probably see it from her house. Chris McDaniel was among those unsupportable candidates. There was much nastiness and several of the oddest peculiarities to come out of his camp, particularly those in his campaign who managed to get themselves locked in the courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, overnight where the ballots for Hinds County were stored. Does that not seem as suspicious as the courthouse fire in Alice, Texas, when the recount for LBJ’s first run for congress was to start the next morning? Hmmmm! Mississippi, Louisiana, Chicago and Texas have nothing on each other, it seems.

I detested the entire Mississippi Senate race and smell a real rat in that Thad will indeed likely retire before the end of his term so Governor Phil Bryant can appoint former governor and RNC Chair Haley Barbour to fill Thad’s Senate seat. Hmmmm! This is good old fashioned politics; Chicago Blago could hardly do it better…well, yes he could since he was crassly auctioning off Barack Obama’s Senate seat, but was foolish and got caught. Huey P. Long never got caught, and he was a United States Senator and Louisiana Governor at the same time, which is a remarkable feat of human political endeavor…then he got assassinated, perhaps by his own bodyguards. That was a terribly inconvenient occurrence for his political career if you ask me.Unfortunately, Huey P.was unavailable for comment, or he would likely have called this a major setback.

All the stink about Thad soliciting Democrats to vote in the Republican primary…well in spite of Mississippi law saying this is illegal if you do not intend to support that party’s nominee, we can’t let courts decide what people’s intentions about voting are. People change their minds. People change their minds all the time.

I voted Democrat in the primary in our last local election just so I could support our excellent Democrat Sheriff. I would have voted for him in the general election, too, but he had no opposition, so everything was decided in the primary. I’d do it again. I like our sheriff, who is very professional, impartial, and serves all us citizens of Kemper County admirably.

Barring some miraculous court ruling, Thad Cochran will face former Democrat Congressman Travis Childers in the November general election. Thad will likely win…but then again, many disgruntled conservatives may sit this election out or switch and vote for Childers. I am likely to be one of the sit-outers. The closest I am likely to be to the polls is to have my wife tell me how hot it was there, since she is a certified poll-worker.

“But you must exercise your right to vote,” I was told.

“I can exercise my right not to vote,” I replied.

My intentionally not voting can certainly be counted as my political voice, because I like none of my options and am no longer willing to vote for the devil I know or for the least distasteful of the devil-I-know’s opponents. I am tired of choosing the least distasteful. I am tired of holding my nose and flipping the lever. I want a candidate I can believe in . . . not one who promises more of what the nation can no longer afford, nor the one who promises to go to Washington with the intent of making enemies and accomplishing nothing.

Have you noticed the value of your money? Think prices are going up? No, the value of your money is coming down and will continue to do so. We have gone about as far as Keynesian economics can take us, in spite of what Paul Krugman says, and still had negative GDP growth the first quarter of this year. If the second quarter also shows a decline, well, what does one call that? I don’t know what you might call it, but economists call it a recession.

Good luck, Washington. You have gilded your own halls and spared no expense to make your careers all lifelong. Congress, you have allowed the Executive to show you the greatest contempt. And Executive, your contempt is obvious, as indicated by a couple of recent 9-0 votes against you in the Supreme Court.

Eric Cantor should have been concerned with what the people in his own district were concerned about. When our elected officials chide us, they should do so with great trepidation, not the rancor we have come to expect from them…after all, who are they working for? The answer we propose and the one they forward are likely very different. Eric Cantor has learned that. I hope some more do. One might call me an anti-incumbent. One would not be far from wrong.

But I’m not saying any of these things. These are things I would likely to say were I to say anything. I am not writing about politics; I am writing about what I would write about were I to write it, which is about the failure of politics to do anything but further entrench the already entrenched, who need no entrenching, but eviction. That’s what I would say…that is if I were saying anything.

If you can’t understand that, then you should learn that language has nuance and can be used to reveal or conceal. I have revealed nothing. But I didn’t conceal anything either. You are free to choose how successful I may or may not have been, just don’t reveal it to me or I’ll claim you lack nuanced understanding…of which I am accused by our Washington politicians all the time.

Lord have mercy! I feel better now. Not writing about politics can improve one’s disposition.

You may re-rant this rant if you’d like.

Note added 6/27/14 1:45AM – Still not talking about it, if I did I’d say the only thing I liked about this whole Senate race was a comment from Haley Barbour. When some supporters of Chris McDaniel snuck into a nursing home in Madison, MS, to take some photos of Mrs, Cochran, bedridden with dementia, which was a despicable invasion of her privacy, Haley Barbour had this to say. “When I ran against John Stennis he was 81. The whole time his wife [known to us Mississippians as Miss Coy] was in a nursing home. If someone would have mentioned this, I’d have knocked their teeth out.” I expect he would have, too. Then as the offender was stooping over to pick up his teeth, Haley could have kindly advised him, “Keep a civil tongue or you’ll be picking that up next.” Three McDaniel supporters were arrested and charged with felonious abuse of an elderly person in this egregious invasion of Mrs. Cochran’s privacy. Apparently they were hoping to stir up a scandalous relationship between Thad and his Executive Assistant, Kay Webber, who accompanies him on overseas trips and Washington social functionns, and from whom whom he rents a basement apartment he lists as his primary residence, in a spectacularly modern/retro, non-politically correct twist on sexual scandal: Man has affair with woman. Those are all nasty allegations. I don’t know what the reprobate abusers were thinking, but it could be that among the three arrested, one of whom was an attorney, there was not enough brains among them to have and hold a complete thought. McDaniels misleading comments and denials of knowledge about this, every bit as convincing as lost IRS e-mails, likely cost him the election. Fools never recognize foolishness, which is like being surprsed that the sun is bright or remarking extensively on the unremarkable. But, I make no remarks. I’m not saying a thing.

©2014 Mississippi Chris Sharp