Too Fat To Be President

CAUTION: This post contains bitter and graphic sarcasm.  You are likely to be offended.

Barbara Walters outlived her usefulness many years ago, and like so many other people who haven’t found anything else to do in their golden years (she’s 83), she keeps doing TV shows which presumably appeal to women her age.

On her annual (make that “superannuated”) most fascinating people show the other night, she asked New Jersey Governor Chris Christie if he was too fat to be President.

It would seem that Babs has lost more marbles than one might suspect of someone who achieved octogenarian status several years ago.  She’s become like the embarrassing great-aunt who asks insanely inappropriate questions or makes wildly ill-advised statements at family gatherings.  It’s time for Babs to start a foundation or spend her time cultivating gardenias or something.

Consider that the nasty things I’ve said above about Babs are in poor taste and questionable judgment, because it’s not kind to make fun of old people.  We have laws about discriminating against old people. Lord knows we have plenty of people holding jobs well past an age when any other rational person would have retired to pursue dreams and hobbies.  Politics seems to have more than its fair share of fossils and mummies who hang on year after year, until they die in office.  John McCain outlived his usefulness 25 years ago.  Mitch McConnell and Harry Ried should find something else to do, and Ried is a juvescent  73.

The detestable and decrepit Strom Thurmond hung around the Congress for 48 years, finally croaking when he was 100 in 2003.  A broadcasting colleague of mine who lived in South Carolina in the 1990’s while her husband did graduate work at Clemson University said the natives told her they wouldn’t vote Thurmond out of office, even though they knew he was senile, because “it would be rude”.

Southern charm, I guess.

Fred Risser may be sharp as a tack, and in full possession of all his faculties, but for God’s sake, Fred, give somebody else a chance.  He’s 85 and apparently still hasn’t found anything useful to do with his life, other than jab the taxpayers a decade ago for that so-called “law office” shack /eyesore that they tore down to make way for the new county courthouse building.  The county offered the absurd sum of 728 thousand bucks for the tiny pile of boards Risser’s old man put up sometime in the 16^th Century, and Great Grandpa Risser demanded 1.7 million dollars for it.

He got somewhat less than that.

It’s still very much OK in America to hate fat people and ridicule them.  Fat people are lazy, they smell bad, they hog up way more than their fair share of health care dollars, and they’re stupid and should just die.

So when Babs asked Governor Christie if he was too fat to serve as President, instead of shooting back “aren’t you too old to be doing this?” the Governor handled her asinine question with grace and aplomb. 

God, I hate fat people.