Synthetic Opinion #1The American Presidential Election

I promised to write a 700-word opinion piece on any shit you care to suggest. The only rule is that I can’t research a single thing. The first suggestion came in from Adam…

“What about that hot button topic for 2008 – the US Presidential election?”

No sooner said than done, Adam! And to celebrate this inaugural opinion, I have included an animated gif of Hillary Clinton trying on a few new hands. That crazy cow just can’t settle on “the hand for her”. You should see some of the ones that didn’t even make it onto her snap-on attachment hole, though! They would have shaken your very root. Right up to the vinegars.
 
This Was Supposed To Be Fun
Why have you stopped my election from being excellent
Facts are great, but after a while they stop being fun. Say, you’re enjoying a game of Swingball with your best friend, who is a vet. Suddenly, someone rises from a nearby deckchair, and informs you that over the course of his career, he has negligently caused the death of over two hundred Springer Spaniels. An unwelcome distraction, for sure – but then, if you’re easily distracted you have no place playing Swingball. Far worse, would be the sense the you’re playing a kind of rotary tennis against a man who doesn’t know his way around a Spaniel. A stupid, irrelevant fact has just ruined the game.
The less basic and rudimentary a fact, the less fun it is. Take my imaginary friend, the vet. That simple fact is lovely – he has probably seen a cow’s fanny, and I can draw pictures of him squinting at a giraffe and saying “I’m Sorry, It Has Got Very High Mumps“. The more information I find out about his job – that his assistant is called Maureen, that he is unlikely to ever diagnose a giraffe, and that he’s fatally shit at Spaniels – every fact I learn takes me into a world that’s more complicated that I care to learn about. The fact that it’s important to him just makes it annoying.
With this in mind, here are the facts that I know about the American Election, in ascending order of whatever, get over it, Jesus.

1. A black man and a woman are going to have a fight, and as far as everyone can tell, it looks like they mean it.

Hillary Clinton is a woman! That means she has cables running to her big, tanned nipples that are capable of firing out milk. If you don’t think the idea of someone running the world with lasers of milk pissing from their chest isn’t awesome, then I honestly don’t know what to say to you. Legislation brought in for approval would be dabbled with an approving squirt, and evil budgets would be obliterated by a machine gun burst of white staccato squits.
This is all old and stupid hats to us Brits though, we had Maggie Thatcher. We remember when she took the free milk from those poor schoolkids, and poured it into a mechanised tit that she used to rush through the anti-union legislation of the eighties. But even in her most unpopular moments, we – the British People – would never have asked her to fight a black man. Who can imagine the special powers that each candidate could draw from their respective stereotypes during the final rounds? It’s an excellent and probably racist scene to imagine. It’d probably climax with Barack channelling the powers of the Omegahedron through his Burundi Wand, while Hillary straddles his neck and tries to strangle him with her fallopians.
At this level of understanding, anything is possible, and the American Election is possibly the second most exciting thing in the world, after walking into a zero-gravity chamber full of St Bernard puppies, all rotating on a different axis.

2. Another man says he wants to fight the winner.

This is the first fact you’ll encounter in the American Election that is boring. His name is so unremarkable that you might as well simply let your mouth hang open instead of saying it. I can’t think what he looks like, I don’t know anything he’s said, and if you want me to feel something about him then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Everything’s already 40% less fantastic.

3. Super-delegates are being used to reinstate the smoky back rooms and hidden decision-making processes that gave the Democratic party a bad name in the past.

That clattering sound was the pan lid of my interest. First, it made me think “Typical! Politicians!” which is the single least thrilling thing a person can think. Secondly, they’re called super-delegates, but their only superpower appears to be the ability to vote for who they like, and even we’ve got that. Finally, though, it’s rubbish because it ruins the first, excellent point. If you’re going to fix the fight, do it in a cartoon fashion. Put horseshoes in boxing gloves, use suits of armour and massive magnets. Not in some pervasive, creeping and utterly reliable way that would make the public feel a bit shocked if they didn’t already assume that everything was already fundamentally broken.

4. The winner gets to rule the world.

Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I was watching Highlander. If you’re going to take the piss, I won’t bother.
In Synthetic Opinion #2, I shall be answering a question on which I have even less knowledge than American Politics:

Log, do you think the Large Hadron Collider MUST BE STOPPED in case a tiny black hole swallows the Earth? (Remember the set of things on the Earth includes Robert Mugabe and cancer, so it is not as simple a question as it first looks.)

To finish off, here is a decade of UK political opinion distilled into one moderately compressed image.