"What We Wouldn't Give For Just One Good Old Fashioned Garden Variety Extremist..."

In 1964, as a wee lad in his early teenage years, I watched, with fascination, as Democrats did their very best to paint the Republican candidate for President that year as an extremist/maniac whose first act after taking the oath of office would be flipping the switch to blow up a couple of countries we weren't crazy about.

For generations after, the name Barry Goldwater symbolized extremism.

Nigh on fifty years later, we find the current group of first tier contestants in the 1600 Pennsylvania Sweepstakes stacking up like this...

A former pizza chain CEO whose current suggestion on how to deal with society's woes is to have the current President impeached...

A Mormon former governor whose primary appeal, at this point, seems to be that he's not John McCain...

A current Governor of Texas who believes that Al Gore is Chicken Little crying out "the globe is warming! the globe is warming!", Congress should have the power to override the Supreme Court and whose major selling point is his having been responsible for creating tens of thousands of jobs (if, admittedly, the bulk of said jobs involves the use of the expression "uh...you want fries with that..?")...

A Congresswoman who promises a return to two dollar per gallon gas without a real clue as to the financial ripple effect of such an accomplishment...who believes that homosexuality can be "cured" by heavy doses of "Our Father, who art in Heaven" and who can't tell difference between John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy...or the difference between the day Elvis was born and the day he died...

Some guy from Utah who means well but whose captive audience has, to date, grown to a size just a little less then the membership of "MENSA Members Who Love 'Keeping Up with The Kardashians"....

And wandering around out there on the periphery...

The former governor of Alaska/2008 Republican VP candidate whose kid had done Dancing with The Stars, who wont be solicited to join the Paul Revere Trivia Expert Club any time soon and is currently hovering somewhere on the cat gut line between taking a stand/throwing a hat in and trying to get her political swipe card loaded up with another fifteen minutes....

Meanwhile, let us not forget, the current resident of the big house with the columns...three years ago's next big thing, a perceived cross between John F. Kennedy and Denzel Washington who has, to date, turned out to be more of a cross between Jimmy Carter and Billy Dee Williams...as the sun sets on Martha's Vineyard, while it, and the Dow Jones, sink slowly in the west....

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party did a textbook perfect job of painting their opponent as a nut job who would drag us all to Armageddon with his right hand on the nuclear switch and his left hand....well, they convinced America that he held everything in his right hand....

Looking back over that listing of the players in today's pageant, can't help but feel a little nostalgic....with one phrase turning over and over in my mind.....

Barry Goldwater, come home....all is forgiven.