It is beyond mind-numbing in a nation of 320 million, a nation with mandatory education, a nation that is a powerful, albeit dimming, beacon of freedom and what is right, that the presidential election front-runners are all wackdoodles.
Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton? Bernie Sanders? Is it a joke? Can anybody in their right mind envision any of them at the controls? Really? Any halfway intelligent person, even a Democrat, should be mortified.
Trump? The guy is phenomenal: a quintessential showman, master of the deal, and, unfortunately, a demagogue. He gets what Americans are dying to hear, and he gives it to them -- forgive me, H.L. Mencken -- good and hard. He also, it turns out, is wildly unqualified to be president.
Trump bombastically, proudly is no politician, a huge plus among Americans bone tired of the same ol' blah-blah-blah. Those yearning for something new love him. He can blurt out anything and his poll numbers pop because he is as politically incorrect as Middle America is when nobody is watching. And Americans love it when he smacks down know-it-all talking heads and elitist commentators everybody despises.
Is Trump a true-blue Republican? Who knows? He has more positions than a Barcalounger, and no real plan -- for anything. Ignorant of the basics, from taxes to foreign policy, he seems the twin brother of Sarah Palin -- incurious, disinterested in specifics, unengaged, obnoxiously loud.
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the last three Republican administrations, hit the nail on the head in a devastating New York Times opinion piece:
Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them. He has admitted that he doesn't prepare for debates or study briefing books; he believes such things get in the way of a good performance. No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has attracted support from none other than the lovely Sarah P., herself disdainful of knowledge and indifferent to facts. She is Alaska's former demi-governor and was the vice-presidential candidate on John McCain's failed presidential ticket in 2008. What her screechy endorsement of Trump will mean is anybody's guess, but doubtless it will energize the GOP's hard-right, anti-establishment crazies even as main line Republicans -- reading the handwriting on the wall -- eye Trump as a possible standard bearer. It also could frighten away anybody with an IQ higher than room temperature.
Well, hey, what about Hillary?
Hillary Clinton, a self-described progressive Democrat, is an ethical train wreck, a political insider, a hard, mean woman plagued with an impeached, philandering husband who has the craftiest political mind of the last two centuries. Hillary is hauling more baggage than the Queen Mary 2 -- and is unburdened by conscience. She is not the person you want answering your phone, or anybody else's, at 3 a.m.
While she was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation accepted millions from foreign governments unfriendly to the United States and its interests. Add to that: She can't tell the truth. There is the sniper story. Not true. There is the story she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to summit Mount Everest. Not true. She claimed she was "instrumental" in the Irish peace process. Not true. There are countless other fibs: Benghazi; illegally using a personal server for highly classified State Department emails; assertions her family was dead broke at the end of Bill's term. Then, there are the megabucks for canned speeches. And on and on, ad infinitum.
The worst of it? Barack Obama endorses her.
Then, there is Bernie Sanders, an old -- 75 this year -- Democratic socialist, which should disqualify him from just about anything. Socialism, as Winston Churchill pointed out, is the "philosophy of failure," eschewed even by most Democrats. Much of his support comes from the young and Occupy Wall Street weirdos -- and those finally sick of Hillary.
Sanders is an out-of-touch, ideological purist not bashful about saying he wants to redistribute wealth and spread the misery. He seems to know diddly-squat, zilch, about foreign policy -- or much else. He has a truckload of dead-end, pie-in-the-sky notions. His free-this and free-that vision could cost the country -- you and me -- an estimated $18 trillion, if he were elected. Talk is cheap: Sanders would not be.
Up top, it ain't much. Other candidates may break through and catch the public's eye in the coming months. We should hope they do. We should pray they do.
If not, heaven help us all.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.