Many think the business mogul turned reality star is the bottom of the presidential candidate barrel, but there are some that are even lower.
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy, the city of Athens almost died of an aneurysm from laughing too hard. Trump? The guy with the funny hair and the TV show? Trump? An ultra-tan, Botox-filled, racist misogyny machine? That guy? Yes, that guy and that guy has reached the top of the polls for the Republican nomination. By “reached,” I mean “steamrolled,” “rocketed” and “bulldozed.” Trump, a man famous for being abrasive, rich, insensitive and smug, now stands at a 28 percent support rate, compared to the runner-up Ben Carson who boasts a comparatively meager 12 percent.
But for those of us who vomit each time the CNN headlines blare another Trump-inspired xenophobic, racist or misogynistic headline, we should see the silver lining in the issue and remind ourselves that, as hard as it it so to believe, there have been worse candidates in the past for the highest office in the land.
We begin this list of crazies with Jonathon Albert “The Impaler” Sharkey, presidential candidate in 2012, 2008 and 2004. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the nickname “The Impaler.”
Mr. Sharkey is, in his own words, a vampire. In a public statement, Sharkey stated that drinking blood is “a very healthy thing to do.” Sharkey also went on to say “women are beautiful. ... They have such beautiful necks and arms.” Yes, that’s right. Sharkey even confirmed that he regularly drinks blood from his girlfriends (yes, plural — the guy’s a player), two or three times a week. Sharkey isn’t just a personality though. The vampire has actually founded a federally-recognized political party called the “Vampyres, Witches, and Pagans Party” in 2005. Mr. Sharkey leans Republican and has a hard stance on crime, believing that “certain criminals, instead of being put in jail, they should be brutally tortured and impaled. .... Upon them being found guilty of their crimes, I’ll beat them, torture them, dismember them and decapitate them.” We all thought Richard Nixon was tough on crime, but this guy knows his stuff.
Although we could probably write a bestselling biography based on “The Impaler’s” exploits, Sharkey is not the only baffling candidate to have run for president. Although vampires are highly entertaining to watch, punk rockers are almost just as good. Meet Jello Biafra, the former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. This gentleman ran for the Green Party nomination in 2000 but ultimately lost to Ralph Nader.
Biafra had a solidly established platform he ran on. He wanted a maximum wage of $100,000, which lost him the votes of practically everyone who earned anything with six figures. He also wanted to “abolish the military,” something that would probably save tons of money but also cause a few issues. Perhaps his best proposal was lowering the minimum voting age to five because we all know that five year olds can make decisions about abortion, but four year olds can’t.
Even more strange was his choice of Mumia Abu-Jamal as his vice-presidential candidate. Abu-Jamal was a journalist who shot and killed a police officer in 1981. At the time that Biafra decided to run with Abu-Jamal as a running mate, Abu-Jamal was fighting in court against a death-penalty warrant signed in 1995.
While Biafra certainly didn’t help the Green Party’s reputation, at least he wasn’t nominated. In 2008, the Green Party chose six-term Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney as its candidate. While that might sound like a good idea, these next two paragraphs will change your mind.
In 2006, McKinney attacked a police officer. Members of Congress are allowed to go into the Capitol without going through a metal detector if they wear a special pin on their lapels and are recognizable. McKinney, on that day, wore the wrong pin, and unfortunately was unrecognizable because she was wearing a special hairdo. When the Capitol police officer chased her down to confirm who she was, McKinney did the thing most people would do when a police officer is running at you: shoving a fist directly into the officer’s chest. Later that year, she lost her Congressional seat.
McKinney has also claimed that the US government used the National Guard to execute about 5,000 men by discharging a single bullet into each head. The National Guard then proceeded to dump the bodies in a swamp in Louisiana and blamed the deaths on Hurricane Katrina.
Right.
Maybe Trump isn’t that bad after all.
Richard Hwang is a student at Athens High School. What do you think of these candidates throughout history? Email him at rhwang999@gmail.com.
