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发帖数: 2555 | 1 A Presidential Candidate
I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President. What the country
wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past
history, so that the enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything
against him that nobody ever heard of before. If you know the worst about a
candidate, to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be
checkmated. Now I am going to enter the
field with an open record. I am going to own up in advance to all the
wickedness I have done, and if any Congressional committee is disposed to
prowl around my biography in the hope of discovering any dark and deadly
deed that I have secreted, why—let it prowl.
In the first place, I admit that I treed a rheumatic grandfather of mine in
the winter of 1850. He was old and inexpert in climbing trees, but with the
heartless brutality that is characteristic of me I ran him out of the front
door in his night shirt at the point of a shotgun, and caused him to bowl up
a maple tree, where he remained all night, while I emptied shot into his
legs. I did this because he snored. I will do it again if I ever have
another grandfather. I am as inhuman now as I was in 1850. I candidly
acknowledge that I ran away at the battle of Gettysburg. My friends have
tried to smooth over this fact by asserting that I did so for the purpose of
imitating Washington, who went into the woods at Valley Forge for the
purpose of saying his prayers. It was a miserable subterfuge. I struck out
in a straight line for the Tropic of Cancer because I was scared. I wanted
my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it. I entertain
that preference yet. If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the
cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is
empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the
fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of
every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me to be
Napoleonic in its grandeur.
My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not
likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation.
I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The
great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get. The
rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine
needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this
high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency? The Constitution of our
country does not say so. No other citizen was ever considered unworthy of
this office because he enriched his grapevines with his dead relatives. Why
should I be selected as the first victim of an absurd prejudice? I admit
also that I am not a friend of the poor man. I regard the poor man, in his
present condition, as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly
canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal
islands and to improve our export trade with that region. I shall recommend
legislation upon the subject in my first message. My campaign cry will be:
“Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages.”
These are about the worst parts of my record. On them I come before the
country. If my country don’t want me, I will go back again. But I recommend
myself as a safe man—a man who starts from the basis of total depravity
and proposes to be fiendish to the last. |
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