Americans’ contempt for this election year’s respective Democratic and Republican nominees may be record-breaking,but that doesn’t mean there are no other options. If you can’t decide between a megalomaniacal, racist, sexist, pathological liar and “Convenience Christian” versus a shrill, embittered oligarchical hawk and Wall Street sycophant posing as the savior of the poor and oppressed, don’t worry. There are literally a couple dozen other potential candidates, and one is bound to suit your needs. Especially if you’re worried about the gubmint taking your guns, robot rights, or if you have a really muddled sense of what the founding fathers believed. Or if you think the only illegal aliens we should worry about crossed the border in a UFO. Here are just a few of the more intriguing candidates, see a longer list here.
Pull A Nader – Jill Stein
For the “Bernie or Bust” crowd, the simple thing to do with your third party vote would be to vote for the person that’s most like a liberal democrat, and help siphon enough votes from Hillary Clinton to ensure a Trump presidency. If it worked in 2000, it’ll work in 2016, if current poll numbers hold as we move closer to election day. In this scenario, the Green Party’s Jill Stein would be your gal.
Pull A Perot – Gary Johnson
We have to reach back a little further to find the reverse of the above scenario. If you love guns and God but hate homos and health care, don’t vote for Trump, vote for Gary Johnson. He plays himself off as the champion of regular folk, but he’s probably every bit as full of shit and opportunistic as Ross Perot was back in 1992. Do you miss Kasich, Cruz, Rubio, and Jeb? Johnson’s probably your dude, he can be any one of those guys if you ask the right question.
Our Endorsement – Zoltan Istvan
I think we should all vote for this guy simply on the basis of the fact that his name is “Zoltan”. But what are some of the planks in his platform? Generally things you might expect from a guy named Zoltan, like: creating a Transhumanist Bill of Rights, laying groundwork for rights for other future advanced sapient beings like conscious robots and cyborgs. Protecting us against existential risks like artificial intelligence, plagues, and asteroids. Creating a policy for the phasing out of all individual taxes based on robots taking most jobs in the next 25 years. Advocating for morphological freedom. Encouraging private industry to develop and support usage of a cranial trauma alert chip. What more could you want in a candidate? C’mon, you’re always saying “I fucking love science”, aren’t you?
David Jon Sponheim, Goddamn Supergenius
Sponheim’s main claim to fame is that he’s just soooo goddamn smart. He puts that right up front, by calling himself an “Intellectually Gifted Entrepreneur”. Evidence of this mindblowing IQ of his is purely anectdotal. His story: He debated Dow Chemical company employees at the age of seven, skipped a grade in middle school, and in high school, managed an IQ test score of 185. He then attended classes at UCLA, but discontinued “due to strong disagreement with the Communist leanings of his professors”. Despite an alleged straight-A academic record with these commie bastards, he was unable to gain acceptance at other institutions of higher learning. He blames this on affirmative action minority enrollment quotas. He has since worked as an “advertiser, web site designer, archivist, and entrepreneur”, according to his bio. So tell us something. If he’s such a goddamn genius, why couldn’t he figure out how to finish college? And if he’s a web designer, why the hell is his dumb website throwing up a “500 Internal Server” error? And why can’t he manage to upload a photo of himself that’s not pixelated and horribly cropped, and larger than about 150 pixels square?
Sponheim’s site was down when this piece was posted.
Art Drew
Art Drew’s only clearly defined policies are that all teachers should have a small-caliber handgun, and that a wall on the Mexican border is ridiculous. Because what we really need is a beefed up military presence there! Is Art Drew qualified? Are you kitten me? Just take a look at his credentials. Not only does Art have a USDOT Crop Dusting Cerfiicate [sic], he can cut your hair, because he has Pennsylvania State Barber License! He appears to have failed that web design course though.
David Boarman
David Boarman’s platform reads more like a hand-wringing laundry list of moral complaints than policy guidelines. Summarized: we need to get the feds out of all our personal business, make people respect America and its money, and let the churches fix things, not the government. Freedom of religion is of utmost importance, especially the freedom for a business to refuse to serve a customer on the basis of religious beliefs. He also seems to pretty much not get the meaning of a pentagram.
Darrell Castle
Like many of these mildly delusional individuals, Darrell Castle does a mashup of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as he sees fit, which makes it easy for him to proclaim that America must be free and autonomous in every regard, so long as those freedoms align with his misunderstanding of his god’s rules as interpreted by white men over two hundred years ago. Which must be when his website was developed, based on its appearances.
Ed Baker
Call Ed Baker a nut if you like, but he has some good points. The main one being that Marijuana is safer than peanuts, so should be legalized. Or that we need to “Punish the Bad Guys” and “Help those in Need”. Which is literally how those items are presented in his platform. Some of his other ideas will fill your nutsack to the bursting point though; his platform also includes things like reopening 9/11 investigations, support of the confederate flag, full disclosure of UFO’s, and deporting illegal aliens. He’s not clear regarding whether or not those last two items are directly related.
