The Next Mayor of Blowhardville

“I am pleased to announce that I am running to be the next mayor of Blowhardville.”

 John Calia, April 30, 2011

Yes, that’s right, friends. I am running for office. I figure now that Trump has vacated his post as mayor of Blowhardville to run for President the field is wide open. I admit he’ll be a hard act to follow. Why am I so confident that I can win? Because it’s not just Trump who has vacated the little burg of Blowhardville. It seems that blowhards of all political stripes have hit the highways.

My first campaign promise is to create jobs by making a strategic investment in a shovel ready project to build a Blowhard Hall of Fame.

The charter inductees will include both Republicans and Democrats. It was tough to narrow the field but there are a few standouts.

This is Obama from the 2008 campaign: “In ten years, we can reduce our dependence so that we no longer have to import oil from the Middle East or Venezuela. Number one, we need to expand domestic production and that means telling the oil companies the 68 million acres that they currently have leased that they’re not drilling, use them or lose them.”

Wow. We’ve made so much progress in the last three years; I can hardly believe we’ll need another seven.

Or, how about this? During the same campaign, the current Secretary of State referred to her visit to Bosnia in 1996, thusly: “"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

That doesn’t sound bad other than the fact that it isn’t true. Later, she admitted that she “did misspeak”. Misspeak? That might qualify as the understatement of the decade.

Newt Gingrich is a really smart guy. Everybody says so. After all, we are told he reads two books a week which is two more than Sarah Palin. I knew he was getting ready to run for President last fall when he started saying really stupid things. Yet nothing he has said recently compares to this quote from his days as Speaker of the House: “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”

A Socialist argument? Really, Newt? Really?

My favorite quote from the 2008 campaign came from Dennis Kucinich, once the youngest mayor of Cleveland and now the Mental Midget of the Left. Ready? Drum roll, please: “I am running for President of the United States to enable the Goddess of Peace to encircle within her arms all the children of this country and all the children of the world.”

The Goddess of Peace? What church does this guy go to?

Some blowhards have a style that belies their status as a blowhard. We expect blowhards to be loud like Trump. However, my all-time favorite blowhard is the former Vice President of the United States, the avuncular Dick Cheney. He can deliver a line so calmly in that you hardly notice how ridiculous he sounds. Here are few examples:

“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”. That was in October, 2002.

Or, how about this one: “I believe we will be greeted as liberators”. That was three days before we started the Iraq War. How’s he doing so far?

And, my favorite Dick Cheney quote: “Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”. That was during the 2004 re-election campaign.

Now that all the blowhards have left for Washington, I am almost certain to win election for mayor of Blowhardville. The only question that remains is:

WHO WILL LEAD?