Campaign Manager's Journal

It has been a rough couple of weeks in the McDougal campaign, but things are finally starting to look a bit better. I think this month we have finally disproved the old adage that all press is good press. I don't think any Presidential candidate has ever gone from completely ignored to universally reviled as quickly as McDougal did with his Elvis's birthday speech. I find it more than a bit unfair that people have reacted so negatively to McDougal's Iraq exit strategy of reinstating Saddam Hussein as dictator, when it is a plan that is inherently unworkable. Dead men do not make effective dictators. With the possible exception of Fidel Castro. I have some doubts about the current situation in Cuba...

Anyway, the war in Iraq is such a hot button campaign issue, it would be political suicide to go back out on the campaign trail without an Iraq exit strategy. The major parties have already taken their sides, with the Republicans digging in for the Long War and the Democrats standing by for the chance to Cut and Run. This leaves precious little middle ground for third parties such as ourselves.

McDougal spent so much time carefully crafting his Iraq policy, it would be a shame to throw it away outright. After many late night, cocaine and whiskey-fueled discussions on the bus, his plan started to make more and more sense to me. After all, propping up friendly dictatorships is the strategy that won us the Cold War. Somewhere along the line we lost direction and started pursuing this misguided "spreading the seeds of democracy" policy that has caused us nothing but misery. It's time for a return to the good old days.

Of course, there's still the problem of finding a suitable dictator...

Sure, there are a lot of vicious bastards out there, but the best ones are already running their own countries. Picking one of them is out of the question. You can't solve a crisis in an unstable shithole by creating a power vacuum in another unstable shithole. In that direction lies never ending chaos. And the past five years have been rough on out of work dictators. Milosevic, Pinochet, Amin... All dead. I was beginning to fear that we would have to craft another Iraq strategy, but just when I was on the verge of giving up, I saw this news item in USA Today:

Manuel Noriega scheduled for September release