When I voted last week, I noticed Kanye West’s name on the mail-in ballot.
Despite all the negative campaigning in the ongoing presidential race, almost nothing has been said about the Grammy-winning rap superstar’s bid for the White House.
The Utah ballot lists West as “unaffiliated,” but he’s on record as saying he’s running under the “Birthday Party” banner because if he wins, it will be just like everyone having a birthday party.
Even though he’s on the ballot in the Beehive State, I would have to go with the odds of Kanye winning at somewhere around a billionth of 1 percent.
There is a lot that needs to be done to get America back on track, but West isn’t the guy to do it. Some of his campaign promises/suggestions/hints/outright idiocies include:
• The return of prayer to public schools, which he insists will revitalize our nation’s commitment to faith.
Presumably West means Christian prayer as opposed to just any old prayer, including those offered up to pagan gods and/or Satan.
While I don’t agree with this idea, I can see merit in ritually cutting the head off a chicken every morning. Students should understand where the food in the cafeteria originates.
• West has also promised giving everyone who has a baby $1 million. Currently, about 4 million babies are born every year in the United States.
That amounts to $4 trillion a year if the number of births remained the same — which it wouldn’t.
See, right now people generally get pregnant because they want to, they were drunk, or they got carried away in the heat of the moment. But as one of the country’s leading experts on irresponsibility, I can assure everyone that it’s possible to throw a lot of caution to the wind for a million bucks.
• Paying people to have babies would take care of another of West’s campaign goals, which is to outlaw abortion. No more aborting a perfectly viable million bucks.
Undoubtedly, a population explosion would occur, but “President” West has a fix for that as well. He says “shooting guns are fun” and if people stopped having easy access to this kind of fun, we would soon be “invaded and enslaved by other countries.”
Speaking of America’s nasty history regarding slavery, West needs to educate himself about that before he puts his feet in his mouth again with comments like the following:
“Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves. She just had the slaves go work for other white people.”
In addition to having my calls to West’s campaign office go unreturned, I have been unable to get his running mate, Michelle Tidball, on the phone as well.
It’s rumored that West, if elected, would attempt to push the 2009th amendment — known as the “Shut up, Woman. I’m Talking” amendment — through Congress.
It’s probably not true, but there is a precedent for it. West snatched the microphone away from Taylor Swift in the middle of her 2009 MTV acceptance speech for Best Female Video so he could tell the audience that Beyonce was more deserving.
It might be nice to get Tidball’s take on that amendment. I don’t know a lot about her. But somebody needs to clue Yeezus into the fact that times have changed since he was rapping negatively about women. He doesn’t want to spend the first year of his presidency being repeatedly knocked unconscious.
Robert Kirby is The Salt Lake Tribune’s humor columnist. Follow Kirby on Facebook.
