. . . . nowhere NEAR a presidential campaign.

There was a presidential candidate once who was a Roman Catholic. He had to spend a great deal of time trying to convince his country's citizens that he would not allow that to influence his presidency. And he wasn't even all that great a Catholic. I just can't imagine that a swaggering asshole who holds a public religious revival featuring the most extreme of his country's religious extremists as a way to kick off his campaign, a man who endorses the idea of having his state secede from the union, a man who walks around firing handguns, I can't imagine that man ever getting to a primary, let alone a campaign.

Neither can I imagine a woman who is religious zealot, a woman married to another religious zealot, a woman who has a questionable degree from a questionable university that preaches questionable philosophy that is arguably far out of the mainstream, a woman who is married to a man who has a business performing quack cures, I can't imagine that woman coming into the same room as a presidential candidate might enter.

Yet here we are, in early 21st Century America, witnessing those very things.

You know, I look around and I SWEAR this is the same place where I grew up. But I know if can't be. Not with this sort of shit happening. Not when I hear the news telling me that the man and the woman described above are taken seriously as presidential candidates.