Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Psychiatrist, Treat Thyself

Hugh Cort, a psychiatrist who lives in Mountain Brook, Alabama, is running for President. And he's convinced he'll win, not only the Republican nomination, but the general election. Hugh Cort. Who's that, you ask? So does Mike Hubbard, chair of the Alabama Republican party.

"Hugh Cort? Can't say I know him," said Mike Hubbard, chairman of the Alabama Republican Party.

Told that Cort is seeking the GOP nomination for president and is from Mountain Brook, Hubbard's synapses connected.

"Oh yeah. I remember now," Hubbard said. "He introduced himself when (Dick) Cheney was in Birmingham in April for the (Jeff) Session's fundraiser. I remember he told me he was running for president and I asked, president of what? He said `president' and I said, again, president of what. When he said the United States, I guess I must have looked a little odd and said, `America?' Is he really doing that?"

But Cort has no time for doubters, even doubters who've never heard of him.
"I disagree," Cort said when told that most would not consider him a serious candidate for the nation's highest office. "I have campaigned in places like Iowa, Texas, Rhode Island and South Carolina, where I paid $35,000 out of my own pocket to get on the ballot. I am a serious candidate and I will win because I am the only candidate who will protect America."

Here's how he's planning to "protect" us: bomb Iran and Syria, send a quarter of a million more troops into Iraq, issue an executive order that will immediately end all abortion, push a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and build a wall between the US and Mexico to keep out the illegal immigrants that he says are committing millions of violent crimes.

Oh, and he's also a self-proclaimed counterterrorism expert who is the only one capable of saving us from all the suitcase nukes that Osama bin Laden has smuggled into the US. Through tunnels. From Mexico.

Come to think of it, the only reason this guy sounds any crazier than, say, Rudy Giuliani, is that he thinks he'll get elected when he isn't even on the ballot in his home state. Otherwise, he's just a conglomeration of the worst impulses of all the real Republican candidates.