Last week I was approached via email by a well-meaning but naïve woman in Texas who wished to enlist my aid in helping her compile a list of the good and bad characteristics of all the potential presidential candidates coming up in 2016. Her plan is to inform the public on who would be better: Jeb or Hillary or one of the others.

In the day of honest elections, this might have been a noble venture, but I gave up on that after the BROTHERHOOD forced Ronald Reagan to place (an unwanted) George HW Bush on the Republican ticket with him in 1980 and then, through an attempted murder, almost elevated GHWB into the Oval Office. The attempt alone was enough for the coup to succeed, as Bush became the power behind the throne anyway (while Ronnie was the talking head and napped a lot) and was the real president for all twelve years, not just his last four. Reagan, incidentally, was the last president I voted for, and I didn’t even bother with that on his second go-round in 1984.

Nevertheless, I know that this lady is serious, and I want to help her realize her dreams, and here is how she can do it:

Dear Jan,

Due to your patriotic diligence toward retrieving our nation, I have made arrangements through my secret international contacts to put you in charge of the nation’s money supply. Starting today, only you have the (legal) right and power to do anything you want because now you can buy anything you want. Only you can create this “money,” and everybody else has to take it and use it and, of course, work for it. You have unlimited power beyond any imagined restriction.

About the only thing you have to relinquish is your moral code, Christian ethics, spirit of fairness and all personal regard for the well-being of your fellow man – including whether he or she lives or dies.

Now that you have this omnipotent power, you can begin making the arrangements to place the candidate of your choice in the White House in 2016, which seems to be important to you. Ask Jimmy Carter how an obscure peanut farmer from Georgia could have sixty (60) paid campaign workers on his staff in Ohio the first day he stepped up to the Cincinnati speaker’s podium in January of 1976. At ninety-one, he just might not need to fear anymore telling you all about it. But you are about to find out anyway.

For example, let’s say that, after forty years of this Women’s Lib movement, you believe it is time we had a female president, so you make the decision to back the obvious choice –Hillary Clinton – and begin to fund her campaign with whatever and whenever it is needed. You also begin funneling huge amounts of funds to news media in order to maintain the control over all reporters of what is going to be said and printed about her past and present – and how great she is going to be for the future. The country must be inundated with this, and nothing can be told that even suggests her past extra-marital affairs and lesbianism – and America must never be reminded of her failure at Benghazi while Secretary of State.

You will have fun with this for propaganda and creative image improvement, and you can use the same tool to plant outrageous stories about her opponent that are not true, so many that they become impossible to defend against. And when the public debates take place, you can engineer the whole production by seeing that the host gives her the most attention and her strongest opponent the least (ask Ron Paul about this).

However, all this really is an archaic approach to what is a simple solution in this modern hi-tech age. You can get your candidate elected these days by just spreading a few bucks around at the larger precincts of some of the primaries of the “swing states” on Election Day. No, not the old fashioned way of buying votes. You can’t trust that. You buy the vote counters, the ones fixing the electronic boxes to record whatever is programmed instead of what lever is pulled. That’s the new American way.

But for you, Jan, all this will be petty stuff. Why would you want to bother about getting someone elected when you can own the President anyway by simply funding both sides and letting the chips fall where they may. Why not go for bigger things and start a war? That’s where the real profit and control is, and you can capture a whole nation. Want to reap the drug harvest of Afghanistan? Fake a war over there. Want Iraq’s oil? Have your news media demonize Saddam Hussein and then send your boys after him. Oh, sorry. Lil’ Georgie beat you to those two, but you get the idea. And don’t ever forget to keep those military jets flying over the football stadiums every weekend during the halftime speeches about how “our boys” (and a few girls now) are keeping this nation free. Never mind that not one of the 142 nations the U. S. military now occupies has ever attacked our shores, as that is one more thing of which you don’t remind the people. You’ve got bigger things to do.

Such as dealing with those recalcitrant congressmen that cannot be bought. You know, those few that value their oaths and honor and consciences and a good night’s sleep over a few extra million bucks when they retire. “Sammy from Miami” won’t cost you much, and hit men are everywhere – especially when you assure them that you have already taken care of the investigation cover-up and can not only guarantee his safety but another high-paying job down the road soon. Remember Vince Foster? How about Dr. Larry McDonald? Shucks, Jan, with your money now, you can even hire the Russian Air Force to shoot him right out of the sky. Never mind the 268 others on board, as in 1983 – that’s what we call “collateral damage” these days, and if you think it’s going to bother you, you should refer to paragraph #2 above.

And if the idea of murdering undesirables is still just too distasteful (you’ll get used to it), there is always the mickey-in-the-drink ploy (Newt Gingrich may know some details). It certainly is no secret that some Congressmen over-indulge at the DC hotel cocktail parties every week, so for one to get a room upstairs at the last minute to “sleep it off” is no surprise, even to his own family. But when he gets a visit from your colleagues in his office the next week and is shown the embarrassing photos and video of him in bed with a 10-year-old boy, it is quite a shock to him for sure. Then when he is told, “I guess we know how you are going to vote on the So & So bill this week, don’t we Senator,” he is owned by you. You can buy anything.

That’s the power you now wield, Jan, so you can stop wasting your time with which candidate you should be campaigning for in 2016. Leave silly folly like that to the Mike Malloys of the world.

There will never be another honest election in this country until we have the restoration of honest money. Meanwhile, you are in charge.

During my formative years, whenever I would voice my opinion on some current event and offer my teenaged solution to a problem I really knew little about, both my dad and my uncle used to have a favorite saying to counter my ignorance. They had learned it growing up, too; from their own papa, who presumably had learned it from his.

“You’re born, but you’re not dead yet,” sums up more succinctly the homespun wisdom garnered from a lifetime of experience better than any phrase ever recorded by any of the scholars throughout history, I reckon.