Roseanne Barr—that lady with the clipboard and all the buttons who yells at you outside the coffee shop, and occasionally stars in television shows—has made good on her promise from last summer and officially filed paperwork to become your next presidential candidate, presuming that you have not already pinned all of your idealistic but totally imaginary hopes on Ron Paul. Appropriately, Barr declared her intentions to run for the Green Party nomination on her exhaustive, exhausting Twitter feed, saying, “I will run until the convention in July in Baltimore-I fully expect Jill Stein 2b the nominee& I will support her, but til then-I'll serve”—acknowledging that she probably doesn’t have a genuine chance at securing the nomination, but that she wants to use her campaign to “bring press attention 2 the Green Party and speak at its convention.” Because what better way to get people to take the Green Party seriously than to draft Roseanne Barr as a candidate—especially given that, unfortunately, “an awesome Bob Marley T-shirt” is unelectable?
For what it’s worth, Roseanne’s intentions are good: She’s a vocal champion of the “99 percent,” the middle class, small business, “#Europeanstyle” healthcare, women’s and gay rights, and her platform involves ending all war, “kicking out the FED-those to whom all this fake debt is owed,” and forgiving all student loans, mortgage, and credit card debt. In fact, if you can overlook her suspiciously self-serving plan to make "nuts the new source of protein rather than meat" and also make people pay attention to Roseanne, most of her demands echo those of all activists, utopian dreamers, and flyers with way too many words on them that we've seen over the last several decades.
And they’re certainly better articulated than her now-abandoned “Green Tea Party” platform of 2010, where her three-part plan for solving the nation’s problems involved legalizing hemp, putting more women in charge, and “outlawing bullshit.” At the time, she also announced plans to anoint herself "Pirate Queen" and erect a "Holy and Blessed Guillotine" with which to behead corporate pirates and pedophiles, shortly before moving on to becoming Prime Minister of Israel and ending their conflict with Palestine "by simply paying the Palestinian people not to shoot at the Israelis!" Read it! It has lots of compelling exclamation points!
But those were headier days. Roseanne says her newly adopted Green Party platform is relatively more “intelligent and more realistic” than her old one—though it’s still summed up by the grandiose slogan, “Vote for me, I’ll fix this shit!” And after scaling back her hopes to institute a new age of "Rose-Anarchy," like all third-party candidates before her, she now has the very pragmatic goal of simply “sending a message." Still, the Green Party is marginalized and ridiculed enough without having Roseanne be its mascot. Are we sure that Bob Marley T-shirt can’t be convinced to run instead? [via L.A. Times]