If Wyclef Jean were president

The best/worst thing about Wyclef Jean running for president of Haiti is that he could actually win.

I mean, it'd be one thing if this was just some shit he was doing to keep his name hot in the streets between albums, like that time when Gary Coleman, pr0n star Mary Carey and Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California. There must have been some rule that anyone and everyone who wanted to run that year could get their name on the ballot, because it was a special recall election. If I lived in California, I might have run myself. Gary Coleman only got 10,000 votes or some shit, and he came in like fifth. With my Internets fame, it's possible that I could have finished in the top 10 and forced a special runoff election, Jello Biafra-style. I'd have to check the actual rules. I'd pull some shit like that here in St. Louis, but there's the possibility I might actually win. Then I'd have to show up to work every day (if that's required of elected officials) and pretend to give a shit.

Arnold Schwarzenegger actually won that election, but, as is the case with most elections, it probably mostly had to do with race. At least a couple of front runners in that race were hispanic. I know the late, great Peter Camejo was running as the Green Party candidate, and I believe the main Democratic candidate may have been hispanic as well. If either of them won, they may have opened the border up. Fortunately, California as a state is still non-hispanic enough to protect it from such a fate. (Not that there's anything wrong with hispanic people. It's just, they've got their own country.) Hispanics in Los Angeles have won the Jim Morrison-style battle of demographics, and hence its mayor is this fake hispanic guy (a sort of Mexican Rick Ross) who's so dumb he took the bar exam and failed it like five times, even though I'm pretty sure he's native English speaker, and it might be multiple choice, so if you already failed it four times, the answer should be obvious, via the process of elimination. You probably shouldn't be allowed to take it that many times.

I know all of this not because I give a shit what goes on out in California because I heard about it on the Adam Carolla Show, which is what I do while the rest of you fruits finish up at your jobs that pay enough that it's not all but guaranteed that something very bad is going to happen to you, it's just a matter of what. It'll be interesting to hear what he has to say about Wyclef Jean running for president of Haiti. You might recall that he got into a bit of trouble earlier this year for talking shit about the Philippines, where the boxer Manny Pacquiao is either running for office, or might actually be some sort of elected official. This despite the fact that he's a motherfucking prize fighter, beating up Mexicans over here in the US, and my father says he might be on steroids, which would make him a cheater, which is no kind of behavior for an elected official. Filipino people were pissed. Way more pissed than I'd be, if someone from Canada tried to get on me for Arnold Schwarzenegger being the governor of California. (Though I'd take some time to explain to him the unique racial dynamic in that election.) I'm not sure how you'd go about measuring this, but Filipinos might be the most proud people in the world, despite themselves. With all due respect to Puerto Ricans.

Running for president of an entire country is obviously a much more significant feat than running for congress or some shit in the Philippines. Congress isn't even that big a deal here in the US, where we have decent building codes. It's not like you have to govern anything. You just have to win an election. Then you could stay in office for like 50 years, as long as you don't get caught fucking another guy. A couple of people from '90s-era seasons of the Real World are running in elections this fall. (Alas, Syrus from the Boston season isn't one of them.) But Haiti is a much more fucked up country than the Philippines. Lest we forget, Filipinos are part-Asian. It's not like they don't have the mental capacity. And the coastline of the Philippines is filled with ports, where sailors have sex with local prostitutes, which I'm sure contributes a lot to the economy. Haiti is surrounded by water on three sides, but who wants to have sex with a Haitian woman? Especially with the Dominican Republic so close by. The only Haitian woman who interests me is the chick from the Arcade Fire, and she's already married to Win Butler. Any suggestion that the Haitian people would definitely know better than to elect Wyclef Jean president is rendered moot by the fact that 300,000 of them died in an earthquake that may not have awoken me, if it happened before 10:00 a.m., especially if I'd been drinking the night before. Clearly, there's been an ability deficit in crucial leadership positions in Haiti before, and there might be again.