Today’s Vocabulary Word: Altacocker

altacocker /al-tə-kɐ-ker/ or /al-tə-kɐ-kə/ n, slang, from Yiddish : old shit

“My mother’s friend looked at Bernie Sanders and rolled her eyes. ‘I can’t believing I’m going to vote for this altacocker.'”

I still trying to get a whole bunch of off-line things done, but I came across a paragraph today that nearly made me do a spit-take on my keyboard and I thought I’d share it with everyone.

James Howard Kunstler has an amusing post up at the moment about why our choice of candidates is so obviously lousy. He informs us, “The reason is that the problems are unfixable, at least not within the acceptable terms of the zeitgeist, namely: the secret wish to keep all the rackets going at all costs.” Essentially, the shit is going to hit the fan and no sensible person will want to be sitting in the oval office when that happens. The following paragraph made me laugh out loud:

It must be obvious that the next occupant of the White House will preside over the implosion of all these arrangements since, in the immortal words of economist Herb Stein, if something can’t go on forever, it will stop. So the only individuals left seeking the position are 1) An inarticulate reality TV buffoon; 2) a war-happy evangelical maniac; 3) a narcissistic monster of entitlement whose “turn” it is to hold the country’s highest office; and 4) a valiant but quixotic self-proclaimed socialist altacocker who might have walked off the set of Welcome Back Kotter, 40^th Reunion Special. These are the ones left standing halfway to the conventions. Nobody else in his, her, it, xe, or they right mind wants to be handed this schwag-bag of doom.

I haven’t heard the word “altacocker” in ages, though it was one that my mother’s friends used to use, especially as they got older and so did their friends.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with “Welcome Back Kotter,” it was a U.S. television sitcom, aired during the seventies, about students at a high school in Brooklyn. The following video might give you a flavor.

Kuntsler goes on to note that, while the GOP establishment would like to find a more respectable candidate, they may have difficulty finding a willing victim.

But what poor shmo will they have to drag to the podium to get this odious thing done? Who wants to be the guy in the Oval Office when Janet Yellen comes in some muggy DC morning and says, “Uh, sir (ma’am)… that sucker you heard was gonna go down…? Well, uh, it just did.”

I keep looking at the news regarding the primaries and find myself shaking my head wondering how we got here.

I’m starting to think maybe we should just hold a lottery.