Why Is 2024 Beginning to Look Like 1996?

Yesterday my sister sent me this great story out of Oklahoma about a guy named Joe Exotic who has announced a 2024 Presidential bid. The guy’s real name is Joe Maldonado-Passage, and he got his nickname because he used to run a small, personally owned zoo in Wynnewood, OK whose animal population consisted primarily of some big cats.

Currently however, Joe has another gig, which is serving a 21-year federal sentence after being convicted on multiple charges involving the mis-treatment of wild animals and hiring someone to kill an animal-rights activist who was giving him a pain in the ass.

Joe says he’s confident he can ‘represent all the people’ although he hasn’t yet published a list of issues on which he plans to campaign from his jail cell. But his promise to represent everyone appears to be based on a self-description which says: “I am gay, I am in prison for now, I used drugs in the past, I had more then one boyfriend at once.” [His misspelling, not mine.]

Sounds like a current Member of Congress from Long Island who just filed papers to run again in 2024, doesn’t it? I can just see George Santos coming down to the federal penitentiary where Joe Exotic is an inmate and demanding that the guy be given early release so the two of them can form a new party to run for President next year.