Political humor lifts spirits, dulls pain after the primary

I don’t have the heart to joke about our local politicians on the day after the election, when you just can’t beat the most famous one-liner on politics: "The problem with political jokes is they get elected."

So instead, we’ll "flASHback" on some of my favorite quotations about politics in hope of inspiring the winners and consoling the losers.

The last time I did this, a high school civics teacher groused that my choices weren’t sufficiently serious for his students’ delicate minds. Be forewarned that this isn’t high school and I’m not Mister Rogers.

On to our font of political wisdom:

» "In America any boy may become president, and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes." — Adlai Stevenson

» "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." — Groucho Marx

» "A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen." — Winston Churchill

» "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." — H.L. Mencken

» "For 7½ years I’ve worked alongside President Reagan. We’ve had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We’ve had some sex … uh … setbacks." — George H.W. Bush

» "Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." — Ronald Reagan

» "No one can fool all of the people all of the time; that’s why we have two parties." — Bob Hope

» "Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out." — George Carlin

» "The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces." — Maureen Murphy

» "If you ever injected truth into politics, you’d have no politics." — Will Rogers

» "Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don’t understand, such as working for a living." — P.J. O’Rourke

» "To err is human. To blame someone else is politics." — Hubert H. Humphrey

» "The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly,’ meaning ‘many,’ and the word ‘ticks,’ meaning ‘blood-sucking parasites.’" — Larry Hardiman

» "Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from ‘the poor’ and campaign funds from ‘the rich,’ by promising to protect each from the other." — Oscar Ameringer

» "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." — John Kenneth Galbraith

» "In politics, absurdity is not a handicap." — Napoleon

» "The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy is bulls**t." — Lars-Erik Nelson