Charles Barkey Will Always Be A Republican At Heart... But A Weird One

I don't know much about basketball but one of the perks of becoming president of Reprise is that I got the Lakers seats and season tickets that belonged to the company's founder. The company's founder was Frank Sinatra. The Coliseum had a best seat in the house. It wasn't Jack Nicholson's; it was mine. When the Laker Girls kicked, one of their feet came within a few inches of my nose. I even got to feel like I knew some of the Lakers players. I never got to know Charles Barkley though; never met the guy, even though we shared a birthday, February 20, albeit a few years apart.

Barkley always seemed like a weird guy to me though. For one thing, he was a Republican and used to talk about running for governor of Alabama. At one point he said he stopped being a Republican because "they lost their minds." In 2006 he managed to offend an awful lot of people while he was explaining how he would be a great governor of Alabama: "[T]he government is full of it. Republicans and Democrats want to argue over stuff that's not important, like gay marriage or the war in Iraq or illegal immigration... When I run-- if I run-- we're going to talk about real issues like improving our schools, cleaning up our neighborhoods of drugs and crime and making Alabama a better place for all people."

Then the supposed future Republican candidate for governor of Alabama endorsed Obama but said he's an Independent, not a Democrat or a Republican. "The Republicans are full of it; the Democrats are a little less full of it." True that!

Anyway, that crazy Republican, who says he thinks Kasich is the best guy running, more inspiring than Hillary or Bernie, says he's pro-gay marriage and pro-Choice and that the word "conservative" makes him "sick to my stomach." More recently he applauded a Missouri grand jury for not indicting the police officer who murdered Michael Brown, referring to the Ferguson protesters as "scumbags" and threw in his support for George Zimmerman in the Taryvon Martin murder. You kind of see the Republican aspect there, right?

Sunday he was on CNN saying how he wasn't inspired by Bernie or Hillary when he said he feels "bad for the American people. It’s the greatest country in the world, but what politics in America has become about is rich people screwing poor people. I feel sadness more than anything about how they’re dividing us up. We have made this thing about rich against poor, black against white, white against Hispanic, and that’s just not the way the greatest country in the world should operate. It has not enhanced the process."

At least he's not Dennis Rodman, Latrell Sprewell or Frank Kaminsky, basketball players who have been taken in by Trump. Oh, and The General... Bob Knight, no longer head coach of the Hoosiers (or even TexasTech), just another violent Trumpster.

OK, so support Bernie... not John Kasich!