These are not just those "wacky foreigner" B.S. stories the media likes to bullshit us with every once in a while. Thanks to various protest votes, gaffes, and other strange curveballs, America has seen dogs, cats, mules, and Austrian bodybuilders voted into some political position or another over the years.

Of course, there's a limit to how high up the mountain a politician can survive with this particular climbing equipment. As folks like Ben Carson, Rick Santorum, and Vermin Supreme (it's worth noting that, as far as we know, only one of these people is actually a performance artist) have helpfully and repeatedly demonstrated, the joke candidates -- whether deliberate or accidental -- tend to remain decidedly in the fringe when it comes to serious candidacies of the leader-of-the-free-world sort.

It's just that even within a single nation, political and cultural sensibilities vary widely, and for a politician, there's no such thing as mainstream appeal. Even the most popular politician will always have nearly half of the nation against them, solely because of their party alignment. The people who support, say, Jeb Bush can easily consider someone like Bernie Sanders a senile softie who wants to turn the whole nation into a hippie hug-a-thon, while Sanders' proponents consider Bush to be yet another puppet upholder of family traditions of invading desert countries. But for their own camps, both are heroes, so those are the eyes they shape their public image for, aiming for the lowest common denominator to rake in as many semi-like-minded supporters as they can.

As a flipside of that coin, this creates a weird situation where that image can be downright cartoonish to everyone else -- which is most of the people. Hell, if you support Ted Cruz, there's a very fair chance you see the "Fight me, bro" debate challenge he threw at Obama as a brave, honorable move instead of, say, a weaselly attempt at attention and some cheap pops.

The hero principle gets even more ridiculous on the global scale, where cultural differences further muddy the image puddle. Consider Vladimir Putin, who's notorious for crafting his public image as a Chuck Norrisian memetic badass, thanks to carefully chosen ubermensch imagery like this:

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images News/Getty Images
"Bond villain? I eat Bond villains."

To the average Westerner, an image of a president straight-up Monty Burnsing in a supervillain submarine is something you'd expect to see in a bad action movie. But for a considerable segment of his own citizens, he's the term "hardcore" personified, because he's their president, on their side. "I will fight for you. I will protect you." Meanwhile, I'll bet that many of those same Russians are looking at patriotic photo-ops like this:

Reuters/Larry Downing via SMH
"Can we do the volleyball scene with Iceman next?"

... and shaking their heads. "God-fucking-dammit; those Americans are at it again. Why must they turn their presidents into cartoon superheroes?"

"Hold on, Pauli, you ignorant sack of genital mucus," you say. "You know you can't base a claim about the entire political scene being dominated by arbitrarily decided enemies on one man's crusade for unholy stupidity, right?" This is correct, so I'm not. Also, "sack of genital mucus"? Holy crap, I want to high-five you for having such a colorful palette of insults, straw man I just made up.

Friend, let's face it: Inventing enemies is not just a common political behavior; it's a great fuckin' way to recognize you're mentally wearing a stormtrooper uniform and taking orders from asshole space knights voiced by James Earl Jones. I'm going to trust you and assume I won't have to mention the asshole antics certain mustachioed Soviet and German leaders pulled off with variations of this particular smoke-and-mirrors tactic a mere handful of decades ago. Shit, America once threw freaking George Takei in an internment camp, along with, oh, 120,000 or so of his American peers. George Takei.

You'd expect humanity would have taken a hint and stopped the whole arbitrary-enemy-inventin' thing, because it should be apparent by now that it's nothing but a tool to hurt people. So why do we keep that shit up? Maybe it's because ...

And it is a sign of the times. Remember, this isn't Trump's first rodeo: He gave candidacy a shot in 2000 as well, backing ass-backwardly off the Reformist party race while, funnily enough, throwing Nazi accusations at his opponents. Today, he thrives, and the question is less about how he'll shoot himself in the foot and more: What if he doesn't? This is what's currently happening on a global scale; right-wing fringe characters previously treated as little more than bad jokes are crawling out of the woodwork, because the current atmosphere allows them to employ their strategies of choice to the absolute max ... and succeed. France has Marine le Pen, whose views on race would have seemed excessive in the pre-Civil War South, and her National Front party is currently sweeping the floor with the two biggest parties in her country. Hungary is actively flirting with neo-fascism and building straight-up razor wire fences. Hell, everyone's at it: Austria, the U.K., Finland, even freaking Sweden have all seen the emergence and success of far-right movements in recent years.

The why of it is simple supply and demand: When the world is afraid, the people who profit are the people who thrive on fear and hate. For what it's worth, my belief is that it's eventually going to go away. History has shown that extremist bullshit rarely lasts in democratic countries: Voters are reactionary creatures, so the far-right will eventually blunder and begin to falter, people will move on to other things, and these ideologies will crawl back to the marginal and once again bide their time. Still, until this shift happens (surely it will happen, guys? Guys?), chances are we're looking at some ... interesting times. That was pretty dark for a comedy article. Have a picture of some animals.

gurinaleksandr/iStock/Getty Images
Silently judging humanity, as is their right.

Pauli's next column will probably be about farts. Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.

This wouldn't be the first time being batshit crazy has swayed voters. See how Francois Hollande won the presidency with a Kanye West song in 5 Insane Strategies That Won Elections (And Changed History), and learn that politics has been ridiculously stupid throughout time in 5 Presidential Elections Even Dumber Than This One (Somehow).

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