Doug Clark: Roskelley’s candidacy is all downhill from here

Welcome to Clark Knows It All.

I will now provide answers to the pressing problems that nag at us like a stage mother at a recital.

Let’s begin.

Problem 1. The Roskelley runaround.

John Roskelley is a world-class mountaineer and small-time Democrat who has obviously run out of challenges.

Once, scaling Everest was Roskelley’s idea of high adventure. Now it is trying to reclaim the seat he once held on the Spokane County Board of Commissioners.

On the Mountaineering Danger Meter, this is listed as on par with riding the River Park Square escalator up to the food court.

The only obstacle facing Roskelley is that he now lives in Guam or Tukwila, which, Republicans argue, violates the residency requirements as spelled out in some law nobody’s ever heard of.

To wit: County commissioners must reside within the same land mass they are screwing over.

Incumbent Commissioner Todd Mielke, Roskelley’s opponent, reacted to this residency issue by expressing fake outrage and a real lawsuit.

Mielke makes the very good argument that Roskelley shouldn’t get his name on the ballot because, to paraphrase, “He doesn’t live here and, besides, there’s a really good chance he might beat me.”

Roskelley responds by essentially saying, “Aw, get off my back, Toad.”

Roskelley, I believe, should be allowed to run as planned.

But only if he moves into one of his tents pitched on some undeveloped property that Roskelley supposedly owns in the legal district.

In addition, Roskelley must promise that, after pounding Mielke like a piñata, he will NEVER spend so much as a plugged nickel of taxpayer money on something as stupid as an Airway Heights racetrack.

Problem 2. MAC attack.

Why was Forrest Rodgers fired after spending less than a year as executive director of Spokane’s Museum of Arts and Culture?

And did it have anything to do with becoming amorously involved with one of those nudie Rubens paintings?

We may never know.

But there’s a bigger issue here, and that is: Why do we even have a museum that has the word “culture” in the title?

This is Spokane, after all.

Our idea of fine sculpture is the garbage goat that sucks up trash at Riverfront Park.

I went to the MAC once to see this traveling art exhibit by some dude named Monet.

What a rip-off. They had all these big paintings of water lilies that were out of focus.

I say we close the MAC and turn it into a cool museum like the one I went through at the Tropicana in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago.

It was called the Mob Attraction. The whole thing was about the killers and crooks who transformed acres of dry, worthless desert into David Copperfield’s retirement home.

The museum featured actors who played the parts of mobsters and also glass cases filled with brass knuckles and assorted weaponry. I went through it with my son, Ben, and at the end we got rubbed out in a blaze of gunfire.

This was way better than looking at blurry flowers.

So let’s turn the MAC into an educational and interactive tribute to our local brand of organized crime.

The Spokane Police Guild Museum, we could call it.

Problem 3. Saving the planet.

I’m not a superstitious guy. And I certainly don’t buy into all this doomsday talk about how the world will end in 2012.

At least, I didn’t believe it.

Then last week my buddy and political writer Jim Camden convinced me to start digging a backyard bunker.

He did it by reporting that perennial candidate Barb Lampert would NOT be running for office this year.

If that isn’t a sign of the impending apocalypse, what is?

Lampert has mounted a crackpot run in every election since Prohibition was up for a vote.

And now – in 2012, mind you – we’re supposed to believe that she was “just too busy with other things” to launch her usual failed campaign?

I see only one way to possibly ward off doomsday: Lampert the write-in candidate.

If you care anything about saving the planet, Lampert’s name must be written in in at least one race on every ballot.

I’m not 100 percent sure that even this will keep us from spiraling into the abyss. But it’s all we have, my friends. It’s all we have.