Your guide to understanding US politics through House of Cards

American politics is a right old carry-on. They have ballot papers designed by Chad Michael Murray and they don't even have a rich family they pay a huge annual salary to nonce off teenage girls and dress up as Nazis at parties. If only House of Cards made it easier to understand WAIT IT DOES

The 14th amendment to the Constitution states that the President is allowed to stinkpalm whoever he likes, in any official setting, no matter how little effort he or she makes to conceal it.

This tableau of human-sized, stars-and-stripes-branded Milky Ways is arranged every morning in the White House Rose Garden to taunt the obese, in an initiative thought up by President Gerald Ford, who didn't care for them.

Before being sworn in as Secretary of Agriculture, the incoming official must have his groin subjected to close scrutiny. The Founding Fathers devised this check to safeguard against those with genital abnormalities or herpes holding public office, as Thomas Jefferson thought them "Men of low calibre ... groinal subversives and ne'er-do-wells".

Sometimes the full scale of America's human rights violations in occupied countries is revealed in the Situation Room, and even the President is all like WHAT THE WHAAAT

As of the Facial Hair and Public Protest Act of 1936, men with beards are not allowed to demonstrate in a public place. This man is flouting the law, in an anti-Underwood T-shirt that you can look forward to TV-savvy zeitgeisters wearing in real life this summer.

The President and First Lady must run a gauntlet of jealous Congressional aides and spiteful junior Senators every morning to reach the Oval Office, just like in the Gladiators. President Grover Cleveland was the first to insist upon this daily rite of passage, because he bloody loved the Gladiators. Even Warrior.

In a tradition dating back to the Truman era, President Underwood plays "patta-cake, patta-cake, baker's man" with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to determine whether or not the US should invade a smaller Arab nation and muck it up.

This man has been incarcerated under the Didn't You Used to be in Dexter Act of 2008, on the grounds that I know him from somewhere, and the best I can do is he's either the Ice Truck Killer off of Dexter or he's Super Hans.

Frowning in corridors is expected by any member of the Senate Select Committee on Frowning in Corridors.

The fleet of limousines that forms the Presidential motorcade was briefly replaced in the mid-1980s by twelve monster trucks. Each bore a loudhailer that would blast out Hulk Hogan's entrance music, "I Am a Real American", wherever it went. This was repealed in 1992 as a pork barrel offering to the Democrat-led Congress.
House of Cards season 3 episode drop is on Friday 27 February.