A winning game plan
Cynical politicians count on voter stupidity...
Sometimes you have to wonder if politicians are really, really stupid or just think the rest of us are and I had that very thought when I read that Republicans were criticizing Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson for being “soft on crime.”
Since those Republicans think being “soft on crime” is a bad thing, now seemed like an excellent time to remind people that Donald Trump had quite a few administration officials and associates charged with crimes which doesn’t seem to bother Republicans all that much and here’s the most recent article I could find about that:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/21/politics/tom-barrack-trump-arrested/index.html
Despite Donald Trump’s brushes with the law, most Republicans still kiss his ass and support him and his possible return to the White House (or at least say they do so they don’t piss off Trump supporters) so if Ketanji Brown Jackson is soft on crime it seems safe to say there’s a lot of that going around Washington, D.C. these days.
Also…
Not that long ago Republicans tried to claim the Ukraine situation was caused by Joe Biden being soft on Vladimir Putin, so I wrote a piece reminding people that Donald Trump invited Putin to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and was hoping to wear Vlad’s letter sweater which probably wouldn’t fit because Vlad is 5’ 5” and looks to be in shape for an old dude and The Donald is 6’ 3” and looks like you could use his ass as a drive-in movie screen.
So are Republicans oblivious to their hypocrisy or do they think the rest of us can’t put 2 and 2 together?
Now here’s an article about the bad-faith questions and baseless allegations being made by Senate Republicans which led me to draw a cartoon questioning whether Ketanji Brown Jackson was actually a “first” or yet another example of a minority being treated with disrespect:
On the other hand…
If politicians think the general public is less than brilliant and they can get away with being wildly hypocritical because we’re not smart enough to make some fairly obvious connections, they have quite a bit of evidence on their side and here’s some of it:
Turns out there’s a French Canadian dish which consists of French fries covered with gravy and cheese curds (often served with a side order of myocardial infarction) and it’s called “poutine.”
And because the French spelling of “Putin” is “Poutine” some people think the dish has something to do with honoring Vladimir Putin and have been calling restaurants who have poutine on the menu to issue insults and threats.
Which seems pretty dumb, but let’s not forget there are also people who thought the coronavirus had something to do with Mexican beer and now here’s an article about that:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cornavirus-corona-beer-they-have-nothing-to-do-with-each-other/
If you actually are really, really dumb the world has been telling you that for a long, long time (probably starting with the D+ you got in that kindergarten finger-painting class) and since you have a long track record of being wrong and misinformed about all kinds of subjects, you’d think you’d eventually learn to shut the fuck up, but apparently part of being really, really dumb is not realizing you are really, really dumb, so you think the world needs to hear your opinions about just about everything and you call restaurants you never go to and complain about a dish you’ve never eaten or heard of.
And if you’re dumb and lazy, you just stay at home and share your opinions by drawing cartoons and writing a blog.
(Wow…I was right in the middle of describing stuff that dumb, opinionated people do and the description started to sound way too familiar.)
Moving on in the nick of time…
One of my favorite examples of being too dumb to live occurred when Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton needed a liver transplant and some overly enthusiastic football fans offered to give him one of theirs, under the impression they had two of them – like kidneys – apparently unaware that livers come one to a customer.
And just in case you think I made that up, here’s an article on that:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-02-04-9902040063-story.html
We’re having a heat wave…a tropical heat wave
Speaking of being dumb: I have no idea why some important things seem so hard to remember – birthdays, anniversary dates and the current location of my car keys – and other useless nonsense seems super-glued permanently into my brain, like the fact that I can’t think of the phrase “heat wave” without it being closely followed by the next line in the song sung by Marilyn Monroe, which reminds me that I once heard a story about working with Marilyn Monroe and the actor that told the story said it was really exhausting because you had to be perfect in every single take because if Marilyn ever got one right, that’s the take they would use.
Anyway…
Recently, both the North and South Poles had temperatures 50 degrees higher than average and while “experts” say you can’t attribute that solely to climate change, they did admit it was “dramatic” and “alarming” and while my weather expertise is limited to looking out the window (which often puts me one step ahead of the meteorologists on TV) I gotta think climate change didn’t help.
And here’s an article about that:
https://www.livescience.com/arctic-and-antarctica-simultaneous-heatwaves
I recently read an article in which one of those weather experts said that when we first heard about climate change we thought it was something our kids or grandkids would deal with and the expert said we were wrong; it’s happening right now this minute and it’s only going to get worse.
So maybe those cynical politicians have a point
Despite the fact that polar bears are suffering heat stroke, we don’t have the political will to do anything about it and often deal with climate change by burying our heads in the sand and pretending it’s not happening, which leads us to this next quote:
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”
That was supposedly said by H.L. Mencken (which makes we wonder if his close friends called him “H”), but I don’t know how seriously you want to take Mencken’s opinions because of all the styles he could have chosen, he went with this haircut:
And once wrote “War is a good thing” which sounds like something you say if you’ve never been in one, so it sounds like Mencken had some off days, but also defined democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses” and if cynical politicians are counting on people being dumb, it sounds like they just might have a winning game plan.
If I haven’t already ruined it for you, have a nice day.
Loved all your asides in this one.
Wish I could attach one of the all time great letters (to Marilyn Monroe from John Steinbeck) in here. Maybe I’ll try fb.