"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."
-Jim (played by Gene Wilder), Blazing Saddles
I made the mistake of reading the news this morning. It's the calm before the storm next month, but still plenty about which to shake one's head.
The unfortunate hurricane victims of far western North Carolina, still digging through the rubble of their lives after Hurricane Helene, waiting for help from their state government while an "aid" bill that contains no actual aid, but merely includes a pile of procedural measures meant to wrest political control from a Democratic governor is stalled in Raleigh with the Republican supermajority that controls the legislature.
So there they sit, businesses shuttered, homes wrecked, roads washed out, while the party in power uses them as pawns to grab still more power.
But I don't feel sorry for them. Here's how they voted five weeks ago.
Poor Buncombe County, the blue speck in the lower left. That's Asheville. They have the same problem as Corning: a progressive, smart, culturally diverse community surrounded by morons. I don't have an explanation for tiny Ashe County to the north voting for Harris--they also voted for Biden in 2020.
In any event, screw you guys. Enjoy squatting in your debris pile. Elections have consequences.
Meanwhile, the incoming administration promises "warrior commissions" to try and cashier senior officers out of the military for being too "woke", which presumably means being too concerned with inclusion of the women and minorities who make up a huge swath of the armed forces. I understand our poor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Charles Brown, stands at the top of the list of unreliables.
So these geniuses plan to decapitate the military as we stand on the cusp of a two-front, or maybe three-front war, against fairly capable adversaries. The last time this was tried, if memory serves, was when Stalin purged the general staff in the 1930s, a move that's cited by many historians as the primary reason the Soviets spent their first two years in World War II taking such a drubbing--they'd eliminated an entire generation of senior leadership, many with combat experience, just as the Germans were about to pour across the border.
Oh, and how did our boys in uniform vote in 2024? Counting veterans, overwhelmingly for The Donald.
So screw you too. Enjoy your time in a foxhole being led by some dimwit whose primary qualification for the job is fealty to Dear Leader. And vets, you may want to pay attention to what they're saying about the surfeit of riches that is being a disabled veteran.
Bad news for us as a country, of course. But maybe necessary. Elections have consequences.
I ran across a survey in the NYT yesterday of fourteen voters who cast their ballots for Trump, explaining why they did it and what they hoped for the future. My favorite blogger, Prof. Paul Campos over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, apparently read the same piece, with the same sense of revulsion:
All complete dumbshits, and all convinced they've ushered in a golden era in American history by voting for a prevaricating sex criminal.
But Campos ends on an upbeat note, as required in American letters these days.
I will say that this kind of thing does cheer me up in a perverse but real way, in that it drives home the extent to which the Ariana Grande Theory of Politics is valid. Huge swaths of the populace are ignorant morons rather than literal Nazis. So that’s the good news . . .
So maybe it's a little mean spirited of me to hope these people suffer the consequences of their stupidity. It's like trying to hold Dean the Cat responsible for some decision, as if his feline brain makes him responsible for his actions.
But Dean does understand a whack on the nose when he jumps on the counter and starts eating the rib roast. Enough vigorous nose thwacks and he changes his behavior. Perhaps the next four years will be the nose thwack these people need, but I'm guessing not. Instead, as P and I have discussed over happy hour many times, this agenda of MAGA 2024 is bound to fail, perhaps spectacularly, and if history is any guide, instead of owning the failure his mob will start looking for political unreliables to blame for it all.
By then we'll likely be on Corfu living our best life, just far enough away from Athens that Ambassador Guilfoyle won't pay us any mind.