THE SPEECH

You can never go wrong if you follow the native wisdom of Mark Twain. One of his many memorable  sayings is:

 

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lighting and the lightnin' bug."

President Biden delivered the lighting and that lightning ignited a conflagration.

Our former friends on the right have been merciless in attacking President Brandon, I mean Biden. It's not just attacking his 81 year-old gait. "He's old, he's infirm, he's even suffering dementia" according to them. These rhetorical gems are delivered in service to a narcissistic fellow who actually said that he would be a dictator "only on day one". That would be an historical first! He also said he wanted to be a Unitary executive, whatever that means. Whatever that means, it most surely leaves Congress out of the loop. And finally, he wants to be a President in a "post-Constitutional America". This is the scary thing because Republicans are lousy users of words. They are so arrogant that they believe they can say whatever hyperbolic insult that drops out of their brain pan and onto their tongue, and there is somebody stupid enough to repeat it as scripture. Hyperbole, according to Oxford Languages, which I'm pretty sure is not the shortened version of Oxen Ford, Kentucky, means "exaggerated statements or claims" (and here they think the definition ends, but it doesn't) the next phrase beyond the comma is, "not meant to be taken seriously". Exaggerated statements or claims, not meant to be taken seriously. Hmmmm.

If you want to know who uses hyperbole skillfully, listen to a comedian, especially a satirist. This awkward use of hyperbole is why there have been few notable right wing comedians since the late, great, P J O'Roarke, who once said, "The Democrats are the party that Will tell you that government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass from your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and they get elected and prove it". I want to pause here a moment to speculate on why this statement is effective.

1) Government does make you smarter, thanks to public schools. Think of what may happen if those public schools were for-profit schools, afraid to teach uncomfortable history. 2) government did make us taller. My dad was a scrawny kid of 17 when he enlisted in the army for WWII. He was the eighth child from a family of 9 kids and a mother who struggled to be ambidextrous, while living hand-to-mouth. When he reported for duty he was 5'10" and 160 lbs. He came out of WWII 6'2" and 200lbs. From eating C-rations. Imagine if he had been able to get free, or reduced-price lunches and food stamps. 3) government made more of us, if not richer, at least not groveling in debt. That has changed since Reagonomics. 4) government might not get the crabgrass from your lawn, but at least your children and pets have less exposure to poisonous pesticides. Republicans would, in Project 2025, do away with those government successes and more. So yes, Republicans do make things worse, unless you are a wealthy manufacturer of pesticides and other dangerous chemicals.

Another quote from this great writer who managed to be both Republican and funny, is "Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we are looking for the source of our troubles we shouldn't  test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power". That little bit of comedic nuance was less noticeable in O'Roarkes heyday. Today that nuance has become a chasm. O'Roarke would never live to see his humor be prophecy.

Wednesday, July 24, Joe Biden proved Republicans to be as lacking in the qualities of democratic leadership that many of us have believed intuitively. They will never admit it but the contrast between an old man telling us that he felt the need to "put the country first", and an old man running for president to put himself first has never been more stark. Any Republican who mentions Trump’s  criminal misdeeds would be laughed off of the soapbox. No one, not Lindsey Graham, not Mitch McConnell, not Rafael Ted Cruz, has the guts to tell the truth. They had many chances to live up to President Biden's noble words, but they failed to display that example of, putting the nation first. Their reasons fall somewhere on the spectrum between unbridled ambition and fear of being defeated in their next primary. They are cowards who have a dictators view of strength, and a cadre of militia-trained insurgents: their bellies full of hamburgers and Hershey-bars. Few, if any have the command of language necessary to speak anything more complicated than a limerick. And they're lucky if they could memorize that. We may also confidently say that their sense of history is equally stunted. And yet these are the MAGA Brown-shirts. And Donald Trump is the personification of the man the Brown-shirts served. Need i remind you that, when those Brown-shirts were no longer useful they were rewarded with a little thing called, "The night of the long knives". They were succeeded by the SS, the Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organization controlled by Adolf Hitler. Do I also need to remind you that the SS in particular, and fascists in general had/have a lousy sense of what was/is funny?