“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.” — Dan Quayle
During my senior year of high school, some of us were able vote in the 1992 presidential election. It pitted an experienced George Bush against upstart governor Bill Clinton. In deference to this quote it pitted Senator Al Gore against the vice president. Quayle was famous for misspelling potato and many quotes like the one above.
The quote above was Quayle’s butchering of the slogan of the United Negro College Fund’s “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Somehow when you read it with this in mind it becomes that much more inane. However, he might be an intellectual giant in comparison with the current president.
It will take decades to digest all of the intellectual, moral, legal, and ethical grenades from the current administration, but the first one might be the most significant even when stacked against the rest. Yes, there was death. Yes, there was destruction. Yes, there was graft on a historic scale. Still, that might not be what the administration is most known for.
One of the more comical aspect of MAGA’s defense of the president is the insistence that he is playing three dimensional chess. The concept of three dimensional chess is comical by itself. It is essentially the concept that an idiot is really a genius because you can’t understand what he or she is doing. It’s kind of like the joke they tell about the Polish mafia. They make you an offer you can’t understand.
In the case of conservatives, there is the notion that they intentionally put incompetent people in bureaucracy to starve the beast. There’s no better way to convince people that government doesn’t work than to guarantee that government doesn’t work. The problem is that no one has committed to this strategy full bore.
Maybe their consciences couldn’t let them. Maybe they were just too competent for their own good. Trump always promised to hire the best people and then proceeded to hire and fire the worst people. Dig into his past and this really was no surprise. He might be the only person ever to bankrupt casinos. Harra’s has been a disaster in New Orleans and it is still up and running somehow. That should tell us something.
King Midas is a cautionary tale from Greek mythology. It is something uniquely American that the “Midas touch” is considered to be something desired. Trump has been said to have the Midas touch, but maybe he has the Sterquilinus touch. That would be the Roman God of poop. Everything he touches turns to excrement.
In the latest tale we get the associated story of the relief bill and spending bill that he was threatening to pocket veto. The strategy made no sense politically as it threatened to torpedo the GOP’s chance to win the run off elections in Georgia and just pissed off a majority of the country. One might imagine Wile E. Coyote blowing himself up to catch the road runner.
Trump reversed course and signed the bill yesterday but now is insisting Congress must go back and rework the deal. No one bothered to tell him that by signing it he was guaranteeing that wouldn’t happen. Perhaps he was mixing that up with the defense bill he did veto. It is so difficult to keep track of two different bills at the same time. Who can be expected to do that?
The clownish aspect of this is undercut by the fact that millions are suffering through unemployment, the failure of small businesses, a housing crisis, and food shortages for many families. It isn’t so much that 600 dollars is not enough. It is the fact that it is coming way too late for many people. Even the 2000 dollars now would likely be too late. The president’s actions were so see through that there were no clothes at all.
It was never about 600 versus 2000 dollars. It was about somehow punishing Mitch McConnel for saying Biden won. So, he was willing to make millions suffer to make a point. The cruelty is certainly on display, but the idiocy can’t be ignored. What was the endgame supposed to be? How could they possibly spin it to be anything but what it was? The gambit made so little political sense because he has never had political sense. He doesn’t know how government works. You’d think he’d learn after nearly four years, but idiots never learn.
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