Demented Politics, Lunatic Markets

[EasyAce]

Burying our head in the sand won't make the midterm elections go away
By P.J. O'Rourke
https://online.flippingbook.com/view/201572/8/

. . . I mean, personally, I’d rather have a little hopeful uncertainty instead of a hopeless sure thing. I’d rather have my doctor say, “Maybe this is serious” than “You’ll be dead in a week.”

Which is how I feel after the campaign season we’ve been through.

We have two political parties in America, each worse than the other.

One party thinks it’s in favor of business and economic growth. It’s not thinking very hard. The GOP has done nothing about the nation’s burgeoning debt and deficit. If Republicans were financial advisers, they’d take a look at your huge credit-card bills, delinquent car loan, and outsized mortgage debt and tell you to quit making loan payments and go on a spending spree.

You’d say, “But I’ll lose the house!” And Republicans would say, “Heck, we lost the House. So what?”

The other party is convinced that everything is free. Health care is free. College tuition is free. Parental leave is free. Not that parents need it, since daycare is also free. Democrats should go into a butcher shop and announce that beef is free... and get clocked on the head by a butcher wielding a frozen rib roast. (Except Democrats will ban meat because animals are free, too.)

Meanwhile, Republicans claim that free trade isn’t free and costs too much and this means war. Because... the way to deal with the giant Walmart that is China is to burn it down and get swell bargains afterward at the fire sale. Which makes Democrats scared that real war will break out and, when the world is destroyed by nuclear holocaust, women and minorities will be hardest hit.

But, Republicans say, what we really should panic about is thousands of jobless Hondurans and Guatemalans invading our southern border. Never mind that with the current unemployment rate, I can’t find anybody to mow my lawn, not even for $18 an hour. So, privately, I’m thinking of the Hondurans and Guatemalans as “The March for Yard Care.”

And what’s worst of all about these two political parties is that on Tuesday, November 6 both of them won.

Now we’ve got a Saphead Senate and a House of Fools . . .

[EasyAce]

Elsewhere in the essay, Mr. O'Rourke wrote:

Let us not get ourselves all a-twitter – so to speak – about what we think of President Trump. Whether you approve, or grudgingly approve, or disapprove, or abhor him with bells on... whatever you think of President Trump, he’s not exactly the person you’d pick as an umpire.

If the 116th Congress were the World Series and Trump was the umpire, he’d send both teams to the showers so that he could be the pitcher and the batter and throw every strike and hit every home run... And he’d also want to be the only hot dog vendor in the stadium.

This game is not going to end well.

To which I couldn't resist writing a brief letter to the editor: Reality check: If Congress were the World Series and President Tweety the umpire, the Series would have been the Baltimore Orioles against the San Diego Padres in Ebbets Field. And Tweety would have pitched, caught, homered, owned the concessions, named himself the Series MVP, and declared the Giants and the Dodgers had damn well better move back to Harlem and Flatbush and start building Edsels again because they didn't know who they were messing with.

P.J. O'Rourke is priceless.

[Cyber Liberty]

I've been a fan of O'Rourke's for a long time.  We share the first two names.