You know those comics who think it's funny to say how glad they are that crazy people are vying to run the country because it will give them good material for their monologues? Well this morning, for just a moment, I related to those treasonous bastards.
You know the likely next Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy of California? I haven't paid him much mind, but Dana Milbank has, at The Washington Post. Apparently whenever McCarthy opens his mouth, he steps on his phonological phallus—even when he reads from a prepared text, as he did yesterday during in a foreign policy speech, according Milbank.
“If I look at history of where we are it seems a lot like 1979,” McCarthy told the crowd at Washington’s St. Regis hotel.
Also:
“We must engage this war of radical Islam if our life depended on it because it does."
“I have visited Poland, Hungria, Estonia,” he said, and also “visited in our, uh, the allies in the Arab Gulf.”
Of course, we “live on the greatest nation that’s ever been on the face of the Earth.”
According to Milbank:
McCarthy called for “an effective politically strategy to match the military strategy,” and he lamented that “we have isolated Israel while bolding places like Iran.” He blamed President Obama’s White House for “putting us in tough decisions for the future,” but he voiced hope that a “safe zone would create a stem the flow of refugees.” And he scolded the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to assist returning servicemen “who fought to the death in Ramadi.” …
He spoke of the “beth path forward to safety and security”; he asserted that Syria’s regime uses chemical weapons “to the very day”; he argued that the Soviet Union collapsed “because of America’s leadership and America resolve.” And he memorably rephrased the famous question asked of Republican presidential candidates: “Would you have gone to war if you knew what you knew now?”
What a breakfast! After years of President Obama's lawyerly clarity and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's technocratic tongue, I didn't know how hungry I was for some syntactical bacon grease.
Ten years ago, our national leader was George W. Bush, the man who invented the Internets.
And on days that the president didn't say something imbecilic, my Chicago Sun-Times contained a wonderfully nutty quote from Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley.
"Scrutiny?" Daley once asked rhetorically, in a press conference. "What else do you want? Do you want to take my shorts? Give me a break … Go scrutinize yourself! I get scrootened every day, don’t worry, from each and every one of you. It doesn’t bother me."
Though they're a reliable source of shallow mirth, inarticulate platitude pushers are not good for anyone.
They're not good for writers, because they convince leaders of what they already suspect—that word-fiddling is a time-waster, and that power is the only language they need.
And they're not good for the country, because these people can do whatever they want, protected from the gaze of scrootening eyes by the linguistic lean-tos they construct.
Or as McCarthy might put it, "There's function to my madness, and method follows my form."
Here we go again.
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