Let’s see if we can find the pony in this pile of manure.
(Optimists, Ronald Reagan joked, look for the pony buried in any pile of road apples.)
Let’s take a look at the tumultuous events of recent weeks:
– The good news is that political ads disappeared from TV and radio after election day. The bad news: Those Medicare supplement renewal TV ads still have a couple more weeks to run. (Are you as tired of Joe Namath as I am?) And I don’t think the pillow guy from Minnesota is ever going to give us a rest.
– A radio ad that ran before the election got my dander up, referring to the “atrocious” voting record of a candidate I met during my reporting days, and who got my vote in several elections. Atrocious? Really? She is a former rodeo queen, legislator, state office holder and congresswoman. Sometimes bare knuckles turn people off, and the former rodeo queen won by a huge margin.
Good for her.
– I wrote in a column two weeks ago that if Joe Biden wins the election, “I intend to regard him with all the respect, dignity, good will, cooperation and benefit of the doubt that our Democrat friends have extended to Donald J. Trump.”
That column ran on Facebook and got 337 likes, a couple loves and some laughing smiley faces. But one reader called me a “mouth-breathing dullard,” and another said, “This guy needs to find a different line of work.” (Now he tells me, after 47 years in this business.) “He’s not the brightest bulb in the box.” Another asked, “Who paid this idiot to publish articles?”
Several were appalled that I would treat the next president as shabbily as the current one has been treated. But don’t worry. I don’t think we will treat your guy as badly as you relentlessly treated our guy, from day one, for four years, day in and day out, with constant investigations and 95 percent of the news coverage of him deemed negative. We’re nicer people, and I doubt we could compete with that virtuoso performance.
– Talk of a “blue wave” of Democratic victories in the House and Senate did not pan out, with Republicans actually picking up seats in the House.
In the Senate it’s a closer deal, but it looks like Republicans are likely to hold on to their slim margin and retain leadership. That throws a monkey wrench into liberal plans to expand the Supreme Court, end the legislative filibuster, add two new states to the union, repeal the Trump tax cuts, and make rich people “pay their fair share.” Oh yeah, and they want to phase out fossil fuels and put a cork in cows.
Not gonna happen, unless the Democrats can win both of those Georgia runoff elections on January 5th for two Senate seats. Seems unlikely.
If the Democrats pull that off, however, my advice is to bury your life savings in coffee cans in your back yard, and shelter in place in your basement until 2022.
– I think it’s very good news that Hollywood airheads donated big money to defeat Republican Lindsey Graham, and Graham got re-elected by a 10 percent margin. That’s $100 million wasted. A similar unsuccessful effort to unseat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasted another $100 million.
Is there a dumber town than Hollywood?
Sometimes, like calling someone’s voting record “atrocious,” throwing millions at defeating a candidate just makes voters mad.
– Borrowing a term from one of my critics, I think some states aren’t the brightest bulbs in the pack, either. Alaska is almost as sparsely populated as Wyoming, and yet Wyoming’s vote totals were in early on election night. But five days after the election, they were only half done counting votes in Alaska. (I think the votes were coming in by dog sled, one at a time.)
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada were also dim bulbs when it comes to timely vote counting.
– And lastly, who in their right minds will ever believe pre-election opinion polls again after their woeful performance in the last two presidential elections?
I wouldn’t trust those guys to tell me the time of day.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at davesimpson145@hotmail.com
