Beau Elliot
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Scenes from a parallel universe in which the unbeatable Ronda Rousey turns into the Titanic going all judo on the iceberg. The iceberg goes all iceberg.
Turns out that parallel-universe realism isn’t so surrealistic as real realism (Hello, Donald Trump), but it may be more cubist in a mini-Wheat Chex sort of way (Hello, Carly Fiorina). Also, Wheat Chex tumble down a staircase in a cubist descending sort of way. (Hint: Use the Do-Shamps wax.)
• Ah, Joni Ernst. Now you may think you know her as the junior Republican senator from Iowa who became famous by castrating hogs, but you don’t know the real Ernst or the importance of being Ernst. Actually, she’s a college-football post-nosticator. Apparently. As the Hawkeyes’ football Big Ten title game wound down (and it seemed to wind down for several decades as the Spartans ran the ball and ran the ball and ran — well, you grasped the true feeling of reruns. Isn’t here, you wished, the point at which the 30 Years War finally ends? Apparently not), the ever-lovable football fan Ernst tweeted:
Congrats @hawkeyefootball on the big win! #big10 #B1GFCG #iowa.
Um, yeah. The great thing about parallel reality is that Ernst can castrate pigskin dreams as well as pigs.
• So we see that Donald Trump, in another of his bold, imaginative moves to fully capture the white racist vote, has repeated his assertion that John Wilkes Booth was not the real assassin of President Lincoln.
Syrian refugees did it.
I saw it on TV, Trump shouted — even though he was speaking through a microphone — thousands of Syrian refugees in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheered and fired off semiautomatic weapons as Lincoln died.
Um, yeah. That’s how it happened. Just ask the Trumpster; he knows. He’ll tell you if you don’t know, because that’s what he does for a living. Tell you what you don’t know, that is, because he does know. It’s a cool gig, and it doesn’t matter what your hair looks like.
Better than former Stealth President Dick Cheney, who didn’t have any hair, but told us we don’t know what we don’t know.
Knowledge is either growing or shrinking; who can tell, given Trump and Cheney? (Who unwrapped those Christmas presents labeled Trump and Cheney, anyway? Can we return them? Got the cash-register receipt?)
By the way, Trump claims he warned the United States about Osama bin Laden in his 2000 book The America We Deserve, when, Trump says, nobody knew who bin Laden was.
All well and good, except that in 1998, then-President Bill Clinton bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan to protect U.S. security. So we knew who bin Laden was. (You sure you don’t have that cash-register receipt?)
• What to do with Carly Fiorina. Well, we could send her back to HP but …
Her latest brilliant idea is to allow people with smart phones to vote on congressional bills as part of her citizen government proposal.
Yeah, great. Except, of course, that it cuts out people who can’t afford smart phones and not because they’re not smart enough. Those would include poor and working people of all, or any, color of skin. You know, mostly Democratic voters. Swell move, Fiorina.
“There are a lot of flip phones here in Iowa; you’ve got to upgrade,” she replies.
It’s a great reality, parallel reality.
