By Beau Elliot
“Don’t try to escape from reality,” the all-knowing Horoscope advises.
Well, of course not. That would be like trying to escape your teeth, and metric tons of research, some of it scientific, shows you simply cannot escape your teeth unless they have the IQ of creamed corn. (We are not making any Jeff Sessions jokes here. Promise.)
Your teeth always find you, no matter where you try to escape and hide. Reality bites. As the movie said.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the Iowa Legislature have sharpened their teeth in their war on women’s health care, women’s right to choose practically anything (rumor has it that next on the agenda is women’s right to choose a marriage partner because their fathers obviously know better, or if they don’t, GOP lawmakers do), collective-bargaining rights (already a done deal, if you can call that a deal), voting rights for minorities (that voter-ID thingy, though the most famous instance of voter fraud last year in Iowa was a white woman who tried to vote twice for Donald Trump), anything local governments might do to affect local issues (now that they’re in charge of everything from river to river, big government doesn’t seem so bad after all), and things involving hedge apples and catnip.
Hedge apples and catnip? you ask. What’s the big deal for GOPers?
Glad you asked, though not so glad as a gladiolus. Hedge apples and catnip, it turns out, repel cockroaches. GOP lawmakers apparently believe that if poor people or organic-type liberals can’t afford toxic chemicals, they deserve to have cockroaches. It fits poor people’s/organic-ites’ station in life, as the Republicans in their other proposals have demonstrated.
Hmm. Meanwhile, with Russian connections continuing to confound the Trumpster administration (albeit, yes, it’s easy to confound this administration), it now seems as if almost everybody among the Trumpsterites were yakity-yaking with the Russians — the National Security adviser designate, the attorney-general designate, son-in-law Jared Kushner designate. OK, he is the son-in-law, not designated. Just yet.
In any case, the Fake-News-in-Chief moved to deflect the Russian news, because that’s what he does when there’s bad news: He accused former President Obama of wiretapping the Trump Tower. You know, as if we’d all stop thinking about Trump-Russian ties, the number of which continue to mount, and start thinking about evil Obama’s wiretapping.
Of course, it should go without saying, given his track record, the Trumpster had no evidence of Obama wiretapping whatsoever. You don’t have to take my word for it; both former DIA head James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey have said there was no wiretapping of Trump, as a candidate, as a president-elect, and as a president.
For that matter, I’ve got more evidence of life on Mars than the Trumpster has of Obama wiretapping: I have this little red rock with striations, so it must mean there’s life on Mars. (Pay no attention to the rock behind the curtain, which actually comes from the Mojave Desert, which is a bit farther than an Uber ride from Mars.)
So apparently the Russians are coming, both in the White House and the Iowa Statehouse.
Hmm. Better learn to say “Dasvidanyia” pretty quickly. Quick is better when it’s pretty. Just ask the Trumpster.