Tainted love

 At every konservative klavern, when they hold a straw poll for 2024 Josh Hawley comes in at "Which one is Josh Harley now?"  In an effort to raise his profile off the ground the Missouri senator and glove model has come up with the Love America Act, a bill to promote love by requiring children to learn about the wonderfulness of America and to not learn about racism or other unpleasant things which are the product of a few disordered psyches.  Further, they are to memorize stirring prose from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, because rote learning takes up time that might be wasted on analysis or discussion.  

I have no objection to celebrating American prose.  It's lovely, from John Winthrop's "city on a hill" to King's "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."  If I were a history teacher I would lead my students into the yawning abyss between the beautiful words and the reality.  I call it critical history theory.  (Maybe if we omit the word "race" the racists will stop freaking out.)  If I lasted to the end of the school year, you can be damn sure my kids would learn derision for bills with Orwellian titles like Love America Act.

Let's look in on Republicans Behind the Wheel.  South Dakota lieutenant governor Jason Ravnsborg is facing only three misdemeanor charges in the death of Joe Boever last September, apparently because he passed a blood-alcohol test fifteen hours after the accident.  Ravnsborg has suggested that Boever was trying to commit suicide, based on nothing.  More recently Charlie Gerow, candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, says he's not responsible for the death of Logan Abbott even though he drove for several miles with Abbott's motorcycle stuck to his front bumper.  Toxicology tests are being done on Abbott  but apparently not on Gerow. 

Like October blizzards and the dysentery at Lauren Boebert's restaurant, bubonic plague is a fact of life in Colorado.  The state health department tests fleas for yersinia pestis and usually finds it, especially in summer.  When a prairie dog colony in La Plata county disappeared, residents called the experts; then a ten-year-old girl died.  Plague has also been reported in five other counties.  Plague has a bad reputation from that whole fifteenth-century thing, but it's usually treated with antibiotics now.

Plague is about the only disease Margie Greene didn't reference in her angry tweet when she heard that Argosy restaurant in Atlanta has instituted a "no vaccine, no service" policy.  She called it "segregation" because she has no fucking clue, and demanded to know if they would test patrons for "flu, strep throat...venereal diseases...staff [sic] infections" etc.  And now the restaurant is getting death threats.  Way to support small business in Georgia, you ignorant cow.

Before he realized that Texas politics was a better scam than military medicine, Ronny Jackson was a diving safety officer for the Navy and then an emergency room doctor.  Not a neurologist or a gerontologist, but like so many other Republican doctors, a self-certified expert on whatever he feels like talking about.  He shared his professional concerns about Joe Biden with Stephen Miller and Sean Hannity and then with the twitterverse:  "He's lost.  He's confused...He MUST have a cognitive exam and release the results!"  Like the remember-five-words-and-get-a-lollipop test he administered to Trump, who triumphantly repeats all five at every opportunity.  (NO DEMENTIA, NO DEMENTIA, YOU'RE THE DEMENTIA!)  After a consultation Devin Nunes concurs:  Old Joe is so senile and boring that the Democrats can't even lift a fifteen-second sound bite from his town hall to electrify the country the way Trump used to do.  No pizazz, this guy, just ideas and strategies, YAWN, tell us about the Space Force and swapping Puerto Rico for Greenland and how we need high-pressure showers to make our hair great again.  

By way of demonstration, Trump took his new comedy show out of town, to Phoenix, home of the fraudit, to break in some new material.  His new word is "routers," which somebody told him is the key to overturning the election in Arizona and everywhere else:   "We want the routers, sonny.  Wendy, we gotta get those routers, please.  Routers!  Come on, Kelly, we can get those ROUTERS," and on and on.  Then he moved on to how "woke politics" caused the women's Olympic soccer team to lose their opening game to Sweden (no wokeness there) and encouraged the mob to boo them.  And then he reached a new level of weird, first suggesting that the women on the basketball team are not "real" women and then musing about what sort of player LeBron James would be if he transitioned...As Dr. Ronny would say, it was embarrassing.  Is it wrong that I hope this gibbering idiot will be subpoenaed by the 6/1 commission?  What Florida slip-and-sue lawyer is representing him these days?