Things they actually said

Fans of A Christmas Story are familiar with the neighborhood bully Scut Farkas and his horrible little henchman Grover Dill.  Putin has his own Grover Dill called Dmitri Medvedev.  For reasons of his own (dreams of being named successor, perhaps), this toady put his name to an incoherent, racist screed called "Why contacts with the current Ukrainian leadership are meaningless."  After some scrambled history it settles down to an ad hominem attack on Volodymyr Zelensky, "a man with certain ethnic roots," nudge nudge, who is not a genuine person just as Ukraine is not a real country.  And so on.  If this is the acme of Russian "thinking" I'd hate to read their gutter press.  Defending the indefensible must be enervating and exhausting even for a toady.

But there is no shortage of gutter thinking even in The West.  Try this from someone Newsweek describes as "former Republican Senate candidate Lauren Witzke:  "Here's the deal with arranged marriages is that your parents want what's best for you...I fully support arranged marriages [and] parents having a say and choosing the family that you choose to bond yourself with, I fully support that."  At the time she was interviewing someone called "Woozuh" who took it the next level:  "My real position is that women are our currency to be bartered and traded.  It's not biblically unfounded...you could trade a virgin bride for half a dozen yoke of oxen."  (Twelve oxen?)  "I think if we went back to that and got rid of all this feminism crap, forget about your master's degree, forget about your career and just go mommy mode."  It's safe to say they weren't talking about some adorable old match-maker like in Crossing Delancey helping Amy Irving realize that Peter Riegert is the man she wanted after all.  Some crap is podcast performance art to appeal to the incels and "own" the libs.  Some of it is as serious as cancer.

Regrets?  Martin Anglehart has a few.  He fell in with the mob of dark-money-funded truckers who terrorized Ottawa and other Canadian cities to protest government measures to keep people from dying of covid.  Anglehart spent thousands of his own dollars to provide the diesel dummies with fuel and laundry services, and now he says he was kicked out of his home and lives in his SUV.  "I would like to apologize to people in Ottawa.  I'm sorry...all I wanted was to help people."  The wrong people.

When the ink had dried on the PATRIOT Act, some of the Congressmen who voted for it finally read it.  They discovered to their shock that librarians were supposed to keep a record of materials checked out and advise the FBI (I suppose) if patrons read books about Iraq or Islam or just about anything that suggested they were "terrorists," the kind who have unlimited time to spend reading books.  Somebody called the ACLU and the ALA and the alarm was raised, and the government never acted on this threat to free thought and speech.  But in America bad ideas don't die, they lie dormant for years like locusts.  The Oklahoma House has passed HB4014, another of these "parents' rights" bills requiring librarians to provide parents with records of what their children read.  Its co-author, one Sherrie Conley, says parental rights "have been given to us...by our Lord and savior simply through birth."  One of the sane minority in the House asked about a problem Conley was having in a single school district, whereupon she retorted, "You may see only one cockroach in your kitchen but that doesn't mean there's only one there."  Quick, Sherrie, the Flit -- I just seen one of them librarians!  

Elsewhere in Woody Guthrie's home state Pastor Jarrin Jackson asks voters to "unleash" him so he can clean up the number one problem confronting Sooners, GODLESS COMMUNISM.  He would like to employ military tribunals to send them to "burn forever in a lake of fire," which is a big task for a member of a state senate.  Gonna take down Darwin, perverts, all that sex stuff.  Shoot them in the face.  Cockroaches.  Everywhere!  Get 'um offa me!!

I don't want to suggest that our super-patriotic Republicans -- did you know Lincoln was a Republican? -- get their ideas from Moscow but Russian schoolchildren are now getting patriotism lessons to keep them from succumbing to thought-crime.  Can book-burnings be far behind?  Yes, their parents are already too frightened to complain.  "We are united and therefore invincible!"  The only question is which state will go first.  Oklahoma?

Enough.  Here's something worth reading.

I can't make it any larger.  Thanks, Andrej, you're a legend.