"The Wacky World of Politics"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Wacky World of Politics”

July 20, 2021

 

“All the problems we face today can be traced to an 

unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indians.”

                                                                                                                                Pat Paulsen (1927-1997)

                                                                                                                                American comedian and satirist

 

Napoleon, allegedly, once said: “In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.” What he said about politicians applies equally to reporters, teachers, Hollywood and sports figures, social media influencers and commentators, me included. A good friend, though admittedly a misguided Democrat, recently e-mailed me: “I believe we are at the end of a long pendulum swing to the right [that] started with Goldwater’s loss.” Goldwater lost to Johnson in 1964. At that time, the federal budget deficit was about 5% of the federal budget, and total federal debt was less than 50% of GDP. Today, the federal deficit is approximately 60% of the federal budget and total federal debt is roughly 122% of GDP. With debt piling up, political correctness ubiquitous, open borders, censorship on the rise and people fearful of using the wrong pronoun, God help us, if the pendulum is just now swinging to the left.

 

In 2009, Sega introduced the video game, “Wacky World of Sports,” featuring unconventional sports like tuna tossing, cheese wheel rolling, furniture racing and mud sliding. A creative video game aficionado today might make millions introducing similar games for close followers of the political/cultural scene. She (or he) might offer Woke Warriors, Campus Censors, Climate Cozeners, Facetious Facts, Illiberal Liberals, Reprehensible Representatives, Senile Senators and Plagiarizing Presidents. Rather than a Quest for the Holy Grail, we might have “Pursuit of the Principled Politician.”

 

Politics have become unstrung. We have a Constitution that protects freedom of speech, yet White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently said: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” We have legislators who send their children to private schools, then, deny school choice to low-income parents. We have politicians that want to “defund” the police in inner-city neighborhoods, but who hire private security guards for their own homes in gated communities. We have legislators who preach “tax the rich,” but who want a multi-page tax code filled with loopholes, including reinstatement of SALT deductions. We have a Secretary of State who invited members of the UN Human Rights Council, which includes such bastions of freedom as Cuba, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Russia and Venezuela, to review our civil rights record.

 

And it is not just politicians who have gone mad. We have a culture that seeks diversity in gender, skin color and religion, yet demands conformity in ideas. We have Progressives who call mothers “birthing people,” while allowing transwomen to compete in high school sports against biological women. We have educators who condemn “cultural appropriation” by “privileged” white males, which means removing Shakespeare and Dickens from high school’s curricula. We have coastal elites who believe that if everyone owns a Tesla and heats their homes with solar panels, climate change can be kept at bay, yet who purchase beach-front mansions and then complain of rising seas. We have Black conservatives who are dubbed “white supremacists,” while wealthy, progressive White suburbanites become honorary members of Black Lives Matter. We have sententious media types who claim that stricter gun legislation will reduce gun-related crime, ignoring the fact that New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore – scenes of some of the worst gun violence in the nation – already have the strictest gun laws in the country. We have $60,000-a-year private primary schools that recognize non-binary genders like androgyne, genderfluid and pangender. We have $75,000-a-year universities that do not allow conservatives to speak on campus. And we have a Navy more interested in bathrooms for transgenders than in adding ships of the line.

 

In his 1914 collection of essays, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Yet we have a President today who has decided that secrecy is proper when it comes to his son Hunter’s sale of artworks at prices most artists can only dream about. And this despite public knowledge that the son has previously used his father’s connections to make money from foreign individuals and companies.

 

Politics have been wacky for years. Will Rogers (1879-1935), humorist and vaudeville performer once said: “If you ever injected truth into politics, you’d have no politics.” But I look at the past few years, and suspect things have become nuttier: What has any of the craziness we witness today have to do with making our lives freer and richer, making our nation more secure, competitive and prosperous, or improving tolerance and civility? Unlike my friend, I don’t know in which direction politics will trend; though I suspect the average American believes in his God-given rights and the rule of law, and that individual success is predicated on aspiration, talent, hard work and the acceptance of personal responsibility. But this I know and know full well, our politics and culture have become wackier and not in a healthy way.