With the House caucus fracas ended comes the first shots of the New Old wars
Good morning. Coffee calls. (Click away!)
The first shots in the War of the Prude Dudes have been fired. Under the leadership of the Forward Into The Pastors, the muskets, bayonets and blunderbusses have been returned to the battlefields along with horses, mules and mandatory veils for the little ladies.
Among the skirmishes with a Congress and state legislatures newly seated, useful bills aimed at serious problems were MIA.
Entrenchments were dug around Missouri’s state capitol as the Show Me state showed us all real good. They passed a dress code with changes directing fire at the women. No longer will the public have to be upset by the sight of bare naked women’s arms. Entire nations have fallen from the enticement of uncovered elbows and wrists. MISSOURI WOMEN WERE OUT OF CONTROL! and had to be reined in.
In Florida, at my father’s alma mater, breastworks were thrown up to ward off the fire from godless liberals who’ve had New College under siege with mortars lobbing enormous burst of wokeness that forced students and educators alike to adopt standards of diversity and inclusivity unseen since God bestowed His blessed segregation on that sacred soil.
Former Tea Partying Freedom Caucus member Ron DeSantis specifically called them out for the ‘wokeness’ agenda of ‘inclusion’, ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’ as he launched the first broadside to repel the assault. Then he named some of the conservativiest radicals to the college’s board of trustees, promising to turn it into a haven where conservative values could shine as a moral example that would promote its spread to campuses across the country. Henceforth only approved subjects like old math, the two true sciences (chemistry and physics) and properly twangy English will be taught at New College along with the screened and approved history of white male complaints that they’re struggling to mate and breed.
He vowed to always "defend our children against those who seek to rob them of their innocence," apparently forgetting that most college students are adults and most aren’t pure little waifs lost in the wilderness. So far, he’s following the successful playbook of fixing things that aren’t broke and censoring the accurate teaching of history, biology and medical science. And polling shows he’s now tied with the strange ex-president for the GOP nomination for president.
And let’s not overlook the third war front in Arkansas where the Divine Ms. Governor Huckabee launched her own attack against wokeism by banning her state agencies from referring to Hispanics/Latinos/Latinas as ‘LatinX’. A number of younger adults identify as LatinX to avoid the Latino/Latino gender based descriptors. Somewhere between 3% and 4% of those adults prefer LatinX (almost 9 million Americans) but Huckabee isn’t having any of it.
Taking her cue from British Knights, she’s courageously leading her own Knights of Political Correctness to cancel out groups of people based on labels. So I’m expecting that Arkansas agencies will be ordered not to permit the words ‘Black Americans’ and will have to categorize them in the old traditional way as ‘Happy Negro Americans In Cabins’ soon.
Note: there’s 62,600,000 citizens that the US census identifies as ‘Hispanic or Latino’ but this group contains 37,237,000 Mexican Americans, 5,798,000 Puerto Ricans, 2,474,000 Salvadorean Americans, 2,400,000 Cuban Americans and 2,394,000 Dominican Americans. Those 5 groups make up more than 80% of the group and most prefer to call themselves by their country of ancestry instead of ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’. And other than Mexican- Americans, the other 4 groups plus more than 18 others are smaller groups than the group identifying as LatinX. If Governor Huckabee thinks excluding 3% is important, why does she also avoid the use of Mexican American, which is 59.5% of the Hispanic/Latino group?
Anyone looking for Republican policy prescriptions that address real world problems this past week will be sorely disappointed. I haven’t heard a peep about fake votes from the party even though news came out describing the biggest vote fraud I’ve heard about in the country in the past 3 years when a woman cast 23 votes illegally and was arrested for it last Thursday. She’s been charged with 52 crimes. The votes were cast for a candidate who she happens to be married to. All we got was crickets for that story. Maybe it’s because she’s Republican, and they invoked the IOKIYAAR* rule that makes her crimes invisible and forgiven. (*It’s OK If You Are A Republican).
Also, in the tax trial of the Trump Organization, it was fined the maximum penalty the law allowed, $1,600,000, which is far less than the taxes they skipped via their illegal accounting. Nobody in the GOP mentioned that news either so I guess that means our tax system will remain broken.
Oh they did talk about the usual stuff: fucking up the Social Security every worker paid for, eliminating the entire tax code and replacing it with a 23% national sales tax, ending the Affordable Care Act and the Dept of Education and threatening to shut down government instead of allowing any increase to the debt ceiling, but they know the Senate and the President’s veto pen will easily block most of those, so they amount again to performance art… except for the debt ceiling one. (We’ll hit that ceiling this coming Thursday so they’ll have about a dozen days to conduct their interpretive dance routine before paychecks and retirement plans have to be paid. Yawn.)
They also indicated they would investigate President Biden’s handling of classified documents but not Trump’s, upholding their longstanding tradition of building a wall of defense around the mobster and his crime family. All the boring and nonsense words that the majority of voters roll their eyes to, yet will have to vote against again in 2024.
Oh wait. Here’s something new: they won’t let anyone take away your gas stove. Which nobody elected to Congress or the White House ever planned to do. Some were actively posting pictures of a lit gas burner swearing that nobody was going to pry them from their cold dead hands. I’m not sure they understand their hands are much more likely to be blistered than cold if they grab hold and refuse to let go.
And with that, a special dance is in order to lighten your spirits.
Or maybe two: