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Thursday, July 27, 2017

Dog and Pony Show

So apparently at today's "press conference," Huckabee Junior read a fan letter from a fourth-grader:
 

If this thing is remotely real and totally not fake, we are in deep fucking shit, people. A nine-year-old who cannot spell simple words like "know" and "seem" and "money" and "how" (among others) and prints like someone half his age is probably doomed. I look forward to my tax dollars going to pay for his eventual opioid treatment, and the litters from whatever trailer-bound hose-monsters he knocks up.

It's difficult to believe this is real, because at the very least, only the child of a cult member would write this sort of thing to the, erm, p-word. And a cult member in good standing would never let their child write to their false demigod in such a sloppy, haphazard fashion. At minimum they would coach the kid past all those tricksy four- and five-letter words that most six-year-olds can master. They would helicopter-parent the young'un to a base level of competence.

(Then again, if you look at the inbred magalos (h/t Samantha Bee) at last night's Youngstown rally, maybe not. Maybe that was the best their progeny could do with their help. A few more years of Betsy DeVos skull-fucking the public school system and they'll all be writing like this, if they write at all. After all, you can't write effectively if you don't read, and as we all know, reading books is now an elitist activity, done only by effete swells after the cucumber-and-watercress-sandwich croquet soiree, but before the shower-room buggery. That's just science.)

But whatever. Let's say the letter is real, and was written by an actual nine-year-old child with the odd nickname of "Pickle," whose family has no association with this regime, and who scrawled this bootlicking jabber entirely of his own volition. So fucking what? Why on earth should anyone care what any kid writes to any gubmint office-holder? I don't care what kids wrote to Obama, or Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, or Orrin Hatch, except insofar as their letters might reveal something about themselves or their parents and the motives of either. People seem to think this sort of shit is charming, but it's usually just peculiar. Nine-year-olds should be playing video games and watching cartoons, not penning mash notes to politicians.

It makes a weird sort of sense that a senile, incontinent old man who acts like a nine-year-old would appeal to actual nine-year-olds, but still:  why are we supposed to care? Does Huckabee Junior really think this stupid shit offsets the very real damage her boss is doing to the country, the world, in real time? Or does she lamely think that we all think that? If that's the case, these people are somehow even stupider than we had all previously assumed.

Obviously, there is no useful purpose for bringing such things up at a press conference, but then these events barely meet that low bar these days. The cameras are kept off most times now (though today was an exception), and no content of any value is ever conveyed, at least not deliberately.

I persist in the odd notion that perhaps this is time wasted by all involved, and that maybe the journamalistas might hew closer to their supposed craft if, rather than stenographing cheap PR copy that all parties know are untrue at best, they get out and uncover something useful, we might all be better off. Heck, we might not even get stuck with a half-bright rage-clown next time.

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