Earlier this week I was listening to one of the AM shock jocks who had a lady caller telling him that she ‘knew for a fact’ that the whole Pandemic thing was a hoax. Why was it a hoax? Because it let Big Pharma get a lot of money from the government, it let all the hospitals make lots of money and most of all, it was a way for the government to keep everyone under control.
Now I don’t know if this woman was actually a listener to the show or was paid to make that call. But either way, it is clear to me that what we have right now is a national political party which promotes a narrative that floats between the bizarre and the ultra-stupid and back to the bizarre again.
How do you come up with a rational and believable response to an unemployment rate which is well below 4 percent? You don’t. You ignore the economy and instead talk about how schoolchildren are being corrupted by ‘woke’ ideology, as if anyone out there even knows what ‘woke’ means.
Or you fall back on the GOP’s tried and true appeal to racism, which Barry Goldwater tried to exploit in 1964 but Nixon then copyrighted for the GOP in 1968. And even though the so-called Chinese Communists are more committed to free enterprise than we are, you can always roll out some litany about how all those non-white immigrants are trying to sneak into the country to get welfare, food stamps, free this and free that.
I happen to believe that most voters, maybe more than 90 percent of the voters on both sides don’t listen to the rhetoric of either political party and just vote the same way every two or four years because that’s how they have always voted. So why change?
I consider myself to be an average person when it comes to my political behavior, and I wouldn’t vote for any Republican if my life depended on it because I just don’t. So, I’m not about to spend one minute trying to figure out whether this candidate is better than that candidate, or which party is right and which party is wrong.
All I know is that I have lived in high-tax states (NY), medium-tax states (IL) and low-tax states (SC) and no matter where I have lived, 40 cents of every dollar I have earned never ends up in my paycheck. I also know that the United States is the only country in the entire world where I can walk into the bathroom of any gasoline station and drink the cold water right from the tap.
Right now, the narratives coming out from members of the red team aren’t aimed at the 10% of the voting population which needs to switch from blue to red in 2024. The current commentaries represent an effort to line up endorsements and donations for the primary campaign, which will get serious in six months or less.
But here’s the problem for the nine or ten men and women who would like to be at the top of the GOP ticket next year: How do you come up with a plan to make 50% plus one of the voters want to change things when things don’t need to be changed?
Here are your two options right now.
You can stand up in the House, the way Kat Cammack from Florida’s 3rd CD stood up last week and pronounce that we need to end all Covid-19 mandates should end ‘right now’ so that the schools can re-open and everyone can ‘get back to work.’ Is she in the real world?
Or you can take the chief asshole designation away from Trump the way Ted Cruz did it this past week when he said that we waited to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon until those freedom-loving patriots in Montana spotted the damn thing and forced Biden to do what otherwise he would have been too chicken-shit to do.
Either way, this nonsense is good news for our blue team because it will make it difficult for the GOP Presidential ticket to sound like anything other than a warmed-over version of Donald Trump next year.
Which means that we will just have to figure out how to steal seven or eight million votes again in 2024.