As far as I’m concerned, the best news from the past week is that a share of Tesla stock ended up trading at $180.14, a 40% drop since September 20th of last year. Maybe the price will drop another 40% over the next eight months and we would finally get that wunderkind Elon Musk to shut the fu*k up.
He really has become a pain in the ass, and because he can’t run for President, he’s trying his best to put someone else at the top of the GOP ticket in his stead. And now that his admiration for Trump has hit the rails, he’s come up with a new name to tweet about all day long.
I’m referring to his sudden discovery of Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, who announced his Presidential candidacy last week in the form of a 30-second video which will play tomorrow night, but the word is already out that Scott’s in the 2024 race.
So, what I did was to watch the first 9 minutes of a speech he recently delivered in a stop in Iowa which is an appearance on what he calls his ‘Faith in America’ national tour. This so-called tour is simply Scott’s version of what Donald Trump started doing in 2015 with the rallies he held all over the place.
But the difference between Scott and Trump is that the ex-President spent most of his talking-time telling everyone how smart he was and insulting everyone else. Trump’s demeanor was angry, loud, and rude, and the crowd at every rally was encouraged to indulge in raucous and nasty, full-throated, hateful chants.
Scott, on the other hand, couldn’t be more respectful, more well-mannered in his language and tone, and most of all, he uses the word ‘faith’ to underscore his personal religiosity and what he believes will bring America back to where it needs to be.
You see, the problem that Scott has is the same problem which every GOP 2024 Presidential wannabee has or will have, namely, the only way they can create and sustain a viable candidacy is if they remind the voters that everything is a mess, and they have a plan to fix things even if the plan is nothing more than some vague nonsense about the importance of ‘faith.’
I lived in South Carolina in the 1970’s and the idea that a black politician would even consider running for a statewide office was a joke. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a liberal, Democrat(ic) Governor, Fritz Hollings, who actually took the federal civil rights law seriously, someone like Tim Scott would have had about as much a chance of building a successful political career as I would have had a chance to stay on a diet over the past twenty years.
I went to a GOP political rally headlined by Strom Thurmond in 1976. I thought I was at a meeting of the Klan. Thurmond told the crowd that if Carter was elected, he would send HUD (pronounced ‘hood’) down and force whites to live next to blacks.
How much more open and inclusive has the GOP become since the days when the South shifted from blue to red because Nixon promised Thurmond that he would ‘go slow’ on civil rights? You can get an answer to that question by listening to how Scott talks about the ‘failure’ of public education to mount a defense against transgender ‘rights.’
I’m a kind of old-fashioned guy, so no matter whether you call it ‘faith,’ or ‘belief,’ or any other religious euphemism you choose, I happen to think that politics and religion don’t mix. I listened to the first nine minutes of Scott’s oratory and he told at least six big lies, all delivered in polite, respectful and faith-based ways.
If Tim Scott feels he needs to follow religious teachings in order to help guide the country in the years ahead, perhaps he should move to Iran, Yemen, Vatican City, or some other theocracy where God is fully in charge.
What I’m about to say in a not so polite way is that Tim Scott can piss away every penny that he gets from Elon Musk, but if he heads the 2024 red-team ticket, we’ll just have to steal another election away from the GOP.
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