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Op-Ed

Oprah in 2020

March 17, 2017

In Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s 16 years in office, he proposed three bills that became law. One gave a name to a post office in Wisconsin. One reduced taxes on deer-hunting arrows. (Ryan hunts deer with arrows.) One established a $3 million commission on “evidence-based policy making.” Ryan calls this legislative onslaught “A Better Way.”

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

In Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s 16 years in office, he proposed three bills that became law. One gave a name to a post office in Wisconsin. One reduced taxes on deer-hunting arrows. (Ryan hunts deer with arrows.) One established a $3 million commission on “evidence-based policy making.” Ryan calls this legislative onslaught “A Better Way.”

For these 16 years of unremitting toil, you and I paid Ryan $3 million in salary. We will pay him far more in benefits, insurance, and his forthcoming pension — should he live so long.

Has Ryan ever showed the least bit of backbone in Congress?

He has not.

He’s a snufflebutt.

He is Speaker of the House today because he’s cute, and has cute hair.

Ryan is 47. On the day he was born, I was legally an adult. Judged by the standards of traditional, conservative societies, then, I am not only older, but wiser than he.

Ryan should agree, since he professes to believe that government is evil — though he’s been a powerful government official for one-third of his life, and I’ve never been elected to anything, except my high school student council.

What the hell, it got me out of social studies on Thursdays.

Even before Ryan began sucking off the public tit, my guru in things political and musical was Miles Davis. Miles said, and I agree, that white people loved John F. Kennedy because he had a lot of hair.

What did President Kennedy accomplish? Not much, legislatively. What he did do was set a mindset for a generation — my generation. And though I see now, as I crawl toward death, that Kennedy was a phony, I see too that what he did was important.

It might not have been great, but it was a reach toward greatness.

Kennedy was a coward on civil rights. His Vietnam policy was idiotic. It required his tragic successor, LBJ, to muscle Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, and the enabling legislation that Ryan and his verminous acolytes are repealing.

Ryan himself is an acolyte: a water boy. That’s all he’s ever been and all he’ll ever be. Which brings us back to hair.

Speculation is rife — I love saying things like that — that Oprah Winfrey is considering running for president against The Donald in 2020.

That would be great.

Oprah would spank that little boy and make him cry, and send him back to his hotel in Azerbaijan, on the hair issue alone.

Did Oprah straighten her hair? When, where and why? And sometimes how? What does she have to say about it? What’s wrong with a ‘fro?

This would dominate the airwaves and internet for months.

You think Little Donnie could own Oprah on camera like he did Hillary? Pah!

You think Oprah would let him get away with racial slurs that left his white slip showing? Bosh!

I have known and worked with many powerful black women, on factory floors, in music halls and in newsrooms, and I tell you, America: They could beat you, me — anyone! — into submission, from righteousness alone. Not to mention poetry and grace.

Would issues of importance be discussed in an Oprah v. Donnie campaign?

Who cares?

That’s not what it takes these days to be elected president of the United States.

All it takes is a good show. And Oprah knows how to put on a good show.

Plus, she’s a better person than Little Donnie, and way smarter than he is.

Oprah in 2020! Because she cares!

And here’s the thing, America: She probably does.

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