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Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service
Op-Ed

Idiots’ Delight

May 5, 2017

Thank god this “first 100 days” nonsense is over. That’s not reporting. That’s bullshit. When I was a young city editor, I asked our chief photographer, a wiser man than I, why all news photographers seemed to wear the same vest. He said: “Because we’re a bunch of sheep.”

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

Thank god this “first 100 days” nonsense is over. That’s not reporting. That’s animal noises. When I was a young city editor, I asked our chief photographer, a wiser man than I, why all news photographers seemed to wear the same vest. He said: “Because we’re a bunch of sheep.”

Amen, Brad: Wherever you are.

Mah fellah Amurricans: Was the most important news this week, really, that a vile, corrupt, self-seeking congenital liar, elected by morons as president of the United States, had staggered through 0.68 percent of his term?

That’s not news.

Wasn’t the real news the damage he has done so quickly, and severely, to the Republic and the Constitution? And that both of our presumably great national parties rolled over like the cowards they are?

Wasn’t the real news this week, and next week, the lies, bile, venom, hatred and ignorance this mental cripple spews every day? Which is duly reported by my brethrens and sistrens in the news business, and their editors, whose cowardly corporate overlords try to dress it up as anything but what it is?

Trump this week licked the ears of a self-proclaimed mass murderer, Rodrigo Duterte, and invited him to the White House.

This after deep kissing the Turkish Mussolini, Recep Erdowan.

What a country of wimps we have become — a nation of whiners. Toothless sheep.

I miss the late, great Henry Louis Mencken, who was not afraid to call a moron a moron.

Last week The New York Times — the greatest newspaper in the history of the world — did a big takeout story on people who voted for Trump, and why they still support him.

Why would The New York Times spend so much time and money interviewing morons?

What is the Times trying to prove? That morons belong on the front page?

They were morons when they voted; they’re morons now. They will always be morons.

What possible public good could emerge from interviewing morons?

Suppose the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta decides to investigate why it is that some families, or population clusters, breed congenital morons.

Suppose the CDC decides to spend $20 million on this, in the interest of allowing normal people to have normal sex in a normal way, without breeding morons.

Sounds like a good idea, no? Fifteen cents apiece, from you and me?

Should the CDC attempt this today, surely it would be prohibited by Republican senators, because it involves sex. And science. And Darwin. And, presumably, Planned Parenthood.

But here’s the thing. Suppose the Yankee liberals manage to secure federal funding for the study of congenital idiocy, and a cure for it.

Surely the senators from Texas and Alabama could not oppose that, so long as they get, O, say, $200 million or so ($1.50 from each of us) to build another Confederate monument somewhere, on a courthouse lawn, in a public school — anywhere, really.

Surely the senators could commandeer a busload of morons to pump for this monument. Just as surely the senators would present their morons to the national press.

And just as surely, the national press would interview the Specially Selected Morons and put them on the evening news.

To show how fair we are.

Here is my question: If Congress — which Mark Twain called our only native criminal class — if Congress wanted to appropriate $20 million to help congenital morons, and their children, would Congress let congenital morons write the law?

I believe Congress would — if the morons had the money, and forked it over.

Because congenital morons are ideal constituents, for Congress, and for the president of the United States. And that, my friends, is the State of the Union.

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