Republican Humor
Republicans believe that if they repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Sadly enough, that has worked for them.
The party of family values has been caught cheating, seducing children, picking up men in public toilets, doing drugs, patronizing prostitutes and even having sex with animals (the unfortunately named Neal Horsley, of Georgia, who admitted to sex with a mule). Still, they call themselves the party of family values, and many of their devoted followers believe it.
They claimed, over and over and over again, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and he didn’t. They were not mistaken. They just lied. And they got away with it.
They invented the war on terror which, it turns out, is really just a war on Iraq and Afghanistan. Terror is a crime. A police matter. Its rhetorical escalation to a war has cost hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent lives. People whose only crime was being born in the wrong country.
The other day, the topic of Republican humor came up, when Senator Rick Santorum whose name has become synonymous with a rather gross afterproduct of anal sex, sent a twitter message with a joke about Arugula.
Arugula, for any who don’t know, is a kind of lettuce. It is popular among those who like salads, but enjoy a bit of variety now and then. Obama got in trouble (with Republicans) when he talked about it. They seemed to think that that, and a taste for Dijon mustard (which I quite like, btw) marked him as an elitist.
The same way they joked constantly about John Kerry windsurfing. It has worked for them before, so they thought it might work again.
But Obama got elected, so they switched to watermelon and fried chicken jokes. First rule of humor (OK, not the first) is you can’t have it both ways.
And teleprompter jokes, which I suppose means he’s not intelligent. First rule of humor (and this is probably a lot closer to the top of the list) is it has to be true. President Barack H. Obama is about as far from unintelligent as you can get. He is a brilliant writer, a professor of constitutional law, and an amazing public speaker. All of those require a fair bit of smarts. To paraphrase something he said recently, you can question his policies without questioning his intelligence.
But Republican humor is like all Republican thought. If a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, they seem to think, then a joke repeated often enough becomes funny.
Note to Republicans: No, it doesn’t.
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