T'ain't funny, McGee!

In 2009, I wrote a post entitled “De Mortuis . . .,” (1) which was inspired by the death of a conservative columnist whom I refused to even name. One of his claims to fame—such as it was—was the coining of mindless alliterative quips for the later-disgraced Spiro Agnew. 

Another celebrated Republican quipster—at least celebrated amongst that tribe as a latter-day Oscar Wilde—was Saint Ronald Reagan. His most famous mot, still lovingly repeated by his acolytes, is: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” I always wondered if anybody with half a brain would accept the opposite statement: “I’m from the government, but I don’t give a damn.” 

Well, this week we learned of one Republican—obviously without half a brain—Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City, Texas, who believes that the role of government in a time of crisis is to do nothing except to espouse a brand of Social Darwinism. (2)

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About half a century ago during an energy crisis, bumper stickers in petroleum-rich Texas read, “Let New England freeze in the dark.” Today, Yankees of the nicer sort are not affixing “Let Texas freeze in the dark” stickers on their vehicles.

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To return to the swampland of conservative quipsters, are you willing to say nothing but good about Rush Limbaugh, the loud-mouthed racist and misogynist who kicked off the other day? De mortuis be damned! He was another of those personages who passed for wits among the right-wing tribe. But as Conor  Friedersdorf of The Atlantic notes, “[N]o Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant.” (3)

Perhaps Limbaugh’s most famous coinage was “feminazi,” which is a locution that really gets up my gourd. Whatever distaste one might have with feminists (I don’t have any) the attempt to equate what they are about with the murderers of the Third Reich is beyond disgusting. Some early feminists might have burned a bra or two, but they did not gas millions of Jews or start a horrific world war. Limbaugh was worse than a Holocaust denier; he was a Holocaust trivializer. The ashes of Auschwitz served only to soil the proponents of equal rights.

Friedersdorf ends his article on Limbaugh saying, “May he rest in peace.”

Conor is a much nicer person than me. I say, “May he rot in hell!”

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(1)   https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2009/10/de-mortuis_09.html

(2)   https://news.yahoo.com/texas-mayor-says-government-utility-001034037.html

Thankfully for the residents of Colorado City, Boyd has since resigned.

(3)   https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/rush-limbaughs-rise-and-conservatisms-fall/618058/