Remember when the white house wrecking ball made fun of a person with a disability? Oh, which time, you ask? Well there was the crass mocking of NYT reporter Serge Kovaleski for his denial to ratify the white house squatter’s exaggeration of a piece he wrote. Kovaleski, a contributor to an earlier article that had garnered a Pulitzer Prize for the NYT, suffers from arthrogry, a condition that causes joint contracture in his right arm and hand.
Kovaleski had reported on the reactions of people he interviewed after the September 11th attacks on The World Trade Center, indicating that some of them were actually celebrating. In citing the story, the white house oval office decorator had exaggerated, as always, claiming that the reporter said he had seen hundreds and thousands of people celebrating at tailgating parties in the streets. Kovaleski denied this exaggeration, saying that the story had never included such high numbers.
In making fun of the reporter’s denial, the faux king president waved his arms wildly, crudely jerking from side to side, in mockery of the reporter’s disability. Want another example? During his 2024 campaign for the post he now, sadly, inhabits, he mocked Senator John McCain’s war injuries, sustained in battle and in captivity by saying McCain could get his arm to vote “yes” but never “no”. Amazingly, he constantly mocked Joe Biden’s alleged stuttering, saying he was slowing down mentally (stones? glass houses?) He made fun of California Governor Gavin Newsom for talking about his dyslexia.
All of which would be funny if it weren’t so pitiful because who, after all, is more truly unable to rationally perform than this mottled, confused, garbled little man.
Like any wannabe performer, he thinks a little makeup will cover all the faults. However, even though these only thing he has ever actually done for himself is his makeup, he does it badly and crudely.
His attempts resemble the work of my contractor in repairing my house’s stucco facade. He smears strangely orange-colored goop on his face with a putty knife, stopping way short of his ears, and covering his hands with more of it. The most dangerous disability of all, for the future of this country, however, is his increasingly failing and fevered mind, a mind focused on spewing ever more bizarre AI-generated tweets in the middle of the night. Folk wisdom has long held that we tend to mock that which we fear. The cautionary tale about that behavior is equally ancient, warning that you are then doomed to become that which you mock.
The Quran, which the debilitated fear-monger would never, of course, read, warns that a person who criticizes the behavior of another will not die without experiencing that same behavior. You become what you fear and criticize. Of course, in the case of the pretentious pretender, that may have already happened, and his critique is proof of his deep-seated fear of having to face that fact.
Toppling the Washington Monument
No, this does not refer to another giant sledgehammer special put on by the oval office version of Doctor Destructo. Though it does involve a hammer.
Josh Hammer, to be precise. This “voice” on the op-ed pages of the increasingly top-driven LA Times, apparently, and unfathomably, gets paid for half-digesting and regurgitating white house talking points. Last week, seemingly out of the blue, he penned an op-ed that did just that.
Purporting to write a critique of former President Obama, he obligingly recited every puerile chunk of mud previously flung by the tweeter-in-chief, save only the gag-inducing depiction of the Obamas as apes.
How is it that such an alarmingly thinning newspaper can waste precious space on this drivel? I posit, not by choice of the editorial board, but as a clear goal of the right-leaning cabal pushing to buy out as many media outlets as possible.
We increasingly use the word Fascism these days to describe the wrenching and violent attempts by those, world-wide, to narrow the number of voices engaged in discussion down to no more than one: the dictator of the moment.
The word itself comes from an ancient Roman symbol meaning “bundle of sticks” all cut to the same length and bound with a cord, or, later, with an axe. It was adopted by Mussolini to symbolize the necessity to make certain that only one voice would prevail and all would bend the knee to it.
Hammer’s feeble attempt to criticize and mock Obama seems more like the useless work of a five-year-old digging at the base of the Washington Monument in order to topple it. It is possible, however, if thousands of five-year-olds commence mindlessly digging toward the same goal, that many of our institutions could be endangered, and not simply metaphorically.
To return to our original theme of mockery, perhaps pushing back wherever we can to wake up the mindless followers of such tripe, looks like a better and better idea. So far, every letter sent to the LAT about Hammer has made fun of his slavishness to familiar talking points, not his own. Never think a small gesture has no effect. Let’s be a host of little shovels dislodging what they want us to believe is an unstoppable and untopplable creation. Hah!
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