LAS VEGAS (The Borowitz Report)—The Democrats who participated in the first Democratic Presidential debate of the 2016 campaign garnered a scathing review from the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who said that none of them offered a concrete plan to protect the Earth from an invasion of bloodthirsty alien dragons.
“A swarm of marauding dragons with the capacity to shoot flames a thousand feet or more could destroy life on this planet as we know it,” Carson told Fox News. “And yet not a single one of these Democrats has apparently given any thought to such a threat.” …
“If I am elected President, I will gather the greatest minds in technology to design and build a dome made of dragon-proof material,” he said. “As a backup plan, in the event of a dragon attack, I would attempt to convince the dragons to attack Mars instead.” …
Bobby Jindal Lies To Parents About Winning GOP Nomination
BATON ROUGE, LA—Saying he wasn’t quite president yet but that he was very, very close, Republican candidate Bobby Jindal reportedly lied to his parents Thursday about winning the 2016 GOP nomination. “Now, I don’t officially become president until I win the general election, but I’m just one step away,” said the Louisiana governor on a phone call with his mother and father, cautioning them that while he wasn’t able to live in the White House just yet, he almost certainly would be soon, and they could visit him anytime they wanted. “Yeah, thanks, it’s very exciting. It’s still sinking in…of course you guys can be there when I take the oath of office!” At press time, Jindal’s parents were reportedly telling him how proud they were and that they weren’t the least bit surprised.
“Turned out it was the highest-rated debate for the Democrats ever. More than 15 million people tuned in to watch Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the three high school principals they invited to fill out the stage.” –Jimmy Kimmel
“A new analysis of recent political speeches found that George W. Bush actually used longer and more complex words in his speeches than President Obama does. Granted none of those words were actually in the dictionary. ‘Don’t be condescencious. My vocablulation is completely misunderestimated.'” –Jimmy Fallon
“They were keeping a spare podium open for Joe Biden in case he decided to enter the race at the last minute, as if he’s going to walk in and shock everyone like a Spanish soap opera or something.” –Jimmy Kimmel
“Dr. Ben Carson made news last week by saying that the holocaust could have been averted if European Jews had had guns. Though I’m pretty sure what he meant to say was, ‘I don’t want to be president.'” –Seth Meyers
“They’re saying that Republican candidate Ben Carson made a number of serious mistakes as a neurosurgeon and even left a sponge in one patient’s brain. When asked how it affected his life, the patient was like ‘It’s fine, I’m still running for president. I don’t care. Everything’s great. It’s gonna be huge.'” –Jimmy Fallon
“House Republicans announced a sudden postponement to the vote to elect John Boehner’s replacement, after speakership front-runner Kevin McCarthy declared himself ‘unfit’ for the job. Though I think he just got scared of how difficult that job must be when he found out that John Boehner is 31 years old.” –Seth Meyers
“Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich made fun of a young woman at a campaign event this week by calling on her for a question and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have any Taylor Swift tickets.’ This morning Taylor Swift announced that John Kasich is out of the squad.” –Seth Meyers
I was particularly amused by Ben Carson’s remarks about Obama “politicizing” the recent shooting.
My thought was “if only!”
One affects change in a democracy precisely by politicizing events and by getting the public to learn from them and by mobilized by them. As the cartoon suggests, conservatives have shown no reluctance at all to politicize events that feed their agenda. For example, crime rates among immigrants have run significantly lower than among those of us born here, but that hasn’t prevented Trump, Breitbart’s zombie, Daily Caller, House Republicans, etc. from politicizing every crime an immigrant has committed as if it were emblematic rather than exceptional.
And that is why Republicans are able to run candidates on their issues (such as they are) whereas the national Democratic Party only gets around to pushing issues until its chosen candidates run on them. And so climate change motivates few voters. Untruths have become accepted reality: voters believe Obama is growing the deficit and that “Obamacare” has failed.
These issues, which Democrats could and should win at, suffer from not being politicized.
…I largely agree, with one caveat: Democrats (and liberals in general) are neither very good at it (at least, not any more) nor are they given equal stature in the debate. It strikes me as balanced between Democrats not being as shameless about it as Republicans and a truly feckless media. The canonical example was the 2004 presidential race: John Kerry the war hero vs George W the draft dodger… and the Republicans completely inverted the entire narrative. And the feckless media just continued as though it was just another he-said-she-said horse race…. I don’t know that the narrative of Kerry “not hitting back hard enough” would have been subverted even if he, Kerry, actually came up and called George Bush outright a liar. I think the media would have taken great pains to point out how mean John Kerry was for saying such things. Bill Clinton, fairly shameless person himself, told Kerry to triangulate against the LBGT community to get elected. As strategy, without moral considerations, it was likely to be very effective. Kerry’s response was ‘i’m not ever going to do that.”
Now, greater than 10 years on the media landscape hasn’t so much changed as concretized. We’re living the same sort of narratives but the proliferation of media sources — more than one for each bias — has merely nullified fact checking and standardized confirmation bias. So, yeah, we’re not very good at polliticizing the issues, but the lens with which the world sees both the politics and the issues, the media, is very much broken right now.