The Voters Speak. Well, Mumble, Really

It's Caucus Week in Iowa! where it's so cold that well diggers across the state are protecting their posteriors. Brass monkeys are banging on the door to be let in. Witches are wearing electric warming bras. In short, it's chilly.

The Voters Speak. Well, Mumble, Really
"I think I can see Trump's hair from here."

Well Happy Iowa Caucuses Week! And before we get into what's really got up my nose, as our trans-Atlantic cousins say, a bit about this distinctly goofy political practice.

Almost all other states hold primaries where, you know, you just go to a polling place and actually vote for someone. But no, that's too simple for 4 states: Iowa, North Dakota, Wyoming and Nevada. What? Just take off your lunch hour to pull a lever? No, we want you to take the whole damned day off and listen to speeches after your TV has melted down from the campaign ads for the last few months, and then cast a super, double-secret ballot. And if you're a Democrat, you have to physically move to different parts of a room to join the group that favors your favorite political perp. It's like musical chairs with dark money.

And this year, you have to bundle up like a member of the Shackleton Antarctic Expedition to do it, and we know how that turned out. Yes, it is so cold in Iowa now, well diggers across the state are protecting their posteriors. Brass monkeys are banging on the door to be let in. Witches are wearing electric warming bras. In short, it's chilly.

Ah, but one Trump ally knows why we're dealing with enough snow to take Bing Crosby out of the Christmas mood. Laura Loomer is a white nationalist, conspiracy-loving, Muslim-hating all around dummkopf and she knows why it's snowing and who is behind it.

Trump heaps praise on far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer
Trump heaps praise on far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer Source: Laura Loomer

Now, Laura has promoted the usual bushel basket full of chowderhead conspiracy stuff like the Parkland shooting being faked, and of course, the Covid vaccine will turn you into a newt.

Well, this week she posted on Elon's crazy-quilt Etch-A-Sketch social platform that used to be the mildly annoying Twitter and is now saddled with the oh, so ominous sobriquet, "X!" OK, I added the exclamation point. But here's Loomer's explanation for the fact that everyone in Iowa is auditioning for parts in the remake of "Nanook of the North."

Now, to explain, though it feels like I'm explaining Professor Irwin Corey here, HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) was an Air Force program to study the ionosphere. NBC explained...

HAARP is a research program designed to analyze the ionosphere, a portion of the upper atmosphere that stretches from about 53 miles (85 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth to 370 miles (600 kilometers) up. The program has been funded by the Air Force, the Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
The U.S. military is interested in the ionosphere because this portion of the atmosphere plays a role in transmitting radio signals. HAARP sends radio beams into the ionosphere to study the responses from it — one of the few ways to accurately measure this inaccessible part of the atmosphere.

And it was such a liberal, deep-state conspiracy, that one of it's biggest supporters was the late Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who managed to get the funding and facility sent to his state. But, the usual confederacy of dunces on the internet, including Loomer, propose that it was meant to control the weather. Oh, and by the way, it was shut down and dismantled in 2014 over cost issues. So, for Nikki to rev it up again and crank up the intergalactic snow machine in Des Moines, is pretty impressive. She might bear watching.

It would be easy to say, "Oh, come on. No one will buy that nonsense." Really? And I'll bet you think we actually landed on the moon.

No photo description available.
I think this is Ramaswamy, but I'm not sure.

Take Vivek Ramaswamy...please. The preternaturally tiresome millionaire is facing a question that, in an educated society, would be way down the list of disqualifiers. Voters in Iowa see a dark-skinned guy with a weird name and, drum roll please...they think he's Muslim. I would have thought it was that he is tiresomely abrasive, delivered with a shit-eating grin that no clever retort can erase. But no, Iowans don't seem to realize that the majority faith in India is Hinduism. But then again, it's Iowa, where the New World Order and another 9-11 is just one illegal border crossing away.

And that misconception about India could have been resolved with a little more reading in school. But, one of the Iowa candidates has a solution for all that rampant learnin' going on. That is the recent book banning law in Florida, and don't pretend it's anything else and insult our collective intelligence, was endorsed by Governor DeSantis and conservative stalwarts like, oh, Bill O'Reilly, for example.

Now, Bill-O, who knows his way around a loofa, has "written" a series of concocted history books with the word "Killing" in the titles. "Killing Lincoln," "Killing Kennedy," "Killing a Cushy Fox Gig" and so forth. Well, our boy is now in a state of high dudgeon over the fact that his books are on a list of volumes banned in the Escambia School District in the Sunshine State, and he wants to speak to someone in charge right now.

Bill O'Reilly - We'll Do It LIVE! - YouTube
"I need to see the manager, now!"

But Bill's bilious mewlings are not the biggest outrage in this list. It contains the usual stuff you might expect in books about race, sex and gender. But it also lists the Collier's and Merriam-Webster dictionaries and 4 others, apparently because you can look up the word "sex" or the word "gay" or the word "Hindu" for all I know. It includes John Grisham's best-selling novels and a couple of volumes of "Ripley's Believe It or Not" and "The Guinness Book of World Records." It includes "Tom Sawyer" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Shocked? You shouldn't be. The whimsical Douglas Adams books starting with "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, 23 books by Stephen King, "Brave New World," "Schindler's List," "On the Road" by Kerouac, Sinclair Lewis and the great theologian, C. S. Lewis, Martin's "Game of Thrones" books and of course the book no child should read, "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Here's one that is just dumb, "The Teen Vogue Handbook: An Insider’s Guide to Careers in Fashion?" 

Oh, and Flaubert and Proust are on the list as well along with National Geographic's Science Encyclopedia and Human Body Systems.

I think you get the picture. And I think I found the person responsible for the list...

The Wizard of Oz: Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West – Girls  Do Film
"Smut, smut, everywhere!"

Seriously, though, this is where we are. There are 1600 books on the school district's list, and a lot of them involve race or sex. I know, there are appropriate times in life for certain subjects with a child. For example, my Dad called me collect on my honeymoon to give me "the talk." Whew! better late than never.

But this seems to imply, no subjects at all. And not just sex, but the realities of our history, which I have discussed already, probably too much. But, when you dumb down our schools, the information our future voters need, not just for elections, but for life, is left to social media. Surely you have no problem with that, right?

Where else would they get the vital info about the deep state weather machine and that Muslim guy pretending to be a Hindu? Wow, dodged a bullet on those, eh?

"Curse you, Nikki Haley!"
Roger Gray has toiled at the journalism trade since 1970 and his first radio news job at KTRH in Houston. Over those woefully misspent years, he has worked in radio, TV and written for magazines. He was twice elected President of the Texas Automobile Writers Association and was elected to the Texas Radio Hall of Fame. He covered the first Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, Oslo Accords in Israel and peace talks in Ireland. He interviewed writers, actors, politicians and every President from Ford to George W, and none of them remember him.
Now, he is part of the Texas Outlaw Writers, and if this doesn't pan out, the outlaw part will still work as he will indeed resort to robbing banks.