Get Grampy Out Of The TV Room, or at least don’t give him the remote!

Some wise wiseacre on Twitter the other day commented that if someone’s seanathair (grandfather) were behaving like Dolt 45 it would be high time to get him out of the assisted living facility TV room.  I couldn’t agree more.

I am tired of getting my news from a fire hose of misinformation, disinformation, and downright lies. Grampy is up to about 7.5 lies per day. [WaPo] That’s closer to 7.6 if we want to be more precise, but at this level who cares?  It’s embarrassing.   It’s Grampy telling a story about how he met Grammy at Cambridge — that would be Cambridge, Idaho.  Or, Grampy chattering on about his exploits during his motorcycle riding days. No, he didn’t own a Harley, it was more like a Honda Super Cub. Only when it’s the president of the United States it matters.

I make no pretense of being the most original thinker in the flock, but I can recognize when someone is being led — by the nose if not by some other body part — toward policy positions which make absolutely NO sense whatsoever unless someone else is calling the shots.  Why else would we have tariffs on aluminum products from our friends but refuse to impose such import taxation on the Russian firm Rusal? [NYT]  Why are we imposing tariffs on the Chinese such that they’ve moved their purchasing of agricultural products like soybeans from American farmers to the Russians and Brazilians?  Why? It’s not like we’ve  spent years developing markets for American agricultural products and then want to see those same markets frivolously dribbled away in a ridiculous trade war.

It’s not like we welcome divisive rhetoric of the kind on full display as Dolt 45 fulminates against yet another African American, offering yet one more example of his proclivity to call African Americans “low IQ,” or “stupid.”  There’s a pattern here.  [LATimes]  African Americans and women are the usual subject of Dolt 45’s derision, and to be both African American and a woman will get a person the treatment he reserves for Congresswoman Maxine Waters.  He might want to give this another “think.” A quick click into the Google-verse shows 11,700,000 results in less than one second for t-shirts and other stuff imprinted with “Don’t Test The Waters.”

Grampy seems pleased to continue his performance for a steadily contracting audience of hangers-on and sycophants.  Analogous to seeing the little elder ladies thin out to go play another hand of canasta in a quieter location, and some of the men retire to a quiet session counting golf tees.  Pretty soon Grampy is down to the nodding few whose addled pates (complete with male pattern baldness) aren’t really registering what he’s saying, just parroting his rants and encouraging his repetitions for their entertainment value.  The problem is that he’s attracting and thereby promoting the fringe.  These aren’t the people who can still recite their own grandparents’ recipes for marmalade and barbecue sauce; instead they’re the ones who maintain the moon landing was a hoax, UFOs are real, and chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

Thus we have former Bush Administration ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, twittering away, sounding like the kid in the back seat of the family wagon: “Are we there yet?” Only Painter is talking about the 25th Amendment.   This isn’t normal.  None of this is normal.

Most of the reporting on the subject of Grampy’s wildly varying, disassociation laden, rants seems to be on target — it’s usually the headline writing that misses the point.  The Dolt 45 is “not forthright.”  Or, “not accurate.”  Or, “not informed,” Or, “at odds with other administration sources.”  Gee, we can’t say he’s lying because we can’t determine his motive ?  OK, then go ahead and say he’s being untruthful.  The motive may not matter so much, especially as it becomes ever more situational; and what comes out in the end is simply a good old fashioned bit of the southbound product of a northbound bull.  There are enough fact-checkers on the case to set most records straight. What Grampy seems to want on the record is his version of his story — his courtship of Grammy, his motorcycle, his feats on the barbecue grill, his conquests in business, his “whatever” — out there in the TV room for his audience to applaud.  The story changes.  Cambridge becomes Oxford (Oxford, Mississippi) and the cycle becomes a vintage ’57 Harley Sportster, and he started out with even less money from his father to start his business than he said two months ago.  We can call it cognitive decline. We can call it situational obfuscation. We can call it anything, any euphemism we’d like. We just can’t call it normal.

Nor can we allow Grampy the luxury of pontificating in the TV room to his ever declining audience, about his ever expanding range of complaints and grievances, while we try to rationalize the irrational.  At least someone needs to retake control of the Remote.