An outbreak of alcohol poisoning and melancholy sidelined everyone on Pandemic Journal’s political beat after last night’s hootenanny in Cleveland. So I’ve turned to other sage voices to offer royalty-free answers to readers’ questions about the flaming mess we all witnessed.
Does Chris Wallace regret his career choice?
Per Cormack McCarthy, “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
Rudy Guiliani was in the audience, and contrary to my expectations he was neither gagged nor bound to his chair. What’s up with that?
As Anton Chekhov observed, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”
The Proud Boys got an unprecedented endorsement from a sitting President. Did I really witness that or was it a hallucination?
Eric Hoffer once wrote, “Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.”
There go the suburbs. Amiright?
In Charles Kuralt’s words, “It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn’t in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.”
What do I make of the word salad that spewed across the stage any time the President was asked about his plans?
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” That’s Isaac Asimov, by the way.
Are they really going to do this again? Twice?
Winston Churchill once said, “It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.”