What high-ranking elected officials in the Republican Party need most right now is a fool.
Not the kind who’s addled or stupid, but a wise fool who is allowed to take the liberty to speak truth to power, to tell the King what he needs to hear, to say things that no one else in the King’s favor is able to tell him, to "advise him in the premises." (Or her. After all, Queens have needs for fools, too.)
Like the fools in Shakespeare, mostly commoners who spoke to authority with wit and wisdom, simple people who can be accepted as entertainers but who tell truths that groundlings in the cheap seats of the audience know and accept at face value for the reality they contain.
That would save the GOP a lot of trouble, even inside its own party.
Cases in point: VA Governor Bob McDonnell and his switcheroo on the GOP-sponsored vaginal probe bill. Rick Santorum on contraception, and so many other things. Darrell Issa's panel of wise clerics. And Willard Mitt Romney, with his royalty-like inability to relate to us common folk.
First, Virginia Governor McDonnell. He's given blanket support for GOP-sponsored invasions of pregnant women who want an abortion. It is, after all, the very kind of political medicine the Far-and-Farther Right actively promotes, where an individual's civil liberties are beneath notice in the name of Christian evangelical fundamentalist Sharia-type laws opposing abortions for any reason.
Here's how the governor backtracked from his endorsement, undercutting his GOP super-majority in the Virginia House and ravishing his colleagues in the evenly split VA Senate. From a session sponsored by Politico, as reported in HuffPost:
- He didn't realize that the law would require an invasive, transvaginal procedure.
- "We realized there was [sic] different kinds of ultrasounds, so what I recommended to the General Assembly, and they adopted the other day is, let's make the requirement for an abdominal ultrasound."
- "I also got legal advice from various people that these kinds of mandatory, invasive requirements might run afoul of Fourth Amendment law."
- He also said that he sees a lot of bills, hundreds in fact, and has other things to do than study the details of each.
Okay, Guv, but
Huff Post also reported that:
"Whether McDonnell knew that there were different kinds of ultrasounds involved or not, state Sen. Barbaro Favola (D) told HuffPost that the GOP Senators knew exactly what the mandatory ultrasound bill did before they passed it, because Sen. Ralph Northam (D), a physician, explained the details of the invasive procedure on the Senate floor.
'He went through in elaborate detail the fact that this was a transvaginal procedure and made very clear to the Senate exactly what this bill required women to go through,' she told HuffPost".
Second, we have
Rick Santorum. Much as a guy who should be able to take his Far-and-Farther Right base for granted, enjoying his undeniable ownership of it so he can go on to, say, economic matters and foreign policy, Santorum draws himself back into the web of instructing the public on how contraception is unthinkable and wrong, even in marriage, how dependent our nation is on straight marriage and no-other-variations, how we'll get like Hollanders who flee hospitals (no evidence for this) because euthanasia is lawful there (that part is true).
Third, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa. Just like the kickoff panel of all male experts on contraception who appeared before House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa's hearing last week, the GOP does not want to hear both sides of the story, or consider the views of the cohort in America most directly and immediately affected by non-consenual invasions of their bodies and right to privacy. Senate Minority Leader McConnell belongs in this category too, for his ringing statement that the Obama administration's rulings on insurance were not an issue of contraception but of religious liberty. So much for the individual's liberties.
And then there's Willard "Mitt" Romney, laboring mightily to relate to the unemployed, to corporate peoples, to people with lawn crews made up of "them," to automobile owners ... the list goes on, and no one of us needs to be reminded how Romney handled those and so many other tone-deaf situations he blunders himself into. Even liberal pundits seem to be getting sorry for him.
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What these GOP kings and princes need right now is a wise fool, a commoner who can whisper truth to them, or at least describe the other side(s) and the contrary arguments, tell the master and the princelings what they say and how they act will likely resound among the common voters.
On the other hand, even a Shakespearean fool - one who is simple, common, witty, the one who is actually "no fool at all" - probably would not be tolerated in the Republican Party of 2012. Or perhaps, not even recognized.