You’ll find no brilliant, well researched political analysis here, just my personal impression of recent GOP chicanery.
I was watching CNN at the moment the “memo” was released. I listened as the anchors and their guests began their dissection of it, and was singularly unimpressed with its contents. “Meh”, I said. (I actually said it out loud.) Thinking about what the GOP will do with this document, however, made me remember a joke I heard years ago.
It is a long, complex joke, and I am afraid I do not remember all of it, (nor can I find it on the Internet), but I can get the point across, I think. It was one of those typewritten and xeroxed pages of jokes that used to circulate around my wife’s office on a weekly basis. She would bring them home to me. ( For the young people reading, this is what people used to do before modern technology made them able to e-mail or text people links to a pages of dumb jokes.)
Anyway, the joke. It seems a Russian man owned a cow. (Nothing anti-Russian here, I just heard it as a joke about a Russian.) Being an enterprising guy, (and a fast talker) the man hatched a plot. He went to a bank, and borrowed money, using his projected yearly income from selling milk as security for the loan. With this money he bought a heifer and a bull. Back at the bank, he borrowed more money using the expected profit he would get from selling the offspring of his bull and heifer as security for the loan.
The story then goes through about ten levels of financial manipulations, including leveraging, investments, buyouts, and so forth, building his financial worth, eventually making the man a mega-multi-millionaire.
Then the question is asked, “And what happened to the first cow?”
There never was any first cow.
And that is what the memo brought to mind. The GOP will, spraying spittle with outrage, use this hollow memo to fire up their base, crying foul, and declaring its contents to be a mind-blowing sign that all is lost. Waving their three page copy of the memo as they stride, red-faced and shaking with rage through the halls of power, they will further divide the parties, tearing the heart out of this country if they can.
And the memo? There never was any cow.