Saturday, June 10, 2017

Democrats begin Impeachment Proceedings on the Grounds that Donald Trump is an Old Man

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—After the 2018 U.S. congressional election, Democrats won back enough seats to bring impeachment proceedings, but they decided to simplify their case against Donald Trump, citing only the undeniable fact, as the reason for the urgent need for Trump’s immediate removal from office, that Trump is “an old man.”

There are hundreds of scandals, crimes, conflicts of interests, gaffes, inadequacies, or other embarrassments that can be attributed to Trump’s presidency, but leading Democrats believe they can avoid getting into the details by reminding everyone that, after all, Trump is just an old man and thus is obviously unfit for high office.

“There’s something that happens to you when you get old,” said Senator Al Franken. “You go downhill, as they say. That means your brain doesn’t work as well as it used to. Why should your brain stay the same when the rest of your body is clearly deteriorating? I mean, your skin sags and gets full of wrinkles, you lose muscle mass and bone density.

“You go downhill. At the bottom of that hill is the sort of old guy ridiculed in The Simpsons. You get to be like Homer’s dad who babbles incoherently and can’t take care of himself anymore because, you know, he’s gotten, like, really, really old. That’s what’s happened to Donald Trump: he got old, far too old to run a country.”

Democrats contend that, although he’s always been a boor, Trump’s senility is responsible for the outlandish scope of his incompetence. Thus, there’s no reason “to get into the weeds,” as one Democrat put it. “You just go with what’s obvious and can’t be denied. Trump is super old and he acts like it. So he needs to be pushed into retirement.”

Republicans have accused Democrats, in turn, of being hypocritical, since numerous top Democrats are over seventy years old, including Bernie Sanders, Barbara Boxer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Carl Levin, and Dianne Feinstein.

Franken replied that while many Democrats may likewise technically be far too old to be entrusted with driving a car, let alone with the enormous responsibilities of holding high political office, they’re “functional old fogies,” whereas Trump is “off his rocker and off his meds.”

Sociologist Millie Hildebrand credited the PR firm Old Folks Rule for conspiring to generate the misplaced confidence most people have in the elderly, which is why, she said, the elderly are often reelected.

“In an election,” Hildebrand said, “voters see the old man or woman next to the fresh-faced challenger, and the young gun doesn’t stand a chance because he or she lacks experience. That’s what most voters think; they go with the greater experience.

“What these voters forget is that the more experience you have, the older you must be, and after a certain number of years you suddenly become simply an old man or an old woman. When that happens, it becomes absurd for others to expect much in the way of competence from you.

“For example, an old politician won’t be able to keep to a tight schedule, because he or she will be in the bathroom all day and all night. How are you going to talk tough to dictators on the phone when you’re always sitting on the toilet?”

Jay Wackadoodle, a political pseudoscientist at the Machiavelli Institute, offered a different explanation for old people’s success in politics, pointing to the fact that most American voters are themselves elderly, given the shockingly-low voter turnout in all U.S. elections over many decades.

“We vote for people like us,” he said. “Bald guys are more likely to vote for baldies. Blondes vote for blondes, racists vote for racists, and the elderly vote for the elderly.

“That’s how narcissism works, and we’re self-obsessed because our materialistic culture drives us to be consumers, first and foremost. We have to attend to all our needs and wants, and so we have to buy all these products; we think the world revolves around us. Naturally, then, we presume we ought to run the country, but because we’re too fat and lazy to do so, we vote for the next best thing, someone who reminds us of ourselves.” 

11 comments:

  1. "Whereas," Franken opined, "the openly demented, dumbassery, batshit crazy affective style of Reaganesque leadership is and will always be highly desired and even more strongly respected."

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    1. Not sure of the context of Franken's remark, but I think Trump is a long way from Reagan. Reagan's optimism was phony, since his voodoo economics was never going to preserve the middle class, but Reagan was a much better actor and liar than Trump. Trump is a crude authoritarian, but unfortunately for his misled supporters, he's much too old to be competent in staging a coup or in dismantling the administrative state. Like most sociopaths, Trump is self-destructive.

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  2. The Canadian legal system has lost faith in its brainwashed populace.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXwXBcWD6ZM

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    1. I am amused at how, just about every time I harshly criticize American culture, an anonymous reader responds by criticizing Canada. Even if Canada were currently as problematic as the US, that wouldn't make the US any better. I appreciate the context, but part of the reason there's so much focus on the US is that the US is much more consequential on the world stage than, say, Canada.

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    2. Did you watch the video?

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    3. I've watched the video. I don't know the details of the case beyond what's in the video, because I don't follow Canadian politics with much enthusiasm. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an anti-male bias in the Canadian court system in rape cases.

      Then again, the video leaves out the historical context, which is that prior to the feminist backlash, there was much injustice against women and minorities, when white men ruled for centuries in Europe and in the early modern period in North America. The pendulum has swung in the other direction, so that now errors might happen more in favour of women, gays, and other minorities. The problem is that speaking out now against women who claim to have been raped, for example, can appear as a throwback to the decades and centuries when white men could rape with impunity, and when minorities could be killed on sight because they weren't even considered full persons.

      Obviously, if men are being falsely accused of rape, and politically-correct Canadian judges are biased against men, that's unfair. When it's a he said, she said situation, with little other evidence available in the case, the court has to land somewhere and it will likely be swayed by wherever the public happens to be on the general issue. The video says the Canadian public has "lost its collective mind," but that's just name-calling. What conservatives would need are arguments against progressive values. As I say on this blog, conservative values seem monstrous and primitive to me. They don't come close to speaking to the posthuman zeitgeist that's approaching.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2015/05/the-miracle-of-modern-conservatism.html

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/06/the-hidden-divergences-between.html

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/12/clash-of-worldviews-political-edition.html

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    4. "when white men ruled for centuries in Europe" You mean like these white males?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_queens_regnant#Europe

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    5. Those countries may have been ruled sometimes by queens rather than kings, but the cultures themselves were Christian and thus patriarchal and patrilineal. The main rights passed from the fathers to the sons. The matriarchal or egalitarian subcultures in ancient and medieval Europe were heretical, as in Catharism, for example.

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  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_slavery

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  4. How do Canadians keep all these genders straight?

    https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-canada-passes-radical-law-forcing-gender-theory-acceptance

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    1. Anon, I agree with libertarians that the notion of a hate crime is oxymoronic. Hatred alone is in the head and the government has no jurisdiction there, since we ought to express our autonomy and allow others to do the same. That's an axiom of classical liberalism.

      However, discrimination against gays and transgender folks is lame. Certainly, the Christian "principles" of Campaign Life Coalition and of Life Site News (re: the article in your link) aren't respectable, let alone defensible.

      Here's a specious assertion from the former's About page: "Science proves that human life begins at conception (fertilization) when a genetically unique human being comes into existence, with his own genetic code."

      We're human at conception in exactly the same way we're human at the moment of the Big Bang: in both cases, only probabilities, not actualities are in view. A human will develop from fertilization just as human life would eventually develop from the start of nature.

      In any case, the issue isn't humanity, but personhood. There's no person in the womb at conception; thus, there's no right to life at that point.

      And from Life Site News's About page: "LifeSiteNews.com emphasizes the social worth of traditional Judeo-Christian principles but is also respectful of all authentic religions and cultures that esteem life, family and universal norms of morality."

      So the principles behind this criticism of Canada's pro-transgender bill are biblical and thus foolishly anachronistic, not to mention incoherent. (Early Christians were anti-family, because they thought the world was soon to end.)

      Thus, the article quotes a Campaign Life strategist as saying, "Mark my words, this law will not be used as some sort of ‘shield’ to defend vulnerable transsexuals, but rather as a weapon with which to bludgeon people of faith and free-thinking Canadians who refuse to deny truth."

      What is this "truth" that's being denied by Canada's bill, that God designed us to be heterosexual? Unfortunately, that theistic assumption would be untenable and quite lame. Sexuality is on a continuum, and because life is naturally selected rather than intelligently designed, mutations and abnormalities are possible, such as a feminine gender in a male body or a masculine gender in a female body. Hence homosexuality. Sexual orientation isn't chosen, except in the sense that there are grey areas in the continuum of sexual desire, allowing for some flexibility in terms of what some people are sexually attracted to.

      In any case, _every_ sexual orientation, including heterosexuality, is embarrassingly barbaric and will be dispensed with in our posthuman merger with technology.

      I see this issue as falling squarely under my recent article on the nature of sympathy. We should pity and sympathize with gays and transgender individuals for being screwed over by indifferent natural processes. We shouldn't harass them out of self-righteous devotion to a childish religion that has no place anymore in respectable company.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2017/06/the-nature-of-sympathy.html

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