Louisiana Voice

A few cogitations about old dogs, pickup trucks and Repugnantcans.

Don’t let your old dogs ride in the back of pickup trucks. They could fall or jump out. Let ‘em ride up front with you.

Now, about those Repugnantcans, especially those of the Texas variety.

Besides the obvious that Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t know his butt from a bull fiddle, there’s so much to say about Repugnantcans to the west of us who, truth be told, aren’t so different than Repugnantcans in Louisiana. And I’ll get to the Louisiana home-grown variety in due course, so be patient.

It’s not enough that Ted Cruz went skulking off to Cancun rather than remain at home and try to help his Texas constituents. Insult was added to injury when the man he defeated in 2018, one Beto O’Rourke, busily went about trying to do what he could to relieve the suffering. He even drove the 700 miles to Austin to deliver water to residents who had none.

Did I mention that Ted Cruz was basking on the beaches of Cancun about that same time?

But what must have really stuck in the collective craws of Repugnantcans everywhere was that while Cruz was warming his ample tush in Cancun and ignoring his constituents’ plight, one Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC, a Noo Yawk Democrat hated universally by Repugnantcans, was busy raising $5 million….for victims of the crippling cold that paralyzed Cruz’s Texas.

That, my friends, is blasphemy cubed, pure sacrilege it is.

It’s also the very definition of irony and the kind of thing that gives late night talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel ample fodder.

And while Ted Cruz was making an absolute fool of himself, JOE SCARBOROUGH, host of Morning Joe, was taking our very own Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” down a peg or two after the latter’s performance at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings on Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination as Attorney General.

First of all, Kennedy, that human caricature of a southern politician, made an absolute ass of himself when he asked Garland, “Am I a racist?”

“Ah mon ast you ‘bout this concept of implicit bhas (bias),” Sen. Kornpone began. “D-zat mean ah’m a racist? No mattah whut Ah do or whut Ah thank, Ah’m a racist but Ah don’t know Ah’m a racist?”

Wal, butter mah butt an’ call me a biscuit. Ah do believe Kennedy thanks he’s Sens. Sam Ervin an’ Everett Dirkson rolled into one.

It was perhaps one of the stupidest utterances of his brief career (oh, please let John Bel Edwards run against him in 2022 – it will be a breath of fresh air just to hear someone who doesn’t speak with that disgustingly syrupy pseudo-Southern accent that instead of sounding distinguished, begs to be extinguished).

Garland, though, was more than up to the task of addressing Kennedy’s patently clumsy attempt at entrapment, embarrassment, or whatever the point was supposed to have been.

Garland explained that racist is not a term he would use but certainly bias would apply – in the case of every living human. “Implicit bias just means that every human being has biases. That’s part of what it means to be a human being.” He said the objective should be for us to recognize our tendencies toward biases and to see that we behave in certain stereotypical ways. “Implicit biases are those we don’t recognize but it doesn’t make you a racist,” he said.

Kennedy knew that, or he should have. An imbecile could answer that. You reading this have biases. I have them. We all have biases. I pull for the Red Sox and I hate the Yankees. That’s a bias. I don’t care too much for Repugnantcans. That’s a bias. I know that (though I have managed to warm up to Sen. Bill Cassidy in recent weeks as Louisiana Repugnantcans gang up on him for not marching in lock-step with the party of the rich and privileged). I’m biased against cats as opposed to dogs.

On a more serious level, I’ve harbored bias in my past against gays and I’ve told racist jokes – both in my much younger and more immature youth. I hope I’ve grown beyond that mindset. Meanwhile, I’ve developed a keen bias against what I observe as the unabashed hypocrisy of evangelical Christianity that espouses love and forgiveness while seated in a pew on Sunday morning but can’t can’t seem to generate sufficient faith to change the double standard in our system of justice or to challenge the propriety of caging of children on Monday.

But my moralizing aside, Scarborough made me spit coffee onto my keyboard when he said of Kennedy, “Every time John Kennedy, former Democrat, former John Kerry supporter, former Oxford grad opens his mouth, all those institutions weep.” 

But he wasn’t through with the Mouth of the South just yet. “That guy was doing everything but windsurfing in 2004 on Lake Pontchartrain. If he wants to ask if he’s a racist, then “he really needs to take that back to the cloakroom and get on his knees wondering if he’s a racist or not.”

It wasn’t the first time Scarborough has taken on His Éminence of Madisonville. Back in  NOVEMBER 2019, he dredged up 2004 footage of Kennedy proclaiming to be a John Kerry Democrat, a position that would turn 180 degrees in 12 years when he proclaimed to be “110 percent behind Donald Trump.” That’s what the reference to wind-surfing was: going whichever way the (political) wind is blowing. That episode ended with Elise Jordan a Time correspondent wo was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, saying of Kennedy, “Bless his heart.”

Now, Southerners know this already but for those of you who may not have born in the South, when you say “Bless his/her heart,” you have either just observed a very homely person who a mud pack can help only if it remains on, or you’ve just seen someone do or say something incredibly stupid.

Cruz and Kennedy: bless their hearts.