Demented Politicians A Product Of Demented Politics?

Demented

1 : mad, insane

2 : affected by or exhibiting cognitive dementia. Merriam-Webster

Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate brings into sharp relief the fact that America is really, truly, genuinely, not kidding, experiencing a debate as to whether it is “ageism” or “ableism” to question the fitness for office of:

A soon-to-be octogenarian quasi-president who

• habitually walks off podiums reaching out to shake hands with the air and then wanders around confused;
• frequently interrupts himself mid-sentence when he lapses into incoherence;
• regularly utters policy statements laden with global import that must be immediately walked back by White House staff; and
• recently looked into the audience seeking a deceased politician – whose passing he was there to commemorate.

A candidate for United States Senate, the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body™, who

• this year suffered a debilitating stroke yet refuses to release his medical records;
• in rare public appearances never fails to mangle multiple words, phrases and thoughts;
• required a closed captioning device to comprehend a journalists’ interview questions; and
• who opened the debate with the, umm, unusual greeting of “Hi, goodnight, everybody,” uttered unintelligible responses throughout, and bizarrely broke into one of his opponent’s answers and his closing statement with complete non-sequiturs.

Puh-leeze. It is not discrimination in any way, shape, or form to expect that at a minimum, a president be sufficiently sentient to represent his nation with dignity on the world stage. Or a senator be capable of engaging intelligently with his colleagues, the public and the media without his spouse’s or technological intervention.

Rather, sophists’ attempt, on purely political grounds, to protect public figures who fall under the second definition of the term “demented” offered above is perhaps the most conclusive proof ever that the progressive movement has completely descended into the first.  And is slowly but surely dragging this once truly exceptional nation with it.

One needn’t prattle on like a conservative cable news host to list the ways in which our current polity and culture are, in fact, “demented” in its worst sense: utterly depraved.

It’s demented for a political party to pin its election hopes on going all-in on snuffing out more than 930,000 lives in the womb annually. Especially when America is plunging (despite a small COVID baby bump) into demographic winter with its attendant economic and social consequences.

And depraved to mutilate and chemically deform children based on a seeming sudden surge, largely among impressionable teenaged girls, of a condition previously believed to affect far less than 1% of the population – up to 80% of whom also suffer from “personality disorders.”  Not to mention to subject kindergartners to drag queen performances.

But it’s also perverse to plunge entire populations into energy insecurity and poverty to humor a doomsday cult obsessed with an unproven and unprovable hypothesis about climate apocalypse.

Downright sick, and sickening, for a nation that two years ago was the world’s leading oil producer, and that has a 470-year supply of coal and a century’s worth of natural gas, to beg on bended knee for tinhorn tyrants to increase their energy production.

Sheer lunacy to allow rioters and flash-mob looters to run wild while siccing FBI SWAT teams on peaceful anti-abortion protesters and January 6 demonstrators. Then holding the latter in solitary confinement and locking them up for terms of up to three-and-a-half years (plus three years probation) while springing axe-terrorizers and subway-shovers on cash-free bail.

And unhinged to label a majority of the nation’s citizens, after generations of personal, professional, and economic sacrifices to advance racial progress, as inherent, irredeemable, privileged bigots.

Some measure of this mass political and social hysteria can be attributed to the warped imaginations of truly disturbed people. But most of it cannot.

Rather, it represents intentional efforts by fully rational people to – in the vein of 1984’s Room 101 – disorient, unnerve and unsettle an entire populace. To separate citizens from the social moorings, moral and ethical standards, and even basic laws of economics that have governed their lives. And thereby to sap their self-esteem and self-reliance and increase their subservience to the Ruling Class.

By presenting the refusal to accept as authority figures men who were upwards-failing, buffoonish mediocrities as somehow malign, this Ruling Class is demanding that the knee be bent to its entire power structure. It is working to break ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives, in the manner of 1984’s Winston Smith, by jamming into their faces their greatest fears: economic insecurity, social opprobrium, and alienation of their children.

But Americans cannot allow themselves to be broken. The citizenry must continue to resist, until compatriots of character and good common sense can wrench back control of the commanding heights of government, business, our culture, academia, and the media.

Rather than bend the knee, America must, as progressives like to say, bend the arc of history back to normalcy and sanity. Because to lose the battle for our collective minds is to lose, irretrievably, our country itself.

Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.