Macaca Doodle Doo

Macaca; “A pejorative epithet used by francophone colonialists in Central Africa’s Belgian Congo for the native population.” Few Americans had any idea what the word meant when Virginia Senator George Allen, a major contender for his party’s presidential nomination, used it at a reelection speech to chide an Indian American photographer hired by his opponent. It cost him not only a shot at the presidency, but his Senate seat.

My, how we’ve relaxed our standards in just four years! A man’s political career is ended by using an obscure racial epithet and now we think nothing of a lady, running for the Senate in my state, kicking a man in the groin for the benefit of cameramen apparently in her employ. Maybe we overlook this because of her contribution to the world of competitive sports, or is it dramatic arts? Take your pick.

In a neighboring state we have a gubernatorial candidate who threatened to “take out” a reporter who was asking too many of the wrong questions. When asked how, he replied “you’ll find out.” The last I heard he was polling within the margin of error.

Just a little to the south is a senatorial candidate who is not polling within this margin, understandably so having claimed to have dabbled in witchcraft. It’s also understandable that she opposes taxes in view of difficulties she’s had in paying hers. She claims to have had college education at Oxford and Princeton. But her only formal adult education was at Fairleigh Dickenson, from which she received a B.A degree after completing a course this summer, and where she first matriculated in 1988. This then leads to the subject of………oh forget about it.

Out west in the great state of Nevada the early leader in her party’s primary was doing quite well until she suggested health care costs could be controlled by bartering with doctors. It wasn’t long before some mathematical genius figured that the chicken she used as an example wouldn’t take care of the co-pay for an office visit.

Cooler heads seemed to have prevailed until the lady succeeding her advocated “Second Amendment remedies” for whatever she and like thinkers disapprove. Does this sound like armed insurrection, or is she looking for the lead in a revival of Annie Get Your Gun?

These are just a few of the many highlights of previously unthinkable behavior by candidates for elective office who are beneficiaries of the new public permissiveness. The candidates are all considered conservative, you might say very conservative. But I say that voters who tolerate this sort of demeanor to the point of voting for its architects are very very liberal. You don’t think so? To quote Casey Stengel, “you could look it up.”