Dan Quayle was an idiot who proved his idiocy time and time again. Yet Republicans insisted he was a giant, because he fit the warped mold of what they consider leadership (white, male, arrogant, rich, and full of it). It wasn’t until Quayle misspelled “potato” that his political viability came crashing down on him.
It was a nothing moment, really. Quayle didn’t even necessarily get it wrong (“potatoe” is an obsolete alternative spelling). But it was a moment that prompted everyone to see what Quayle’s critics had been saying about him from day one: he was an empty shirted buffoon.
Why am I writing about Dan Quayle of all people? Because as inconsequential as that moment was, as inconsequential as he ended up being, the “potatoe” moment still serves as a case study for something being so on the nose that it finally shattered any illusions (or delusions) that anyone was holding about him. There was really no way to defend his intellect after that; after all, the guy couldn’t even spell “potato.”
That was, of course, a comparatively innocent time. Back then we were still debating whether someone was too full of it and stupid to be President of the United States (or Vice President, as it were). We’ve since been subjected to a President of the United States who can’t spell anything, and can barely speak a coherent sentence, yet his illiteracy isn’t among the thousand most disqualifying things about him. We have a President who is a recently convicted felon, whose entire business empire has been exposed as a long running fraud with thoroughly cooked books, who was found by the courts to have sexually assaulted a woman, who tried to violently overthrow the government of the United States, who has advanced dementia and appears to be dying, who was already rejected once for being the worst President in the history of the United States… and he’s back to being President again?
The bar has been set so low over the past decade that Dan Quayle could never even get the Republican nomination because he’s far too literate – and not nearly evil enough. For some reason, for some utterly psychotic reason, Americans decided to try making the worst person in the world the President, and when that was a disastrous failure, they later decided to make him President again. There’s really nothing that could finally turn Americans against him, right?
But that’s when the on-the-nose last straw comes in. Rob Reiner, a lovely man whose life’s work has inspired millions and whose activism was marked by his dignified approach to it, was tragically murdered by his mentally unwell son. It was one of those moments that has caught everyone off guard. I loved everything about Reiner. But even if you didn’t like anything about Reiner, there’s just no way you’d root for him to go out like this, or anything like this. It’s horrifying, and except for the very fringe of internet trolls, no one was going to find any joy in this awful moment.
Even this so-called President of the United States, who openly despised Rob Reiner and everyone knew it, was surely going to sit this one out, right? This small fraction of a man, even if he was celebrating Reiner’s murder privately, surely had the sense not to say it out loud, right? And even if the Asshole-in-Chief was going to say something negative about Reiner in the wake of his murder, he’d at least… I don’t even know. You just thought that even this worthless husk of a man, whose repugnant behavior has been at its absolute worst of late, just might have stopped at the water’s edge on this one.
But no. This deranged individual occupying the Oval Office, who I’m so angry at right now that I can’t even bring myself to use his name in this article, announced that Rob Reiner got himself murdered by being too angrily opposed to – well, we’re not using his name today.
Where does one even start? Never mind that this insane man… no, you know what? I’m not even going to try to analyze it. I don’t want to know what’s going on in his rotten festering mind, and I no longer care. To hell with him. There’s nothing left to analyze, other than to observe that his dementia appears to be making his worst qualities even worse.
But this isn’t about the man whose name I can’t bring myself to type today. It’s about his supporters. It’s about how, after a decade of warning signs, flashing red lights, loud sirens, and glaringly evil thoughts expressed in exact words, this cretin finally said something that prompted many of his own most prominent supporters to loudly and publicly condemn him. It’s about how this monster finally did something that was so on-the-nose monstrous, his weary supporters could no longer hang in there and pretend it was okay – or even keep it to themselves.
There is no way to predict where this will go next. For all we know, his supporters may well fall back in line with him by the time you’re reading this article. They may even have second thoughts about what the cretin said about Rob Reiner, decide it was justified, and start parroting it themselves. It’s happened before. But yesterday felt different. It was as if they knew their toad god had finally done something so egregious that they knew they weren’t going to be able to credibly defend him on it. For one brief cogent moment on their part, they were as repulsed by this repugnant man as the rest of us have been from the start. Something finally pierced the bubble of delusion that had spent a decade pretending up was down, wrong was right, and the most vile and most destructive man on earth was somehow a classy working class hero.
We’ll see what happens now. But maybe, just maybe, something as simple as a President of the United States publicly gloating derangedly over a political adversary’s murder is finally on the nose enough to jolt his remaining supporters into acknowledging that something is very, very wrong.
I’m with you. Good article, though.