The New Yorker pens its take on a hypothetical Republican version of the Garden of Eden:
The LORD created the animals and bade Adam to name them. Dressage Animals became known as “horses.” Domesticated Animals for Open-air Transport and other Domesticated Animals That Someone (Unknown) Let Out were called “dogs.” Another large animal was named either “moose” or “elk.” Probably “elk.”
Adam set out to build his own business by himself, beseeching the LORD to provide only paths over land and water. Adam’s understanding of this covenant was that these gifts were not to be tallied against his own achievement later.
Adam created Eve and then created a job for her by making her his first legal wife. They were naked and unashamed, especially the latter. Of these, it turns out, one is much, much better for business.
As it relates to fantasy and fever dreams, however, even that pales in comparison to this actual closing line from today’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece by former GE CEO Jack Welch:
The coming election is too important to be decided on a number. Especially when that number seems so wrong.
This was written, of course, in response to the backlash to his infamous tweet of just days earlier, when he accused the Bureau of Labor Statistics of fudging the unemployment numbers to boost Obama’s reelection chances:
[tweet https://twitter.com/jack_welch/status/254198154260525057]There are times when a single statement so perfectly encapsulates a broader mindset that it practically begs to become a symbol of a certain era of history. The closing line of the WSJ op-ed feels like one of those statements. I use the word “feels” a bit ironically, as that’s the crux of the collective Republican delusion so eloquently recapped by Welch: “that number seems so wrong.”
This is the same flawless logic that brought us “unskewed polls,” repudiation of fact-checking, birtherism, Obama-as-a-Muslim conspiracies, “death panels,” “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” and “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior,” among many others. It’s the type of thinking that renounces reality in favor of overcooked, crackpot interpretations of the world that have no relation to empirical reality.
Years from now, when people look back on the Tea Party era, this accusation against a department staffed by nonpolitical appointees (and whose numbers have consistently given the Obama administration headaches for nearly four years) will have a decently strong case to win the hotly contested quest to determine the single most ridiculous thing said during the Obama years.