One of the biggest hypocritical bags of wind in the history of American politics is Sen. Jubilation T. Cornpone, d/b/a Sen. John Kennedy, of Louisiana. This is the guy who pretends on TV to be Mr. Haney from “Green Acres” in the hopes that none of his benighted constituents will notice that he’s got a degree from
Magdalen College, Oxford, which is in England (where so many of those Yurp-eens live). Anyway, Jubilation was in Georgia this weekend, as it was his turn to chaperone Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker who, evidently, temporarily forgot which office he’s campaigning to hold. Recently, former president Barack Obama was in Atlanta and made some mild sport of Walker‘s nonexistent credentials to be a United States senator. (Nobody does, “C’mon, man!” campaigning better than Obama does.) Jubilation was quite exercised by the former president’s flippancy.
At an appearance on Monday, he attacked vegetables with savage abandon:
Whooo-weeee! That’s a good ‘un, hoss.
“Dear Lord, save us from high IQ stupid people. They may be smart, but they don’t have any sense[…]They’re all over Washington, D.C., these high IQ stupid people, and they’re in charge[…]They think they’re smarter and more virtuous than the American people.”
Watching U.S. senators whom no one of integrity would respect on their own merits anymore—Kennedy, Lindsey Graham—act as human shields for a laughable box of rocks like Walker is one thing; but to hear the pride of Magdalen College, Oxford, do so by pretending he’s as big a rube as his audience is to watch in nauseated fascination a distilled version of modern conservative politics: to sneer at knowledge and sophistication from behind your elite degrees, to talk about kitchen-table issues while shoving the country’s wealth upwards, to put on working class signifiers to steal the working class’ future.
The phrase “laughing up your sleeve” was invented for people like this.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has his three children.
This content was originally published here.
