You Can't Make This Stuff Up Department

Jim Hoffa Jr really did just say this:

“Since when is the secret ballot a basic tenet of democracy?” Hoffa said. “Town meetings in New England are as democratic as they come, and they don’t use the secret ballot. Elections in the Soviet Union were by secret ballot, but those weren’t democratic.”

The difference is, of course, in the thuggery. Which rates higher on the Thugs Coming to Visit You in the Night Scale: a Vermont hamlet, or the old Soviet Union? Now where do you suppose, say, the AFL-CIO rates on that scale? Somewhere south of the USSR, to be sure — but well north of Windsor, VT.