I have come to mock Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.S.S.R.), not to bury him. But before we get to that, we need to talk a bit about humor.
There was a charming article about irony, David Letterman, and "post-irony" in R.W. Bradford's Liberty magazine many years ago that has stuck with me. Summed up too briefly, if ironic humor is when your words or actions result in the opposite of your intentions in a comedic way, then post-ironic humor is when you go ahead and take the stupid action, fully aware of what the screwed-up result will be.
Letterman found humor in the badness of television itself. "If you think television is bad," Letterman seemed to promise viewers (way back when his show was still the best thing on late-night), "wait until you see me do it." The joke was that he let you in on the joke that it was all just a joke. Letterman was the post-ironic master of making great bad television.
Irony is un-self-aware. Post-irony is self-aware. But some words or actions are so bad that they are neither ironic nor post-ironic humor; they're just stupid.
Enter, stage left, one Chuck Schumer.
If you think politics is stupid, wait until you see Schumer do it.
I'm sorry you had to see that, but the message I got out of it was: "Please, Chuck, stop — they won't let me vote for Trump again."
And Another Thing: I more fully explored the rise and fall of David Letterman in this 2009 piece, "Deconstructing Dave." It's held up nicely, and you should read it. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be an online version of that Liberty magazine article that introduced me to post-irony.
But yes, to answer American AF's question, I do have a thought on that: Meat axe, flamethrower, chainsaw... what else you got? Bring out the whole inventory like Neo and Trinity in the last act of "The Matrix."
Or maybe that's not the best movie reference. Maybe we need to "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit."
There are other thoughts worth sharing. When Schumer says, "Everyone knows there's waste in government and should be cut," what waste has Schumer ever identified? What cuts has he ever proposed?
To ask the question, Mr. Waller, is to answer it. Schumer is just a high-level cog in the machine that is bankrupting the wealthiest nation in history.
I don't mean cutting a billion here or a billion there because, unlike in Everett Dirksen's day, that's no longer real money. 10 billion here and 10 billion there doesn't even make the cut. We've got a $2.5 trillion-with-a-T deficit this year alone — and DOGE is on a mission to cut no less than [dr_evil_voice] ONE TRILLION DOLLARS [/dr_evil_voice] this year alone.
They need that meat axe. They could also use a little help from a few Democrats who still give a damn about Washington's impending insolvency. But Democrats who still give a damn about the issues that truly matter seem to be in shorter supply than self-awareness in Chuck Schumer.
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