Is everybody going crazy in this nutty world of ours? As I scan this morning’s news, I am struck by the bizarre quality of many of the events being reported.
Perhaps most mind boggling is the revelation that Congressman Robert Brady, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, swiped the Pope’s half-empty drinking glass, obviously believing it contained some kind of Holy Water (lower photo).
How must Pope Francis feel about something like that? He comes to America with a message of love, forbearance and reasonableness, and at least one American takes away the idea that his saliva has magical powers? Can such people even understand what the pontiff was trying to tell them?
So you say that’s just one man – and a politician at that. We all know politicians are not like you and me. They’re weird.
But why do so many weird politicians get elected? I have to believe it’s because the voters are weird.
As Ben Carson’s popularity soars, rivaled only by Carly Fiorina’s, I wonder at the weirdness of the American electorate. Consider these pronouncements by Dr. Carson (top photo):
- Homosexuality is a choice, because prisoners who are raped become gay.
- Obamacare is worse than slavery.
- Americans are living in a Gestapo age.
- The Big Bang is a “fairy tale” and evolution is a theory encouraged by the Devil.
- Young, black men get shot because they didn’t have dads to teach them how to handle authority.
- No Muslim should become president of the US.
Even weirder is his insistence that a fertilized egg is a human being and deserves Constitutional protection as a citizen of the United States. That concept would make taking the morning-after birth control pill first-degree murder, I suppose.
And the retired neurosurgeon says these things in that quiet, amiable way of his, as if everyone must surely recognize their scientific validity. When a famous surgeon, who spent so many years studying science, says things like that, you have to wonder whether he is senile – or just plain crazy.
Dr. Carson’s strange ramblings are benign, however, when compared with Carly Fiorina’s malicious lies.
I don’t mean her fabricated Horatio Alger story about rising from a lowly secretary to CEO of a Fortune 500 company. She was born rich, attended private schools and has two post-graduate degrees. She entered the business world as a fast-tracked management trainee, not as some nondescript “secretary.”
But in today’s politics fictional biographies are commonplace. (Marco Rubio’s fairy tale about his parents fleeing Castro’s persecution is an example. They fled Batista’s Cuba, not Castro’s.)
I can also tolerate Fiorina’s brazen misrepresentation of her career as a CEO. Perception of failure or success is subjective after all, and if polishing our resumes were a crime, most of us would be in prison.
What really sickens me is her slanderous description of a non-existent scene from a video that supposedly shows Planned Parenthood employees marketing tissue from aborted fetuses. She not only lies about what she sees in the video, she doubles down on her lie when challenged.
But I suppose Fiorina’s brazen fakery is par for the course in a campaign season that has witnessed the ascendancy of Donald Trump.
If ever there was a snake oil salesman, Trump is it.
While these strange events are taking place in America, the rest of the world is witnessing its own horrific weirdness.
There’s the rampant insanity of the Middle East, where friends are foes and foes are friends, depending on the situation, where Israel’s Benjjamin Netanyahu and the Ayatollah Khamenei seem to be vying for the title of warmonger of the year and where Vladimir Putin is weaving his own brand of empire building as millions are killed, maimed and displaced in Syria.
Don’t they all know we are here for a short time only, that they, too, must one day return to the dust they came from?
None of it makes sense. It’s a mad, mad world, after all.
Click for the Robert Brady story.
Click for more on Dr. Carson’s beliefs.
Click for more on the Middle East.
Click for a Mideast friendship chart.
