I had a bit of an Aha! moment last night...
I was thinking to myself, as I was driving home from a long day at work, listening to MSNBC live stream on the radio of my car, that the Republicans from the beginning of their, as far as I’m concerned, purloined Congress, have utterly and completely fucked up. It’s as though they’re a football team that has possession of the ball, fumbles it, kicks it around, and finally gets knocked out the back of their own end zone for a two point safety and loss of possession. Yes, I know most of you hate Football analogies, but this one I believe is apt.
Over the years, I have known a fair number of Philadelphia politicians and their staffs. Now we have had a reasonable number of morons in public office here, and I mean morons. The joke we used to make is that you could add up the IQs of half of the city council and still have a two digit number when you were done . I cannot begin to tell you how incredibly stupid some of these people were, and I have firsthand knowledge of their idiocy. We had one guy who did not renew his drivers license as a sitting council person and decided that that was unnecessary and of course, was caught in the act, and , again “of course, it destroyed his political career. He actually had the temerity to say to me personally, that there is no reason for him to have to go through nonsense at the DMV because he was an important person. The absurdity was staggering. We also had elected representatives who were functionally illiterate to the point where they could not read my consent forms prior to treatment and used the famous, well-worn excuse that they “had forgotten their glasses”.
We also had many uneducated individuals, but they were people who possessed a lot of street smarts and were very very clever, and although they were not formally educated, I would say that they were in their own way. Brilliant in the scope of reading people, manipulating people, and advancing their “cause“.
One thing each of these individuals had in common is that they had on his or her staff, an absolutely brilliant, educated, substantive person who had terrific insight and abilities which reached far beyond those of the individual for whom they worked. I knew a few of these people, and they were remarkable in their own right. When Frank Rizzo was mayor of Philadelphia, he had two men working for him, who in their prime were extremely bright: Hillel Levinson, and Martin Weinberg. These were two of the shrewdest individuals I have ever met and easily could work at the federal level as policy-makers and fixers.
Which brings me to my point: I don’t think idiots like Gym Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lauren Boebert have anyone like this. They achieve notoriety, and yes, I mean notoriety, by mouthing off in the extreme and being horrifyingly aggressive in all respects. But there is no second act for these people. That’s why it became so easy to parry their now well-worn out thrusts which of course the President did so brilliantly during his State of the Union speech. This is why Jordan’s attempt at disparaging the Democrats has fallen way short, not only because he has no facts to back up his case but importantly, there is no creativity or shrewdness here. He’s just another dumb fuck who looks and sounds like a dumb fuck. And that’s what happens to these people.
The reason I know this to be the case, is this for many years I treated this one popular but incredibly stupid elected official and his staff from his office. As I indicated before, one of his people was one of these very very sharp individuals, who was his legislative aide titularly, but was serving as his “brain“. This poor gentleman, who was actually a very nice guy, died suddenly of a heart attack, and that was the last anyone ever heard from this elected official, who lost badly in the primary, which, in Philadelphia for elected official, is extremely hard to do. It was as though the puppeteer died, and the puppet thought it could wave around, and continue to perform. As we knew with our former president, in one sense he is sharp, because he was able to snooker a great many Americans into believing that he was their savior, but in fact he did not possess the intellectual capabilities to further his goals, and did not surround himself with individuals who were bright enough and forceful enough to guide him in the “right“ direction by convincing him to show certain restraint or humanism, which, thank God for that, probably saved democracy in America.
I will leave you with an anecdote: those of us old enough to remember Mayor Frank Rizzo, remember the fascist reign which he exercised over the city of Philadelphia, and thus over the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in terms of voting bloc, and the iconic photo of him in a tuxedo with a knight stick in his cummerbund. Rizzo, in his own right was a tinhorn Mussolini, but following his departure, he was remembered by the vast number of people for being the mayor under whom a policy was enacted such that senior citizens could ride free on public transportation, at first in off peak hours, but it quickly evolved to all hours, and all transportation, including trains. This legacy, which continues to today, is a fantastic benefit for the citizens of all ages because younger people don’t have to take off work or worry about child care to drive their elderly parents with limited income around. This was conceived by his deputy, and made Rizzo a hero among a great number of individuals of all races in the city. It was positively frightening to hear African Americans positively talking about a man who declared war on their neighborhoods and on their people. He did use the police as the Gestapo, but if mom could get a free ride… we’ll, forget about the public strip searches and clubbing a and grotesque police abuse. He’s the hero. It’s funny how you can buy somebody’s soul for the equivalent of a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
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Damn. Those are some "blast from the past" names! 
Frank Rizzo and Fire Commissioner brother Joe.
I just saw there was an estate sale a little over 4 years ago - https://whyy.org/articles/relics-of-a-polarizing-legacy-within-reach-at-frank-rizzo-estate-sale/
https://www.estatesale.com/sales/view/206586.html#gal
I could use an Aha moment right now. 
"Is it safe?"
