Cultural Relativism

 

The proper study of man is man. 

This is something I was told in college, at least in the Department of Anthropology, which was part of my major (which spanned three departments.) The Anthropology department was, by far, the most flamboyant, fun and exhilarating faculty on campus, as far as I was concerned, but, it must be admitted, the other departments I traveled through (chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology) were not populated by the most scintillating specimens of humanity.

The anthropologists had lived exotic places, like Alaska, Greenland, Africa and New Zealand and they sported beards and nothing could shock them.

On Wednesday evenings they did "Anthro flicks" which included "Dead Birds" about warring tribes in New Guinea. They were the antidote to the chemistry and biology faculty who seemed intent on shrinking our brains; the anthropologists naturally expanded our brains.

Among the books they submitted for our consideration was Colin Turnbull's "The Mountain People."

Now, this was a cunning choice. "Cultural Relativity" was all the rage in academic circles in the mid 1960's, an argument that we should not judge other cultures as being lovely or vile, because we all see others through the lenses formed in our own cultures. To be scientific, we should simply describe, as accurately and dispassionately as we can, what we see as the values by which other cultures live. But we should not judge, lest we be judged.

Turnbull had written "The Forest People" about the Bantu, and he tried to remain objective--nevertheless the virtues of their kindness, cooperation and altruism shined through. But when it came to the Ik, a hunter gatherer people who were shunted into the highlands between Sudan, Kenya and Uganda, with resultant starvation, deprivation and impoverishment, the usual manifestations of "human kindness" withered, and they would laugh at babies who crawled into cooking fires--one less mouth to feed. 

It was hard to describe objectively people who had no sympathy, and even antipathy, toward their own children. 

Nevertheless, the exercise of trying to see people whose culture fostered and embraced what looked like horrific practices is mind expanding.

If you look at the Third Reich, you have the value of extolling the Volk, the "German race," Aryans, of blonde hair, blue eyes, lean, hard  and athletic bodies and the obverse of that coin, the animosity toward other races, Roma (gypsies), Jews, Black people. It was the logical progression to treat these swarthy people as not being human beings. And, if you had an agrarian substrate, herding cattle for slaughter, pigs, cows, chickens was not seen as repugnant, so why should herding Jewish children into buildings to burn them or into gas chambers be seen as being repugnant?

Having said that, Mark Mazower mentions that the mental reaction of even SS officers to firing squads killing children was prevalent enough, and strong enough to drive the development of gas chambers to replace firing squads. It was as if, even in that culture of the Third Reich, something deeper than Aryan supremacist doctrine caused at least some soldiers disquietude. 

At the Nuremberg trials,  Nazis were convicted of "crimes against humanity," the basic assertion being there are some values shared by all people who are members of the human species: a will to keep children from harm, a refusal to kill harmless people, defenseless people. Even the less active behavior of simply herding prisoners into areas and not feeding them, of enforcing starvation, was ultimately found to be inhuman. 

Working or marching people to death was added to the list.

But, from the standpoint of the culture where resided Reinhard Heydrich, Henrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels,  and the rest of the officials who met for the Wannsee Conference, where they planned the "final solution," mass killings of children, harmless women, defenseless men made good sense.

These sub-humans simply did not belong in the Reich or any of the territories the Reich claimed and overran to provide "lebensraum" (living space) for good Aryan Volk.

Their model, as Hitler reminded them, was the treatment of American Indians by the American government, and its generals, like the redoubtable Philip Sheridan, who said, famously, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," and whose boss at the time, William Tecumseh Sherman nodded in tacit agreement. Expelling Indians from lands white Americans wanted for living space was not even questioned. While Indian reservations may not have been as hideous as concentration camps, famine was not uncommon. Sheridan observed that to defeat the Indians the most efficient method was to slaughter all the buffalo on which the Indians depended. Russian POWs, herded into camps where food was controlled by  their guards may have recognized this tactic.

The Nazis had initially planned to round up and deport all the Jews within reach of the Reich to the island of Madagascar, but once the battle of Britain was lost, it was apparent the war would not be short and the British Navy could intervene, so it was decided to simply kill the not Aryans in place. More efficient. Just as effective, maybe more.

So when you look at the plan, the final solution, using the values of the Nazi, Third Reich culture, it made sense.

And now, we have masked, armed, swarming ICE agents rounding up people who, as Justice Kavanaugh observed, look like illegal aliens, and abduct them, just as Jews were abducted, but instead of loading them onto trains, they load them onto planes and whisk them off to, not Madagascar, but Honduras, El Salvador or Sudan.

It all makes sense, if you see it through MAGA eyes. "They" don't belong here. They are undesirables.

  

And law, as the Supreme Court has so clearly told us, is what the justices say it is, and they agree that law is what Mr. Trump says it is.

Donald Joffrey Trump

 

Winter in New Hampshire sends Mad Dog to his basement gym cave, as the streets are too icy and snow covered for bicycle embarkations.

An hour on the stationary bicycle, in front of the TV means shifting among choices on youtube.

This is one of the 21st century's major blessings.

Youtube, Amazon, streaming TV series, Wikipedia, public TV and radio. 

What a marvelous world we live in.

Another thing: ear buds which carry podcasts into your head as you walk around town, popping in and out of coffee shop, library, hardware store, pharmacy, dry cleaners.

Dave Remnick interviews Adam Schiff on a podcast. Schiff is a United States Senator and Remnick the editor of The New Yorker, so it's not clear exactly where they are sitting, but Remnick begins by playing clip of Donald J. Trump saying that Schiff is a "Horrible person. Real scum. He should be in jail."

This triggered something in Mad Dog's brain, synapsing flashing--a scene he had seen on youtube while peddling in his basement, a clip from "Game of Thrones."

It was a "Eureka" moment. Mad Dog suddenly realized what the "J" in Donald J. Trump really means: Joffrey.

The series ran for eight amazing years 2011-2019, and Mad Dog watched it all, but over the ensuing six years the memory moldered, revived only in snatches on youtube.

Of course, Trump IS Joffrey, the boy made king at age 15, and who is tolerated because his mother is Queen Cersei and he is thought to hold the Baratheon blood line.

He develops into the very image of vile over the seasons, sadistic, cowardly, impulsive, vain, completely devoid of any capacity for sympathy or admiration. He is the fictive avatar of Donald Joffrey Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqsMx8rTSPg

And it was all so clear, simply hearing Trump's voice, his invective against Adam Schiff, having just heard Joffrey. 

What a wondrous age we live in.

Why Marjorie Talyor Greene Quit: Obviously

A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence. 

There is a rowdy strain in American life living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly and with terrifying effect.

--Bruce Catton, historian

Everyone knows why MGT quit.

I've heard Bill Clinton explain it. I've heard James Carville explain it. I've heard discussions from Brooks and Capehart-- from just about every pundit I tuned into and none of them has the faintest idea.

MGT herself has said she didn't want to be in the Congress which impeaches and removes Trump because that is what she says the 2026 election is all about: As soon as the Democrats seize control, they'll try to oust Trump through the impeachment and trial option and she doesn't want to be part of that.

That might make sense, if the Democrats had a snowball's chance in Hell of taking the Senate, even if they can retake the House. 

Most pundits simply say what they want to say about the world: Bill Clinton says people are tired of the sniping and frustrated with the division and all they want is to  make nice and build a country together, which is what he always says and has always said because he thinks it makes him look homespun, wise and someone we should all want to listen to.

James Carville is saying "I told you so." He is saying this is a signing of the impending doom of the MAGA party, because that's what he always says.

But Mad Dog thinks the answer is obvious: Ms. Greene has, after 4 years, discovered being one of 435 Representatives is just not much fun and does not make her a movie star, which is what she really wanted to be all along, not a Congresswoman.

She is leaving because she has discovered the job is no fun, not glamourous and is like real work.  

She's not alone: plenty of people choose the wrong jobs and then bail when they find out what it's really like. Happens to graduates of medical school all the time: they think they are going to be heroes, or living the life they've seen on TV in "Scrubs" or "ER," and they find out it's not like that.

And as for prestige, or being esteemed because you are a U.S. Congresswoman: Forget it. When you look around at the mediocrities who are in your class, you know there's nothing special about being a Congresswoman.

Being a Congresswoman means dialing for dollars from the moment you arrive at your new office in Washington, D.C., calls to rich people begging for money for your next campaign. Being one face in a class of 435 is not much fun if you want attention. There's not even a cheerleading squad to try out for. 

For people who came to Washington to change the world, or to stand up on a stage and preach to others about how we need to change the world, Congress is a disappointment.

For people like MTG who wanted nothing more than a fast and easy track to celebrity, Congress can work for a while, but keeping that spotlight focused on you is a non stop demand and not as much fun as it looked from the red dirt 14th district in Georgia, especially when there are other mean girls competing for the fickle eye of that FOXNEWS camera--like Lauren Boebert and Elsie Stephanek. 

The pay is not all that great, and the travel back and forth from DC to Georgia gets old real fast. Congress people used to move to DC and move their families into apartments or houses and go back to their districts for holidays, and when Congress was not in session. Now they fly home every Thursday night and return Sunday nights. It's a commuter job. 

And then there's the "constituent services" part of the job--all those members of the public who think you have the power to get them a job, or get the IRS off their backs or help their mothers in the nursing homes get a motorized wheelchair. 

And you've got staffers who keep asking for favors, who want you to help them with their careers.

It can get to feel like a real job, but you don't really have any real power and the best you can hope for is screen time and photo ops. 

When you're running, it can be a heady feeling, what with everyone listening to you and photographing you and even cheering sometimes. 

We have a woman right here in Hampton running for Congress and every other day I get an email from her telling me about how important children are, or schools are,  and how we ought to be building communities together, and more affordable housing. She thinks she has something important to say. She thinks becoming a Congresswoman will make her important.

But, truth be told, she will face the same disappointment MTG faced, if she ever does get elected. 

Democrats tend to want to use government to change the world. Mad Dog's favorite is Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything. Mad Dog loves Senator Warren, but she is really like a Sunday preacher, telling you what you know is right and true and how the world should be, but we are all sinners, forever disappointing her, and she doesn't have a chance of actually succeeding in changing anything.

Republicans tend to want to tear everything down, because they are basically unreconstructed preadolescents who are pumped full of hormones and really don't know what they want, but they are angry about it. And they know that whoever is in charge is screwing them.

Outside the Willard Hotel, set into the concrete of the sidewalk is a quote from the wonderful historian, Bruce Catton. Mad Dog has never been able to Google the exact quote but it is some like this: "People come to Washington, D.C. in search of something which will change their fate and launch them into history, but they do not understand what they are looking for is inside themselves." 

Marjorie Taylor Greene took four years figuring that out.

The Enemies Among Us

 

Staring out at me from its position on the  newspaper rack at Hannfords the New York Post front page, "Enemies Among Us!!!"

I didn't have to read the story to know what the MAGA New York Post line was going to be.

A lovely looking young West Virginia National Guard soldier had been shot to death in Washington, D.C. by a man who turned out to be an Afghani immigrant, a refugee, granted entry into the US as one of thousands of Afghanis who had helped the United States army during the long war in Afghanistan providing intelligence, translating services and other vital support to an American army in a strange land.

When those 2021 images of desperate Afghanis running after the departing American airplanes hit the screens, it was decried by every MAGA throat how despicable Joseph Biden and the democrats were for abandoning those who had risked for us, served us during that long war. Oh, for shame! Worse than that helicopter evacuating our Vietnamese allies off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon! 

This is how America betrays those who would ally themselves with us! For shame!

How could we abandon all these loyal allies who had risked all to help us?

Now, of course, the murder of that National Guard member was Joe Biden's fault for ever allowing creepy, sinister Afghanis into the US under a program to protect those who had stood with us during that war.

How could we have allowed all those creepy, foreign, illegal aliens to enter the United States to shoot and murder a white, American, West Virginian women?

Is this how we treat American National Guardswomen?

For shame!

MAGA shifting sides seamlessly, as it always does.

What Mad Dog particularly loves is that after every, weekly school shooting, MAGA bellows, "Guns don't kill people; People kill people!"

But now, when the lunatic happens to be an immigrant, never mind from where,  it's, "Guns don't kill people: Immigrants kill people!"

You can substitute whatever card you want:

"Muslims kill people!"

"Democrats kill people!"

"Radical, leftist, elitist snobs kill people!"

Never let a murder go to waste. Blame it on the Democrats, Joe Biden or whoever you need to blame.

Knowing A Little More

 

One of the delights of reading history long after graduating from school is the discovery of the unmentioned stuff which, had you known, you might have changed your judgment about historical figures, their motivations and the things that made them do what they did.

Two examples: one concerning Lincoln and the other Hitler, two historical figures on the far ends of the spectrum of laudable to despicable.

The Lincoln story concerns the hanging of 39 Dakota Indians on December 18, 1862 in Minnesota, which remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. This incident is often cited by defenders of the Lost Cause,  and by those who want to say Lincoln was no real friend of minorities--the Great Emancipator was a reluctant ally to non White races.

But, the general outline of events in Minnesota gets turned on its head, once you learn just a little bit more.

 The story is that in 1862, just as the Civil War was tearing apart the nation,  the Dakota Indians rampaged through white settlements, murdering women and children and raping some women. Lincoln was faced with insurrection in the South and now in the north. 

Hundreds of Dakota Sioux were captured, tried and executed, their execution orders signed by Abraham Lincoln. Captured White Confederate soldiers were not executed.

For those who wish to fault Lincoln, the "trials" of these Indians were suspect: Often the process of charge, presentation of evidence and sentence occurred in minutes, not hours, and were conducted in a language the Indians did not understand.

So, there you have it: Lincoln signed on to all this and was merciless and maybe even racist.

Lincoln did harbor some of the attitudes of White men of the 19th century concerning Blacks. He remarked that "very intelligent" members of that race might be made citizens and allowed to vote, as exceptions, but later, after he had befriended Frederick Douglass, he pushed the 13th amendment which granted citizenship and the vote to all Black men--but not women.

And what of his blood lust for those Indians?

One thing about Black folks in the 1860's--most of them were not living "at large" but were imprisoned on plantations in the South, so they were under White control. Executions of Blacks tended to be singular events, with the exception of the much dreaded Black revolts.

But Indians lived in the wild, or more accurately on reservations, not under the daily control of white overseers. And just look what had happened under that system, the White military authorities said. 

The Indians, it has come to light, were not just randomly doing the primitive savage thing--they were starving on reservations, having been promised delivery of food by the United States government, but that food never was delivered and the braves and warriors were seeing their women and children starve. So they were, one might say, provoked.  Provocation does not justify murder and rape, but there is that context.

So, the numbers vary, but somewhere between 260 and 303 Indian warriors were captured and the plan was to hang every last one of them. But  Lincoln intervened.  Having ridden the circuit as a lawyer in his youth, Lincoln was adamant these Indians be tried as individuals, and that the records of those trials be sent as files to the White House, where he reviewed every single one of them, and he rejected the verdicts in all but 39, whose execution orders he signed.

The choice he was presented by the Minnesota authorities: "Either you allow us to hang at least some of them, or we hang them all." He chose the lesser of two evils.

Then there is Hitler and the Anschluss. "Anschluss" means "connection," or "Union." In 1938, Hitler, who was born in Austria, claimed that German speaking people in Austria were being mistreated. Of course, he didn't put it that way--these were not just German speaking people, but Aryan people of the German race, living among lower forms of humanity of Slavic origins, or worse yet, Jews. Vienna was the ultimate in polyglot, with Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Romanians and even people like Sigmund Freud, Jewish living side by side. All this racial mixing was intolerable. Good, racially pure Aryans having their racial purity poisoned. 

The way this story was taught in my American schools is Hitler simply used the story of abuse of people of German ancestry as an excuse to invade and annex Austria, as he picked off various countries on his borders to establish a German, White, Aryan empire.

But as Mark Mazower notes in Dark Continent, this was just one small piece in a vastly more complicated quilt of events, cultural upheaval and post World War One carnage, chaos and restructuring in Europe.

The idea of a "nation" before World War I was a very different thing than what happened afterwards, after the Allies imposed the treaty of Versailles on the Germans. Before that war, Europe was almost entirely kingdoms, monarchies--except for Britain, a constitutional monarchy and France.  When Wilson swept in, with his grand imaginings of nation states where the people within certain geographic borders would bind together in bonds forged by lines on a map and "self determination," the world so constructed in the minds of the diplomats had little connection to the people on the ground.

In the kingdom of Austria-Hungary, you were a subject and you  belonged as a true Austrian, as long as you swore fealty to the Emperor, so you could be a Jew or a Hungarian or a French speaker or a Czech and you were in. But after the restructuring, whole groups were suddenly rendered stateless--Slavs, Jews, Roma, you name it.

The solution of finding yourself excluded as a foreigner in your ancestral home was, briefly, to simply get on a boat and immigrate to America, where you might not speak the language, but at least the streets were paved with gold and your children would have a better life. 

The problem was, as President Wilson's advisors had warned him, with National citizenship in flux, the idea of "race" became ascendant, and the Harvard crowd, among others, fastened on eugenics and "The Passing of the Great Race" and even Teddy Roosevelt said admitting all these Jews and southern Europeans from Sicily, Greece, the Balkans, Russia was "racial suicide" for the United States and Congress in 1924 threw up the first barriers to immigration since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. 

So, the way out of Europe was blocked, just as the way out of Africa and "shithole nations" is now blocked by European nations, whose wealth and relative safety is a strong magnet to the residents of failing African and near Eastern nations now.

So when Hitler sought to annex Austria, the fact is the majority of Austrians, who spoke German, were only too happy, and the German troops marching across the borders where met as liberators, with flowers. 

When Hitler was confronted about rounding up Jews and forcibly removing them from their homes in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and France he replied, "Well, nobody wants them. Look at the United States.  They complain about my treatment of the Jews, but they reject them just as completely." 

And he wasn't wrong about that. Even with FDR in the White House, famously boatloads of Jews arrived at American ports and were sent back to Germany, where Hitler's solution to what to do with these "undesirables" was concentration camps, and ultimately, death camps. 

Which is not to say Hitler was anything more than a murderous dictator, but it is to say that he had a point: The nations who refused to take in these rejected "races" were complicit in the mass deaths of these peoples.

At the Nuremberg trials when Nazi doctors were tried for sterilizing Jews, and people judge to be mentally deficient they cited Oliver Wendell Holmes, of the Supreme Court of the United States, who ruled in the Buck v Bell case that a woman judged to be mentally deficient could lawfully be sterilized because, as he so memorably put it, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

So, does this additional information change our view of Hitler? Not at all.

But it might suggest that Hitler was not as much an aberration as we would like to think. The American Army was segregated, and fights between Black and White troops regularly broke out in England as the buildup to the invasion of Europe developed. There were bars for White soldiers and bars for Black soldiers. There were Black airmen flying in Black squadrons. There were water fountains for Blacks and water fountains for whites and even in 1967, as Mad Dog well remembers, when a Black boy was brought to the community swimming pool by a white friend, the manager of the pool got phone calls from people who wanted to know when he was planning to drain the pool and refill it, after the Black boy had swum in it.

The more information you get, the murkier the history gets.

Trump Loves Mamdani! All Is Forgiven! (For Now)

 

seems like just yesterday President's Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt was telling Fox News, in answer to a question about Trump's opinion about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic party's then candidate for mayor of New York,  that the "Democrat" Party's main constituents are Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals."

Lovefest

So, if the Democratic mayor of New York City has been elected by that group, one might expect Mr. Trump to have placed him under arrest when Mr. Mamdani arrived at the White House and thrown him in jail with those six Democratic Congressmen who Mr. Trump says are traitors who should be tried, executed by hanging (for the crime of reminding soldiers they cannot obey illegal orders).

And Mr. Trump repeatedly threatened cut New York City off from all federal funding if its voters elected Mr. Mamdani mayor.  Trump was effectively threatening New York with excommunication from the United States, such was the violation of virtue for electing Mamdani.  It was like South Carolina seceding from the Union because voters elected Lincoln, only in reverse.  The word Mad Dog remembers most from the MAGA mob when it came to Mamdani is "communist." Which was sort of a golden oldie from the Gold Oval Room, as Mad Dog had almost forgotten about that boogeyman, Communist!, and it seemed almost quaint, like "monarchist." 

So we all had every right to expect some major smack down of Mamdani and New York City now that its voters had elected this Hamas terrorist anti-Christian, god hating, criminal loving, illegal alien.

Rehabilitated

But no!

In a twist that would set George Orwell's had spinning, Mr. Trump welcomed Mr. Mamdani, that once and maybe still Hamas leader, terrorist and criminal, with open arms in the gold idolatry ladened Oval Office. 

Oddly, as Mad Dog Googled Republican slurs against Mamdani, conspicuously absent was the word, "Pedophile." Might have just missed it. Mad Dog does not have a research department--his fact checking department is kept busy enough, but no pedophile accusations. 

Ain't We Got Fun?

So Mamdani, until yesterday, was simply a Hamas terrorist (or sympathizer, which is the same thing) and maybe a criminal, and maybe an illegal alien, because, you know, after Justice Kavanaugh said it was fine to abscond with anyone who looked to ICE agents like a bad guy, Mr. Mamdani would surely fit that.

Word on QANON and Breitbart and The Storm Front was that Mamdani has a taste for pets--keep your cats and dogs indoors when Mayor Mamdani is in the neighborhood. He likes them with Haitian sauce.

Orwell's 1984 depicted a world in which there were three warring supernations: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, and alliances kept shifting. So, if you were a citizen of Oceania, one day your worst enemy was Eastasia, but the next week you may discover Eastasia is actually your friend but Eurasia is now (and always has been) the nasty enemy.  Similarly, in Orwell's Animal Farm , the truths were written in chalk on a blackboard, as truth needed to be updated, and so "Four legs good, two legs bad" one day became "Four legs good, two legs better," as the pigs had taken to walking on their two hind trotters.

So, you know, you grow; you evolve. All good.

And so we have Mr. Trump, with his infinite flexibility erasing and replacing that chalk board of his mind. 

Of course, this pig trotter thing has already been seen when President Zelensky (a bone fide, not going to run leader) was thrown out of the Oval gold room, then welcomed back, then abandoned again as Mr. Putin has been shifting from being simply misunderstood, to a man wronged, to a very fine person.

Who knows? Tomorrow we may wake up to read, "Israel bad. Hamas good."

Say It Ain't So Marge!

 

So Marjorie Taylor Greene is resigning from Congress.

Not A Real Congresswoman: But She Played One On TV

She will not finish her term in Congress representing the  MAGA Georgia 14th district, which is White, rural, poor and undereducated. (Surprise.)

How did we love MGT? Let us count the ways:

1. She insisted the Democratic party is the party of pedophiles.

2. She said Democrats "groomed" children to become transgender.

3.  When asked why she called Democrats names, like "pedophiles" she replied the Democrats had started it--"All they've done is called me names and insult me from the start."

4. She liked a Facebook comment saying Nancy Pelosi "should get a bullet in her head." Then she said those were not her words, they were just on FB--she only liked them, and then she said maybe she didn't control her own FB page.

5. She said that America should be a "Christian nation."

When asked about the First Amendment and its proscription against the government establishing religion she said the founding fathers quoted the Bible all the time, which proves they really wanted the nation to be a Christian nation, but they were too diplomatic to say so, and separation of church and state is a myth and a very bad idea and is nowhere in the Constitution. She was correct about that: that phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution, only government "shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion," which, when you think about it, might mean that Congress cannot make a law forbidding the establishment of religion, but that would be a whole other blog.

6. She wanted to stop all immigration for four years.

7. She wanted a national abortion ban

8. She said the federal government could control the weather, including hurricanes, "Yes, they can control the weather. It's ridiculous to lie about it and say it can't be done."  She continued, "If your home or business or property is damaged or a love one is killed by their weather modifications shouldn't you be eligible for compensation? After all, did they ask you if you agreed to our weather being modified?"

She was really a master of "they." They was the enemy, unseen, protected, and nearly all powerful, doing stuff to ordinary folks which really hurts them.

9. In another weather related blast, she claimed FEMA was directing relief efforts and funds away from real Americans and toward migrants, or "illegals" as she like to call them.

10. And, rounding out the top 10, of course, who could forget her public service announcement that the wildfires in California were started by lasers from space sponsored by George Soros, who is Jewish? 

And thus was born "The Jewish space lasers," which is really an immortal MAGA phrase if ever there was one.

Sadly, Mad Dog has never been able to find with Google her assessment of the movie, "Men In Black," which Mad Dog is sure she regards as a documentary.

Who's Your Daddy, Now?

What is really depressing is Ms. MTG has explained she is leaving Congress because she feels like an abused wife, with President Trump being mean to her.  As far as Mad Dog can ascertain, Mr. Trump has not actually physically struck her --that would be inadvisable given their comparative physiques--but it must be the mental anguish inflicted by being called "whacky." 

So the only Republican with the spine to stand up to Mr. Trump over the Epstein files and health insurance is leaving because her feelings have been hurt?

And she abhors the "toxic environment" in Washington?

That sounds like British Petroleum announcing it's leaving the Gulf of Mexico--oh, that would be the Gulf of America in MAGAspeak--because its oil wells have so contaminated the waters it's just not a place they want to hang out any more.

The fact is, with her latest turn, Ms. MTG finally became actually amusing, or interesting maybe even, but just when she does, she leaves.

Which is not to say she'll leave Washington, or the MAGA/QANON media hive.  She currently makes $174,000 as a Congresswoman. What do you think FOXNEWS or Stormfront, or The Coming Fury or The Tip of the Spear or Aryan Nation will be willing to pay her?

And the thing is, Ms. Greene is likely no worse than the people who sent her to Congress. If she thinks her place at the bottom of the heap is where the rich, educated and powerful conspire to place her, well, that's what her people at home think. If she feels insulted, it is on behalf of her home folks. If she thinks the government controls the weather it's because she believes science is capable of anything but it's not available to people like her, only to the elites. 

But then, when her party decided to kill Obamacare truly, sincerely and seriously dead, she realized her own kids would lose their insurance and after she finished ranting about the Democrats and socialized medicine, and after having voted to kill Obama care on 60 occasions, she could not escape the reality that she had just left her kids naked in the medical insurance world and so maybe something inside her snapped. Just saying. Only a guess. 

Not that she or any MAGA true believer will ever admit to having been wrong about health care, Obamacare or anything else, but that little voice inside is sometimes a stubborn thing and won't stay silent.

Or maybe, what really got to her was the respect which began to flicker from the Democratic side of the aisle. Remarks like, "I can't believe I'd ever be saying I agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she alone seems to see what is happening with healthcare premiums, and she sees what it will do to the people of her district. Damn, girl!"

And what are the odds that President Trump will replace her by appointing Laura Loomer to take her place? That might be the job of the governor of Georgia, but Mr. Trump apparently knows the phone numbers of all the important Georgia officials which have been on his Rolodex since he called some of them looking for those 11,000 votes in that election which he says was stolen from him by Biden.

Mad Dog hasn't been this bummed out since Sarah Palin quit her job as governor of Alaska halfway through her term.

He will really miss Miss Greene's chanting and heckling from the floor of the House during State of the Union speeches.

But, then, there was a very peculiar, and in retrospect, premonitory remark, Ms. Greene made on November 6 after Nancy Pelosi announced this will be Pelosi's last term in Congress. 

"I served under her speakership in my first term in Congress, and I'm very impressed at her ability to get things done...So I wish her well in her retirement, but I would like to see people exit Washington a lot sooner rather than wait until their eighties."

A sort of left handed compliment, but a sort of grudging respect Mad Dog did not think MTG capable of--Pelosi overstayed her welcome, but she had some game.

Oh, Marjorie, we'll miss you so. 

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1NCkNCJMiI