Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Joni Ernst's Fact-Free Response to the SOTU Speech

Jesus, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Joni "Nutcutter" Ernst, the earnest junior senator from Iowa, had the hearts thumping and the dicks jumping over at Faux News after her maiden speech (full text here) to the nation following Obama's State of the Union address last night (which, as an aside, William Rivers Pitt described as twenty pounds of shit in a ten pound bag. But never mind that; we kind of expect that in our SOTU speeches. Dubya was famous for it.).

She kinda-sorta-but-not-really pissed and moaned about her hardscrabble life on the farm, where she had to plow the fields (in an air-conditioned tractor, no doubt, but never mind those nitpicky kind of details), her family couldn't afford but one pair of shoes for her, and her mother had to wrap her little farmer-girl tootsies in bread bags to keep her feet dry. No word as to whether she actually had to use a privy for her personal ablutions, or walk to school ten miles in the snow, uphill -- both ways! and we were glad to do it! -- because in those deep dark years of her childhood, when Ronald Reagan was president from the time when was 10, life was hard. And it's still all hard and stuff, and Obama just doesn't get it. So there.

But there was no indication from her that the "hardscrabble farmers" who comprised Ernst's family actually received over $460,000 in Federal farm subsidies over a ten-year period. You also won't find out that fact from the major media. Not Faux News, of course, but none of the others are seeing fit to talk about it.

Oh, and she never used the accepted term "Islamic terrorism" in her speech, either. But still, Faux News loves them some Joni Ernst -- she is a Republican, she is a rare female Republican, and especially she's proud of the fact that she cut her some hog nuts once upon a time. That in itself was enough to make Faux News totally fall in love with her.

Oh, that and her shoes.

2 Comments:

Nan said...

My reaction was WTF? She didn't own a pair of chore boots she could have worn to the bus stop? Did she castrate those hogs while working barefoot?

Bread bags to protect your feet was a pretty common technique when I was in school a zillion years ago, but we slipped them on over our socks before putting on our winter boots. They kept a person's feet dry back in the dark ages before GoreTex and Thinsulate. The idea of putting them on over shoes and then walking in them without also having on boots? Absolutely ludicrous.

Farnsworth68 said...

I had never heard of the bread bag trick before. On the farm everyone had a pair of rubber Wellingtons to wear while milking the cows (who could be, shall we say, a bit "messy", especially in the spring) and it was rarely wet enough to worry about your feet getting wet otherwise. We had over 300 days of sunshine a year. But even when we moved to the "wet corner" of the country, where that ration was reversed, I never knew of anyone using the "bread bag" technique.