Photo by Maialisa is licensed under CC0 Public Domain.

Photo by Maialisa is licensed under CC0 Public Domain.

Civics and comics

January 21, 2017

Politics is funny. The back and forth between feuding politicians and their flat out, childlike pettiness -hilarious. It’s why C-SPAN is my favorite station on TV.

Take Ted Cruz. In 2013, during his 21 hour grandstanding, filibuster against the Affordable Care Act, the man tried to shut down the government by reading Green Eggs and Ham on the floor of the Senate and then proceeded to run for president and actually get pretty close. This is a real an event that happened in American political history and was documented by C-SPAN2 if anyone is so inclined to go back through footage to find the tapes.

This is not the only childish behavior the Senate floor has seen in recent years either. And by childish, I mean something that a child would actually do-not just immature.

In February 2015, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe had a snowball fight on the Senate floor. Okay it was not a fight, but he did bring a snowball made on the steps of the Capitol building to a meeting of the Environmental and Public Works Committee -which he is the chairperson of- to prove that climate change is just a hoax if he could make a snowball in Washington D.C. and he did throw it at an unsuspecting scientist on the panel after again restating his claim that global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.

Again, this actually happened! C-SPAN caught this amazing moment on TV. Sadly the even funny part of the story, Sen. Inhofe playing in the snow out front of the Capitol with his staffers making snowballs, was not caught on camera.

Although snowballs and Green Eggs and Ham are ridiculous and funny, the pettiness and the feuding is better than the childishness, in my opinion.

Just look at Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell. They have a push and pull, feuding relationship that would not be out of place in the first half of a rom-com.

Only last week, Schumer read aloud the exact letter McConnell sent the Democratic caucus of the Senate in 2009 warning against trying to rush a confirmation vote on cabinet picks for the incoming administration. McConnell wrote the letter when their positions were reversed and he was the minority leader and the democrats has control of the nominations process and had an incoming president. Schumer didn’t just read back verbatim McConnell’s letter but he went so far as to post a picture of the original letter with the header crossed off and in sharpie “Dear Mitch” written over the original address and his signature replacing McConnell’s at the bottom.

I can’t even imagine being as spiteful as to do something like what Schumer did. It’s honestly a new level of pettiness that those outside the sphere of politics can only strive to reach. The back and forth between Democratic leaders and Republican leaders of both the House and the Senate is amazing. Watching the debates from the floor is more like watching politicians spend hours roasting one another -of course veiled in polite language and policy talk- but a roast nonetheless. Comedy Central could probably scout some talent for their shows from watching the live coverage of debates.

And if we are talking of cat and mouse and petty politics than Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump must be mentioned.

Take for instance one of the last moves Obama made during his presidency- placing more troops in NATO countries. In his last three days in office, Obama moved up the deployment thousands of troops to European nations bordering Russia before the end of his term. Currently, the highest number US troops are stationed in Europe since the end of the Cold War. This is the first time American forces have been stationed in Norway (with its 120 mile long border with Russia) since World War II. Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania all negotiated for more troops at the last NATO conference, with several thousand now stationed in Poland alone.

And this move is pissing off Putin. Watching the antics of foreign policy play out is one of the funniest things about politics. Especially since this deployment by Obama was a direct dare to incoming President Trump. The audience at home gets to sit back and wait to see if Trump notices the policy trap left, to see if he cancels the deployment and shows his hand on supporting our NATO allies and shows if he is really in the pocket of Putin.. The coverage of this is where the comedy really comes in. Whoever is in charge of the graphics department at The Rachel Maddow Show deserves an award for using Risk game pieces on a map to go with the deployment story.    

There is an element of surprise to politics, too, that adds humor. You never can know what a senator or a congressman or a bureaucrat might accidently spill to the press or say in a hearing.

For example, Betsy Devos and her faux pas on gun control saying that there is need for “a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies” on Tuesday, Jan. 17 at her confirmation hearing for Education Secretary. She of course is not the only politician who should have just kept their mouth shut -recent political history with in help of tape recorders and cameras is full of people stuffing their feet in their mouths. Gary Johnson and his “what’s Aleppo” moment or Ben Carson on the “hermetically sealed chambers” of The Pyramids supposedly used for grain storage are some of the humorous instance that pop into mind. The George w. Bush years were full of wonderfully stupidly funny moments such as his 2000 campaign claim that “I know that human being and fish can coexist”. Laughing at that, to Bush, would likely have been construed as people just “misunderestimating” him.  

Politics is funny… Sort of. It is, of course, a dark type of comedy -gallows humor if nothing else. These politicians that so are laughable are also the politicians who run the country and the world. The debates and the feuding and the pettiness that are funny in the moment, well that’s all part these politicians deciding which laws to enact, what policy to adopt on everything from health care to children’s’ education. These politicians decided if we go to war, they people’s lives in their hands. We entrust them to be adults, to set aside their personal grievances, to make decisions, to enforce the rule of law, to take care of us and to be responsible for our wellbeing. And too often, they do not step up to the challenge of being adults; that’s what you see when watching C-SPAN, children running the county. Politics is depressing but what choice is there left but to laugh at what can be laughed at rather than to grieve what should and won’t be changed.

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