Like Trump is the only guy to say something idiotic on the campaign trail.
Tribune Content Agency — August 12, 2016
First off, I’d like to apologize for setting liberals’ hair on fire the other day.
I guess I just wanted to see what would happen. My bad.
All I did was point out on social media that liberal Democrats like President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have said stupid things about guns and political violence just like Republican Donald Trump, who is famous for saying stupid things.
And all that sensitive liberal hair went poof, like a napkin on a toaster.
Fool that I am, I didn’t know that comparing stupid Democratic comments to stupid Republican comments is frowned upon by those who want Clinton elected president.
Democrats went crazy and chased me all over social media — a couple even chased me over to the Facebook page of a priest friend of mine — to vent their spleens. Yeah, on the page of a priest.
By then, of course, many liberal heads of hair were on fire. You could smell their hair a cookin’ from a long ways off.
You know what burning liberal hair smells like?
It smells like that time my little brother got a weird hankering for deviled eggs late at night. Why did he want deviled eggs? I don’t know. A kid gets a fancy idea about deviled eggs, and he just won’t quit.
So he put two dozen eggs on the stove to boil and then fell asleep watching TV. The water boiled off, and the eggs burned black, the smoke so foul we had to flee the house. Our hunting dog almost died from the smell. Poor Argo.
So for me to now say: “Hey, I wanted to light liberal hair on fire just to see what would happen,” isn’t good enough, is it?
A few days ago, Trump was caught saying his amazingly stupid thing — implying that Second Amendment advocates could find a way to get rid of Clinton if she’s elected.
Naturally, liberals went crazy, and so did Republicans, who fear and loathe Trump the Barbarian because if he’s elected president they’ll be pushed away from the trough.
They pounced on Trump and called him reckless and horrible — which he very well may be — and wrote a gazillion words about how this was the end of America.
That’s how the American people were steered away from that damaging Hillary story, the one about Seddique Mateen, father of Orlando mass shooter Omar Mateen.
Seddique Mateen was spotted at a Clinton rally, and later, he endorsed her in an interview with reporters. “Hillary Clinton is good for United States versus Donald Trump, who has no solutions,” he said.
Clinton couldn’t very well accept the endorsement of the dad of this mass shooter, and she turned her back on a reporter asking about it.
But when Trump said his piece to gun owners, the Clinton campaign shrieked with anger and outrage. And I figure her supporters were overjoyed. Yes, overjoyed that they could shift the conversation away from Mateen. You’d think after that, they’d have no hair left to burn.
But I remembered that Obama also said something stupid about using guns to reach political goals.
In 2008 in Philadelphia, he was quoted by The New York Times and other news organizations riffing on one of my favorite themes, The Chicago Way.
Channeling the mob drama, “The Untouchables,” Mr. Obama said in reference to the general election rumble with the Republicans: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
You bring a gun?
Republicans, in their wimpy fashion of the time, didn’t pull their hair out and accuse Obama of wanting to kill them. Instead, they whined that Obama was being “negative.”
So I tweeted that 2008 quote: “Obama also joked about rubbing out his opponents #The Chicago Way: ‘If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.’ #Obama, Philly, 2008.”
Oh, the screeching, the caterwauling, the charges of “false equivalencies” and the smell of all that burning liberal hair.
“You’re better than that,” wrote a Chicago alderman on Facebook.
When they bring out Chicago aldermen to condemn you, that’s when you know you’ve hit bone.
The hair flames rose even higher when Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren put my tweet on her program to demonstrate that all politicians say stupid things.
I’d already poured kerosene on the hair fire by mentioning a stupid thing Hillary said in 2008 while defending why she stubbornly remained in the Democratic presidential primaries against Obama.
“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, brushing off calls to drop out of the race.
In other words, a black presidential candidate might get killed, so Hillary figured she had to be ready just in case.
She didn’t say it awkwardly or thuggishly the way Trump says his stupid things. She said her stupid thing rather smoothly and reasonably.
Hillary later expressed “regret” if people had taken offense.
There are still more than two months to go. Politicians say stupid things. Even the one who fulfills your hopes and dreams.
So just keep your hair flame-free. You’ll look stupid with it singed.
(John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His e-mail address is jskass@tribune.com, and his Twitter handle is @john_kass.)
(c) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
