The Importance Of Being Ernst

I only saw clips of both President Obama's State of the Union address and the Republican response from Iowa's new Republican U.S. Senator, Joni Ernst, and I give the President credit for mentioning high-speed rail, if only in passing, and his memorable quip of how he no longer had to wage a political campaign because he already won both of them. :-) But for Obama to suggest that we've come out of the shadow of the Great Recession was somewhat  unrealistic, as there are still many of us still not feeling the effects of any "recovery."

And don't expect Republicans like Joni Ernst to lead us into the light.  I expected nothing persuasive from Ernst's remarks, and I got less than nothing.  She delivered the same insufferable bromides about how the Keystone XL pipeline will create jobs, very few of which will be permanent full-time positions (35, by one report, which is one more than the minimum number of senators it takes to sustain an Obama veto of the project).  And a mother in  East Orange, New Jersey, the East New York section of Brooklyn, East St. Louis, Illinois, or any other place east of nowhere near Eden where violence and drugs are rampant will take little inspiration from the comments of a well-positioned white woman about how her family was so poor (but still had a farm to grow their own food on) that she had to wear bread bags over her only good pair of shoes to protect them from inclement weather.  Wonder Bread bags, no doubt; Ernst is just as white and phony as the bread itself.

Speaking of phoniness, was that a wig she was wearing?  A lot of folks were looking at Ernst's hair and, as Rod Stewart might have said, claimed that it just ain't natural.  Which is sort of funny when you consider that Ernst's hair appeared to have tinges of gray in it.  Perhaps, at 44 years of age, Ernst was trying to look her age in a play for authenticity.  But what's so authentic about a wig?  Especially when it's a bad enough wig that people know it's a wig?

I suppose I could go on about what's on Joni Ernst's head, if only because there's nothing in her head.  She supports right-to-carry gun laws, she wants to get rid of the minimum wage, and she doesn't believe humans are causing climate change, and it's astonishing that she even acknowledges climate change.  So why the bleep was she chosen to deliver the Republican response to the President's State of the Union address?  Because she's a staunch conservative?  No, rabid reactionaries have actually hurt  the Republican Party lately; the GOP only did phenomenally well in the midterms because they tried (successfully, alas) to appear more moderate than they are.  Because she's a woman, a freshman Republican senator, and also the first woman to be elected to the Senate from her state?  So is Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia's new senator, on all three counts. 

Maybe it's because of this.  Ernst should not be in the Senate right now, because her Democratic opponent, now-former U.S. Representative Bruce Braley, was expected to win the 2014 Iowa U.S. Senate election.  He was a respected legislator and a man of distinction.  He had the class, he had the financial backing, he had Hillary Clinton on his side . . . dude, he should have won.  But Braley made uncharitable remarks about Charles Grassley, Iowa's popular senior senator, calling him a farmer who had no business chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee in a Republican-controlled Senate, among other stupid comments. Criticizing anyone in Iowa for being a farmer is like criticizing someone in France for being a wine connoisseur.  Like Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut, Braley made a good senator on paper but was a horrible candidate.  Unlike Blumenthal, Braley ran against a crazy lady smart enough to keep her craziness relatively in check until after the election.

In other words, I suspect that Ernst was chosen to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union  address because she won an election she ought to have lost, because it was Braley's race to lose, and he blew it.  (Oh yeah, and unlike West Virginia, Iowa was a state that Obama won twice.)  If Ernst had lost, the Republicans still would have taken over the Senate, as the Republicans picked up a net gain of eight Senate seats outside Iowa in 2014 when they only need six to win control of the chamber.  The fact that the GOP won even Tom Harkin's Senate seat in Iowa was the biggest insult, though, and so Republican leaders merely chose Ernst to deliver their party's response to the State of the Union address as a way of rubbing salt in the dispirited Democratic Party's wounds.

And they have the nerve to complain that Obama is poking them in the eye.  The only politician who would have more nerve than even the GOP would be Bruce Braley, by choosing to run again for Senate . . . or anything.  Forget it, Bruce; you're through.  You're as credible as Joni Ernst's hair.