By Jon Bauer / Herald Opinion Editor
President Trump, keeping his campaign promise to end “woke,” delivered during Tuesday’s address to a joint session of Congress with a record-breaking 99-minute gravel-voiced monotone drone that is now offered as a sound selection on white noise machines. As you drift off to sleep, just imagine the applause of Republicans as a gentle rain, while the boos of Democrats are an owl, softly hooting in the distance.
You’ll need that white noise as the events of the past week keep you up at night.
Verb, that’s what’s happening: Among the accomplishments of his first six weeks that Trump listed during his address was his executive order declaring English as the national language, noting that the nation’s founding documents were written in English, even though translations of the Constitution were printed in German and Dutch for the benefit of the young nation’s immigrants.
If you’ll allow us, we’re just going to take our Sharpie and add an amendment that clarifies — out of deep respect for the English language — that “woke” will no longer be used as a noun or adjective and can only be used as the past tense or past participle verb of “wake.”
Oh, you better believe that’s a paddlin’: Having been poked with a stick and told to “Do something” by Democratic and independent voters, congressional Democrats during the president’s address screwed courage to the sticking place and expressed their displeasure by … wearing pink, holding up paddles with “False” and “Save Medicaid” and — for one 77-year-old representative — shouting his defense of Medicaid at the president, shaking his cane and refusing to be seated, prompting his escort from the chamber.
We’ll give U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Grampa Simpson’s Front Yard, credit for coming closest to the courage of late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis, who staged a sit-in demonstration on the House floor in 2016 in a fight for gun safety legislation. But Democrats; slogans on paddles? Were you expecting an auction or did you have a court time that evening for a pickleball match?
Won’t somebody, please, think of the billionaires? The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported Wednesday that a budget outline recently passed by House Republicans — including plans to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts past this year — would require cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and/or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, totaling $880 billion from health care funding over 10 years. “Their plan would force the largest Medicaid cuts in American history; all to pay for more tax giveaways to billionaires,” said Rep. Brendan Boyd, D-Pa., ranking Democrat on the budget committee.
Hey, Al, hand us that cane for a moment.
Look what the cat dragged in: Scientists at a biotech company have used woolly mammoth genes to engineer a mouse that has some of the characteristics of the ancient pachyderm, extinct for 4,000 years, including a thick woolly coat of fur. The ultimate goal is to bring back the mammoth, the scientists said.
Well, at least when it escapes the lab, the stampede of tusked, woolly mice will be cuter than the average pandemic virus.
The other, other dark meat: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, dealing with habitat damage to marshes from invasive nutria — a large, round rat-like semi-aquatic rodent, native to South America — is touting its culinary possibilities, which it says offers lean, mild meat that tastes like rabbit or turkey drumsticks.
You, sir, in the lab coat; have you considered crossing a nutria with a chicken to bring down the price of eggs?
It’s a letter from a Mr. P. Bear, with an invitation to a state dinner: The prime minister of Greenland, Múte Bourup Egede, defiantly objected to Trump’s Tuesday night comment regarding his intention to make Greenland part of the U.S. “I think we’re going to get it; one way or the other, we’re going to get it,” said Trump. The Greenland PM’s response: “We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken.”
Perhaps displaying some room for negotiation, however, one of Greenland’s polar bears agreed that, “Yes, one way or the other, the president is going to get it.”
Dress warmly, J.D., and remember to say thank you: A week after Britain extended an “unprecedented” invitation to President Trump for a second visit with the royal family at its residences in Balmoral, Scotland, United Kingdom officials are bristling at Vice President J.D. Vance’s comment that a U.S. stake in Ukraine’s economy was a “better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” Only Britain and France have proposed sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire.
Divvying up the ceremonial duties, President Trump told Vance, R-Some Random Official, that he would go to Balmoral while Vance makes the important fact-finding trip to Greenland’s mineral- and polar bear-rich Arctic plains.
Email Jon Bauer at jon.bauer@heraldnet.com. Follow him on Blue Sky at jontbauer@bsky.social.
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