More Things are Dumb, the More They Stay the Same

You probably have a conspiracy theory in your pocket.

If you look beneath the figure of FDR on any dime, you'll see the initials JS near the date.

The initials are for John Sinnock, Chief Engraver of the he US Mint from 1925 to 1947.

When the first Roosevelt dimes were issued in 1946, conspiracies believed the JS stood for Joseph Stalin. This was compounded in 1948 when the mint issued a Sinnock-designed half dollar with the same initials.

I'm reading about this in Avi's "Catch You Later, Traitor," a book set in New York during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

Which brings me to the title of this post.

There's a lot of crap being believed out there, from flat earth (I thought we'd sorted that one out, honestly) to any number of idiot theories about The Man trying to keep us all down. It's discouraging and depressing.

But looking very closely at the dimes in my pockets at least tells me that people believed stupid stuff in the past and very likely will believe in stupid stuff in the future. Only thing is with the Internet, a lot more people having stupid stuff in their heads are finding others who do the same, so they seem louder.

And maybe that's wrongthink, because there were plenty of periodicals and such back in the day that helped people spread their nonsense. Maybe the Internet just speeds it up.

The Backwards Hairpiece Gambit

Early in the morning of February 6, 1858, Representative Galusha Grow, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and Rep. Laurence Kent, a Democrat from South Carolina, exchanged insults that quickly led to blows as the US House of Representatives debated admitting Kansas as a state with a pro-slavery Constitution.

More than 30 representatives joined the melee as South Carolina Democrat James Orr, Speaker of the House, gaveled for order. Sergeant-at-Arms Adam J. Glossbrenner was ordered to arrest the combatants. He jumped into the scrum, wielding the House Mace high above his head.

Order was only restored when Democrat William Barksdale, upset that Wisconsin Republicans John Potter and Cadwaller Washburn had ripped his hairpiece off during the fight, in frustration jammed it on his head backwards. Barksdale looked so ridiculous that both sides stopped fighting and started laughing.

The House was recessed for two days, and when debate was permitted to recommence, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a Free State.

Two lessons can be learned from this:

1. Congress has always been the way it is.

2. Sometimes when people make “idiot” remarks about “serious matters” on social media, they’re secretly hoping it’s the equivalent of the Backwards Hairpiece Gambit and leads people to reassess their behavior.

Yes, this actually happened.

The Russians Meet Myrna Minkoff

So, I’m interested in this; this thing as to whether Russia or Russian interests interfered in the election with the express hope of influencing voters to elect Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton.

I want to weigh the evidence.

Evidence Bit No. 1: Individuals connected to the Russian government provided WikiLeaks with emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.

Aaaannnd everything else appears classified. When (and here I have to insert a hollow laugh because it’s if, and that’s an IF visible from space) this happens, I’m sure the press, which will have forgotten this outrage next week, will get right back to us on it.

(The New York Times is telling us there’s no new evidence, other than circumstantial, to back up the CIA’s claim.)

A former Acting Director of the CIA, you should know, doesn’t want the general public to know about this at all. While he’s upset over the dismissal of the CIA’s news, he has this to say about sharing it with the public:

The Obama Administration should not be leaking, whether that’s the White House, or the Intelligence Community, of whoever, right? The Obama Administration should not be leaking and [Trump] should not be criticizing publicly. They’ve got to get this discussion out of the public domain. It doesn’t belong there. It belong in the room between the President and the briefer, between the President and his CIA-designate, that’s where it belongs.

Mind you, nobody’s disputing the authenticity of what was leaked from the DNC to WiliLeaks and then to the press: That the DNC colluded to give the nomination to Clinton over competitor Bernie Sanders because it was Her Turn ®. That, I repeat, appears not to be in dispute. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz lost her job over the deal, Bernie Sanders got a metric shiat-ton more street cred with his fans, and Hillary Clinton got the nomination. And lost to a candidate whom everyone – including the Republican establishment – assumed anyone with a pulse and better hair could beat.

So what appears to be meddling is that the truth about the collusion got out, thanks to the Russians who apparently did so to get Donald Trump elected President of the United States.

In other words: it’s the ol’ Myrna Minkoff Effrontery*: The information was good, it just came from the wrong source.

Read this report at the Washington Post and help me figure out if there’s anything I’ve missed.

It might also serve as a sobering reminder to those clutching their pearls or, indeed, calling for a negation of the presidential election due to this alleged interference, that the United States itself has a rather long, torrid history of interfering with the democratic or republican electoral processes of other countries.

So you know, glass houses, stones, and all. 

And a lot of this clandestine shinola was committed by the CIA, the self-same organization leading the pearl-clutching over the alleged Russian interference in our own election which – if I need to remind you – revealed truths about DNC collusions via the Myrna Minkoff Effrontery. There are few involved in being upset about this who would have been as upset if their candidate had won.

It’s also important to remember that there are countries out there actively paying hard cash to “develop relationships within the United States with members of Congress, federal agencies, and even the media,” including those frozen ratbags on our northern border, the Canadians.

I can still be righteously outraged that a foreign government tried and maybe succeeded in influencing this election. But I can’t pretend to be outraged over this while not being outraged over my own country’s nefarious mischief, nor can I ignore the gigantic irony in believing the CIA in this, when the CIA also insisted there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

A note to Russia: I do not need your help to believe my country’s government is filled with empty suits and colluders and other assorted slimeballs. Nor am I dumb enough to clutch pearls with the same agency the pearl-clutchers were pissed off at for getting us involved in a decade-long war. 

An aside: There are some saying the FBI blew the election for Clinton. That may be true. What’s also true is that, despite the FBI’s decision that Clinton did not commit a criminal offense by using a private server for government work, it was still a stupid and irresponsible thing to do. For what it’s worth, I think FBI Director James Comey did what he had to do. He had to say, whoops, we found more emails that we need to take a look at. And then a day later reiterated that, well, nope, she STILL did nothing criminal. Announced before the election, he’s a partisan dupe who handed the election to the Republicans. Announced after the election, he’s – possibly – the partisan dupe who handed the election to the Democrats. If I had the same damned if you do, damned if you don’t decision to make in the weeks before an election, I believe I’d do exactly what he did, because no matter what he did, at least half of the nation was going to be miffed at him. With good reason.

NOTE: I will again announce I did not vote for Donald Trump. I would neither have voted for Hillary Clinton. Substituting one power-hungry, morally-ambiguous charlatan for another did not appeal to me. I voted for Evan McMullin (and yes, I know he worked for the CIA, the irony is killing me at the moment) in a state where voting for a third-party candidate did not make adifference in the Electoral College.

* Myrna Minkoff, a character in John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” was rattled by the fact that information/propaganda she happened to agree with and had distributed to like-minded individuals (I forget what exactly, and searching the Internet for this information is futile) came from the KKK. In my mangled memory of her words, she decried it as the “right information” from the “wrong people”.