Monday, July 15, 2019

All The Time In The World

One of the great things about social media is the mask often comes off of people.

Take Stuart Stevens. He ran Mitt Romney's 2016 presidential campaign. He's a Mississippi native, 8th generation! It's to him what being a vegan cross-fitter atheist is to bar jokes. He is what you think of when you think of an "establishment Republican." His twitter background is where he went skiing last year, for crying out loud! 

(If you follow him on twitter, it was the most extended and insufferable humble-brag in the history of humble-brags).

He's anti-Trump, and that's caused his mask to slip off quite a bit.  Ostensibly, he is a Republican...who just happens to be pro-abortion. He despises the average Republican voter. He despises his fellow Mississippians as racists, uninformed yokels, and marvels that we dislike the politics of New York and California, who "pay 40% of the state's budget."

(Never does he mention that much of that is in programs that are the nation's debt drivers, and also the drivers of much of our continued pathologies of poverty. After all, if you want more of something...you subsidize it). 

Yes, I don't like the politics of New York and California. One is a city-state that ignores 90% of its state in order to please the unpleasant city dwellers and the other is a place where it's basically legal to poop and use heroin in the streets. California is a state where a college professor that committed assault with a bike lock was allowed to walk away Scot Free. The great thing about federalism is that I can live freely with a minimal amount of input from New Yorkers and Californians. 

He was very vocal about Senator Hyde-Smith and Mike Espy, so he keeps an eye on what's going on in state. He was ashamed, y'all. Ashamed. But he's been strangely silent about something that's affecting a whole lot of people in the state, which is the flooding in the south Delta area.

If you don't know (and why should you? It barely gets covered on the national news. We didn't deserve coverage after Katrina, and I guess we still don't deserve it now), there's about half a million acres in the Yazoo backwater area that are currently under flood conditions. Due to the volume of water coming down the Mississippi, the Yazoo River and its tributaries are backed up and have spilled their banks. This has affected people throughout the lower Delta. People have lost their homes and livelihoods. Would you like to guess how many times that this influential Mississippian, with his numerous connections, presumably, has said anything on social media about the flooding?

None.

He's had plenty of time to tweet about Donald Trump (who hasn't?). He's had time to tweet about the threat that Robert E. Lee poses to the world (he's been dead since 1870). He will moralize until the cows come home. But he can't be bothered to summon up the humanity to do something that might actually help people in the state. He loves Mississippi. He just doesn't like Mississippians, especially those who don't blindly do what our betters who get to go on CNN tell us to do.

There's a word for that. Hypocrite.

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