Iowa’s Heinous, Bigoted, Incompetent, and Hypocritical “Drag Show” Bill

Orlando and Rosalind in Curmie’s As You Like It

The Republican-dominated Senate would have us believe that folks like Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, and Kristi Noem are anywhere near qualified for the leadership positions to which they were confirmed.  At least the first three are outright threats to the nation and its citizens; Curmie was holding out hope that Hegseth would be merely incompetent, but it isn’t looking that way.  Noem is a vicious and self-righteous fool; that makes her look pretty good by comparison to the rest of that lot.

And 217 of the 218 House Republicans just voted for a budget resolution that would strip billions from necessary social programs that benefit the most vulnerable among us to clear the way for a tax cut for billionaires… and add trillions (yes, trillions) of dollars to the national debt.  So much for these assholes’ claims of fiscal responsibility. 

But with all due disrespect for the GOP quislings in Washington, the greatest example of legislative malfeasance just might be Iowa House Study Bill 158.  It’s currently been reported out of subcommittee with a recommendation to approve.

This totally wackadoodle legislation would criminalize “drag shows” (Curmie will explain the scare quotes in a moment) that allow minors to attend.  Venues would be fined $10,000 per minor in attendance; adults who bring a minor (anyone under 18) to such an event would be guilty of a class D felony (!), subject to “confinement for no more than five years and a fine of at least $1,025 but not more than $10,245.”  Oh, and parents or legal guardians can sue the venue for up to $50,000 plus legal fees for each offense.

Holy Dionysus, where to begin?  Curmie doesn’t attract a stupid or ignorant readership, so we’ll mention the obvious bigotry only in passing.  There is, of course, no rational reason to keep children out of drag shows simply because they are drag shows.  Some such performances may be unsuitable for other reasons, but it’s because of what can loosely be called “adult content”—language, actual sexuality, etc.—not the fact that a biological male (or someone who was once a biological male) is dressed as a woman, or vice versa.  “Drag queen story hours” never hurt anyone.  No, never.

So let’s move on.  The definition of “drag show” in this proposed legislation is a performance in which the following is true:

The main aspect of the performance is a performer who exhibits a gender identity that is different than the  performer’s gender assigned at birth through the use of clothing, makeup, accessories, or other gender signifiers.

The performer sings, lip-syncs, dances, reads, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment, whether or not performed for payment.

Needless to say, there are a lot, and Curmie does mean a lot, of theatrical and quasi-theatrical forms that fit that definition but aren’t drag.  The first one to come to mind is British pantomime—you know, Gentle Reader, that entertainment form that hundreds of thousands of British parents take their kids to every Christmas season?  The Dame, the comic older female character, is always played by a man.  And if there’s a juvenile male lead (as in, say, a version of Jack and the Beanstalk), that role will go to an attractive young woman. 

One of Curmie’s friends is one of the UK’s leading Dames.  He writes and performs in pantos not infrequently, but he also does solo work written specifically with children in mind.  He preaches that it’s okay to be different—sort of the kind of message that got actress Julianne Moore in trouble with the censorial asshats Trump administration for her children’s book Freckleface Strawberry.

I’ve seen my friend in a panto and in a solo show live, as well as a few performances online (it’s a long commute from Texas to England).  He’s very good at his job.  He’s empathetic and nurturing.  And I will positively go to war against anyone who says he’s doing anything but a positive service to the children who see his shows. 

But it’s not just panto, of course.  Many traditional Asian forms feature men playing women.  Ask virtually anyone to name a star of Chinese opera, and if they can think of anyone, it’s more than likely to be Mei Langfan, who was best exclusively known for—well, you’re ahead of me again, Gentle Reader—yes, playing the leading female role. 

Similarly, many Japanese Nō and Kabuki companies still employ traditional all-male casting; the onnagata (a male Kabuki actor specializing in female roles) is very much still a thing. But wait… wouldn’t that mean that the Iowa bill isn’t merely homo- and trans-phobic, but also racist?  Well, it kinda seems that way.

Of course, there are plenty of Western examples, too.  The most notable of these is probably Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  Curmie acted in it once and directed it once (that’s a photo from the latter at the top of the page).  There is no question that the play is very much about an actor playing a character not of the same sex.  What’s particularly interesting here is that there is no way to avoid that issue.  In the original, all-male production, we had a male actor playing a female character (Rosalind) playing a male character (Ganymede) playing a female character (Rosalind, again).  But whoever plays Rosalind, that actor is going to take on the identity of someone of a different sex; it just a matter of which scenes.

Curmie used to live in Iowa.  Imagine if you will, Gentle Reader, if Curmie had directed a production of that play with a special afternoon performance for local high schools.  This kind of thing happens all the time.  (We didn’t have such an audience when I did As You Like It in Texas, but we did for Macbeth.)  In this scenario, assuming a good attendance, the college and Curmie would each be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and both Curmie and every high school teacher who brought kids would have been charged with a felony.

Ah, you say, but no rational person would consider As You Like It a drag show even though it fits the description in the proposed legislation.  Well, no rational person would introduce a bill this fundamentally stupid, but here we are.  And I’m not ready to trust that Deputy Dunderhead, D.A. Doofus, and Judge Jackass aren’t more interested in parading their pseudo-morality than in exercising reason.

There are other examples, too, of course.  Arguably the greatest Spanish play of the 17^th century, Life Is a Dream, and the greatest Italian play of the 18^th century, The Servant of Two Masters, both rely on cross-dressing.  Is that “the main aspect of the performance”?  Well, it’s a main aspect of the performance, for sure.  And of course the multiple-Tony-winning musical Some Like It Hot is pretty much about the cross-dressing.

Curmie can’t think of a show he did in Iowa that would have caused problems, but he may well be forgetting something.  Beloved Spouse directed at a local high school there, and didn’t have enough boys audition for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so she cast a couple of girls as “brothers.”  She probably would have been okay, though, as that wasn’t central to the production.

Similarly, when Curmie has occasionally cast women in roles originally played by men, he’s changed the character to female.  He did strap a fake beard on an actress to play a small part in Woyzeck, and had obviously fake mustaches drawn onto both men and women appearing as the fireman chorus in (Biedermann and) The Firebugs, but complaining about that would be a stretch even for Deputy Dunderhead. 

But Curmie has directed not just As You Like It and The Servant of Two Masters, but also The Breasts of Tiresias, in which the female lead decides to become a man (and does, beard and all), while her husband starts wearing a housedress and gives birth to tens of thousands of babies overnight.  (“Willpower!”)  Yeah, that one might rattle a few cages.  We didn’t have a lot of kids in the house, but those who came (and their parents) seemed to enjoy it.

There are also, of course, some productions (as opposed to the requirements of a play) which might raise the ire of the censorial set.  When Curmie and Beloved Spouse honeymooned in London many years ago, one of the highlights of the adventure was seeing Sir Peter Hall’s brilliant production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy.  

Publicity for the show emphasized the fact that the performance would be historically accurate in the sense that it would feature an all-male cast.  Thus, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Electra, and the specifically female choruses of both The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides were all played by men.  Is that “the main aspect of the performance”?  Well, it’s the one that got highlighted in promotional materials…

We can, of course, add to this list any performance by a trans person.  Curmie can easily imagine a performance art piece by a former student describing his experience as an actress and the various psychological and physical forms of transitioning.  It would be, no doubt, a valuable service to those of us who have never experienced similar urges and especially, of course, to adolescents experiencing them right now.  Nope, can’t have that.

Which leaves us with the final term of the title of this essay: hypocrisy.  According to the sanctimonious right, it is reasonable to home school your kids even if you lack either the education or intelligence to do so.  It’s fine to deny them immunizations which would make them and indeed the entire population more impervious to diseases like polio, measles, mumps, etc.  You can make them go to your church.  What you do with your children is your business.

Well, it’s your business unless you decide to take them to a drag show.  Then, it’s a felony.  Your kids can attend an R-rated movie if you accompany them.  But if you accompany them to a drag show, even a drag queen story hour, perhaps even to a classic play, you’ll be arrested. 

Whoever thought this bill was a good idea is a clown.  Unfortunately, Curmie is developing a case of coulrophobia.  Perhaps you should, too, Gentle Reader.

On Greg Abbott’s Outrageous Pardon of Daniel Perry

  

Curmie won’t make anyone look at a photo of Greg Abbott

Curmie had intended to write about this story since it came to light, but other topics and life in general interfered.  But then came a wonderful piece on the Bulwark site by Jonathan V. Last.  On the one hand, Curmie can’t improve on Last’s commentary, but he nonetheless feels compelled to comment, in part because he’s reminded of just how outrageous the actions of Texas’s petty despot governor, Greg Abbott, have become of late.

There were the twin debacles concerning pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, and Curmie has another piece in the works in which Abbott’s knee-jerk petulance is foregrounded.  (Watch this space!)  And now he’s pardoned a convicted murderer just because he didn’t like the victim’s politics.

As Last points out, Garrett Foster was something of a right-wing pol’s wet dream (Curmie’s term, not Last’s).  Young, attractive, a military veteran, a strong enough supporter of the 2^nd Amendment that he took at AK-47 to a Black Lives Matter protest.  Oh, and white.  Mustn’t forget that part. 

Trouble was, he wasn’t there to interfere with the demonstration; he was a participant.  So a self-proclaimed racist and likely perv named Daniel Perry shot and killed Foster on the night of July 25, 2020.

It appears that Perry researched the various levels of murder and manslaughter charges and apparently sought to create a situation in which he could claim to have been in fear for his life so he could shoot somebody.  What a noble lad!

On the night in question, Perry finished his shift as an Uber driver (remind Curmie to use Lyft if he’s in Austin), rounded the corner and came upon the protest.  He could easily have driven around it, but instead, he ran a red light and rammed into the crowd, hitting a number of people, including Foster’s wheelchair-bound fiancée.  Curiously (OK, not actually curiously at all), the “exhaustive review” conducted by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles (all of them appointed by Abbott, of course) didn’t bother to mention this part of the story.  Or perhaps it did, and Greg Abbott just didn’t care.  It matters little if that little detail was omitted by Abbott himself or by his appointed minions.

Anyway, according to literally every witness, Foster stayed calm and did what he could to alleviate the pressure.  He tried to wave Perry on.  Yes, he was carrying an assault rifle.  Why these things are legal to open-carry in Texas is beyond Curmie’s ken, but Greg Abbott seems to think it’s a good idea… unless, of course, the guy doing so doesn’t own a MAGA hat or answer to “Jim-Bob” or “Bubba.”

Again, according to literally every witness, Foster did not raise his weapon and indeed did not have a finger on the trigger.  To be fair, all of those witnesses were protesters themselves, so they might be a little biased against the guy who killed their comrade.  But <insert late-night informercial voice here> that’s not all!  You know who else says Foster didn’t raise his weapon?  Daniel Perry.  You read that correctly, Gentle Reader.  The guy who’s claiming self-defense initially admitted that he wasn’t actually being threatened: “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me” (emphasis added).

By this logic, and that of some “expert” defense witness Perry’s lawyer dredged up out of the “Testimony for Sale” database, if Curmie now sees someone, anyone, walking down the street carrying a gun, I’m within my rights to shoot to kill, not just if he does anything to actually threaten me, but even if I’m a paranoid coward like Daniel Perry and just sorta kinda think he might.

Oh, and unless Curmie’s been led astray by all those cop and lawyer shows he’s watched over the last half century or more, self-defense is an affirmative defense, meaning the burden of proof shifts.  The prosecution must prove that the defendant committed the act; the defendant doesn’t need to prove that he didn’t, only that the case hasn’t been proved beyond reasonable doubt.  When self-defense is presented as an argument, however, the presumption is that the claim is untrue, and the defendant must prove, at the very least, that it is more likely than not that he was indeed acting in self-defense.

And guess what?  The jury didn’t buy the argument.  Let me put it a different way: twelve out of twelve jurors were convinced that Perry was lying.  Not a single juror had even reasonable doubt of Perry’s legal and ethical guilt.  It may be a little problematic that all of the witnesses were participating in a demonstration that Foster joined and Perry sought to disrupt.  But it’s a hell of a lot more problematic that the only person claiming self-defense is the defendant, on trial for murder, and that he himself acknowledged, at least initially, that there was no immediate threat.

Of course, the day after the obvious verdict was announced, before Perry was even sentenced (!), Greg Abbott proclaimed that he’d grant a pardon if his hand-picked minions the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended it.  Was he acquiescing to the demands of the despicable Tucker Carlson, or did he come to this remarkably moronic conclusion on his own?  We’ll probably never know.

What is clear is that it is that Abbott could not possibly have studied the evidence presented at the trial and done his actual job at the same time.  Not in order to issue a reasonable statement a day after the verdict.  Life is easier, of course, if you form a conclusion based on your prejudices and then grab hold of any excuse, however spurious, to ignore the actual facts.  Those of us who care about actual justice have more struggles.

It is obvious that Greg Abbott is a grand-standing fraud, a hypocritical ideologue, and an authoritarian asshole.  Whether he’s also a racist idiot, or just likes pandering to his base, a sizable proportion of whom are racist idiots, is unclear.

It’s also crystal clear that the pardon, which the Houston Chronicle’s Cayla Harris and Neena Satija describe as “the first time in at least decades that a Texas governor has pardoned someone for a serious violent crime, let alone murder,” was an act of raw political power, a show of force, with no concern for the reality of the events described.  There is literally (and, Gentle Reader, you know that Curmie is enough of a Grammar Nazi that when he writes “literally,” he means literally) no evidence to support a claim of self-defense except Perry’s (ahem…) “amended” memory of what happened. 

Oh, and by the way, there seems to be no disputing that Perry did indeed run a red light and drive into the crowd, thereby surrendering any claim to self-defense.  The best the defense had to offer was the the claim that Perry inadvertently ran that red light and plowed into the protesters while texting.  Oh, well if he was only reckless when he obviously broke the law, that’s all right, then, right?  Even if Perry’s claim is true, which is about as likely as Curmie’s undergrad alma mater winning next year’s NCAA basketball tournament (they were dead last in a pretty weak league this year), there would be no way the demonstrators could have known that he had no ill intent, but was rather a reckless jackass who still shouldn’t be driving for Uber.  It would be reasonable for them to believe that they were being threatened.  Had Foster shot Perry, in other words, there might have been a legitimate self-defense argument.  Not the other way around, though.

Witness, too, Abbott’s cheap shot at prosecutor, Travis County District Attorney José Garza, who had the audacity to prosecute a murderer whose politics aligned with the governor’s.  It’s difficult to argue with Garza’s assertion that the pardon places “politics over justice and made a mockery of our legal system.” 

Side note: if Greg Abbott wants to say nasty things about José Garza as a personal opinion, he’s absolutely entitled to do so, just as Curmie can offer a personal opinion about Greg Abbott.  But to use the power of the governor’s office to say nasty things about Garza as fact in an official document is pretty close to libel, if indeed it hasn’t crossed that line.

A couple days after announcing the pardon, Abbott slithered off to the annual fellation (we can hope that it was only metaphoric) of the NRA.  Of course, he’d just pardoned a murderer who had killed a man for the sole reason that the victim was openly carrying a weapon; one might imagine that the NRA wouldn’t take kindly to that, but of course they’re just as ideological and almost as hypocritical as Abbott.  And one suspects that the average melanin count of attendees was rather low.

Gentle Reader, if you want to say that there is no clear evidence of a racial motive in the killing of George Floyd, you’ll get no argument here.  If you want to suggest that the death of a single petty criminal in Minnesota shouldn’t incite massive protests around the country, Curmie’s willing to listen, at the very least.  If you want to claim that some BLM protests became violent, and that some of that violence was initiated by the demonstrators themselves, Curmie nods in agreement.

But this particular episode at this particular protest at this particular time in this particular place needs to be looked at individually.  (Curmie goes Confucian again.  Who’da thunk it?)  This incident is clear-cut.  Daniel Perry is a racist, a liar, a coward, and… oh, yeah, a murderer.  He should be in prison because he’s an obvious danger to society.  Not as big a danger as Greg Abbott, though.

On the Trans-cendent Hypocrisy of Elon Musk

Admit it: you didn’t really want to see
a picture of that smug bastard, did you?

No one who was actually paying attention ever really believed Elon Musk’s palaver about being a “first amendment absolutist.” That sounded good at the time, and it was indeed was Twitter needed; it just wasn’t who Musk ever was or ever will be. 

A few days after Musk announced that he was purchasing Twitter, Curmie wrote: 

Musk, of course, fancies himself as a sort of Nietzschean übermensch, so superior to us mere mortals that he cannot be expected to abide by quotidian standards of integrity, much less compassion or empathy. Curmie, equally obviously, views him as just another wealthy and petulant narcissist with delusions of grandeur. Oh, and an asshole of the first order; mustn’t forget that. 

Establishing appropriate boundaries for free expression on a site like Twitter is, of course, a monumental undertaking, requiring considerable deftness of touch. Allow it to become a free-for-all, and the slur-shouters will ultimately chase away everyone else. Clamp down too hard, especially in ways that could be perceived as favoring one point of view over another, and we get Pravda rather than truth. (See what I did there?) 

Curmie isn’t sure anyone could simultaneously complete the trifecta of taking an absolutist stand on free expression, eliminating spam, and curtailing the use of defamatory language, as Musk initially promised. But even if it is indeed possible, it’s clear that Musk isn’t the guy to do it: he lacks the intelligence, the capacity for nuance, or especially the humility to negotiate that minefield. He is, as Curmie suggested over a year ago, just “another boring and hedonistic super-rich guy…. longer on braggadocio than on ideas.” His claims that people on Twitter could even disparage him without repercussions lasted about a week. 

The Super Bowl provided us with two lasting images that are relevant to this discussion. First, there was the whole business of sharing a luxury box with Rupert Murdoch, an act which did little for either his non-partisan or anti-media credentials. Then there was the threat to fire Twitter engineers because his Super Bowl tweet generated fewer engagements than Joe Biden’s. It may be remotely possible that someone somewhere might someday be as absurdly wealthy as Elon Musk without being an insufferable narcissist, but it’s pretty damned unlikely. 

So, Gentle Reader, where is all this scaffolding going? This: the self-proclaimed absolutist on free expression has decided unilaterally to forbid the use of certain slurs on Twitter. Reasonable enough, yes? Except that the “slurs” in question are “cisgender” and “cis,” which are simply objective descriptors of people whose self-perception of gender aligns with their biological sex at birth. The term has been around for decades, although it is far more prevalent in common parlance today than in yesteryear. But that’s sort of the point: everyone knows what it means, and that it isn’t a slur, although some folks would like to pretend to be offended. And here I was, thinking it was the liberals who were “snowflakes.” 

Curmie, like most people, is cis. Indeed, there are few demographic descriptors that fit him as accurately. “Old”? I’ll accept that, although is 67 really old? “White”? Sure, mostly, but there’s about 3% Native American in there. “Left-handed”? Yes, for one-handed things (writing, throwing) but not for two-handed things (swinging a baseball bat or an axe). But “cis”? Yes, unequivocally. 

Some people, though, including a number of folks very dear to me, aren’t cis. That’s why the term has meaning, because “X” is meaningless unless there is a concomitant “not-X.” Perhaps, as has been argued by some folks, Curmie’s friends and family members who are trans or gender-fluid have something wrong with them. I don’t believe that for an instant, but I do not seek to stifle the expression of arguments with which I disagree. 

This would differentiate Curmie from both Elon Musk and James Esses, who has, to quote The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky, “repeatedly expressed views that widely would be considered anti-trans.” Those posts, and, for example, misgendering and dead-naming trans people, are, of course, just dandy in Muskistan. But calling a cis guy “cis”? Ooh… but he doesn’t like it. In the words of Curmie’s then eight-year-old cousin, tough noogies. And Curmie will countenance deadnaming when conservatives are forbidden from calling Kid Rock anything but Bobby Ritchie. 

So let’s drop the act, Elon. Like so many other hypocrites—the “parental rights” crowd, for example—you have no interest whatsoever in free speech. Indeed, you’re unwilling to even fight governmental censorship the way your predecessors at Twitter did. You want to claim that you’re a First Amendment advocate, but really you just want to control the discussion and maximize your profits. Your fervor for free expression withers when someone actually says something you disagree with, especially if they’re demonstrably right, which would make you other than infallible. You are simply another fragile rich boy who stomps his feet when he doesn’t get literally everything he wants. Worst of all, you’re boring. Please go away.

The Socialist Who Wasn’t

This was originally intended as part of the collection of short discussions, but pulling them all together took longer than expected, and the other stories fit together under a general heading, so this will be a briefer-than-usual post.

Nathan J. Robinson
A Socialist when It’s Convenient for Him

One of the more intriguing headlines of the last couple of weeks was this one from vice.com: “Socialist Publication Current Affairs Fires Staff for Doing Socialism.” Nathan J. Robinson, the author of Why You Should Be a Socialist and editor-in-chief of the journal Current Affairs, which is described on its webpage as “Socialism with Cajun Characteristics,” essentially fired virtually the entire staff when they advocated for a workers co-op.  Apparently all this talk of actually doing socialism instead of talking about it made Robinson, who plays Napoleon the pig in this community theatre production of Animal Farm, nervous about losing the absolute control to which he believed himself entitled. 

He referenced “his vision for the Current Affairs as published in the first issue.”  That statement of purpose seems intended more to entertain than to illuminate.  Indeed, it’s difficult to find anything there to support Robinson’s current position.  A cardinal principle that the magazine is “firmly against the hurting of other human beings” certainly doesn’t jibe terribly well with his recent actions.  Indeed, that opening salvo expresses particular disdain for “the libertarians, who despise every tyrannical act unless it happens to be done by the boss.”  Um…

You can read statements from two staffers who were… ahem… asked to resign here and here.  It certainly looks like a mess.  But Curmie is less interested in Robinson’s outrageous antics per se and more in a brief exchange over on EthicsAlarms (you’ll have to scroll down pretty far).  I’m particularly fond of the comment by Glenn Logan: “Socialism is one of those things that looks good on paper, but when you experience it, you convert to capitalism mighty fast…”  

What he’s really saying, of course, is that if you’re an insecure, hypocritical, asshole willing to betray the trust of your friends for a little more perceived power, capitalism is the most proven means of accomplishing your goals.  Well, that assertion is difficult to dispute.

Of Assholes, Social Media, Idiot University Administrators [apologies for redundancy], and Victims

Curmie is a little late to the party—but not as late as is his wont—regarding the escapades of one Jimmy Galligan. Curmie first heard the name when a former student—a Social Justice Warrior as only a middle-class het white Christian male can be—applauded Galligan in a Facebook post. So Curmie broke out the Google machine and learned about the case. Turns out that Galligan is … what’s that word, again? An asshole. Yeah, that’s it.

Mimi Groves: because she’s the victim here

OK: here’s the story. Four years ago, then 15-year-old Mimi Groves got her learner’s permit and posted a three-second video to a friend via Snapchat: “I can drive, niggers!,” echoing language she had heard repeatedly in music she liked. Three years go by, and we come to the quite legitimate furor over the killing of George Floyd. Groves posted on Instagram that people should “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Ironically, it was this gesture of support for BLM that may have catalyzed her being labelled a racist. 

Someone she didn’t know responded to her post with “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word.” Somewhere along the line someone had sent the Instagram post to Galligan, who then—get this—waited to post it publicly until Groves had been accepted onto the cheerleading squad at the University of Tennessee, her “dream school,” so he could “get her where she would understand the severity of that word”: in other words, when he could do the most damage to her reputation, and get the most publicity for himself.

Galligan claims he initially brought the video to the attention of school officials “without gaining any response.” Does Curmie believe this is a complete and accurate description of what happened? Well, his response starts with “n,” and isn’t the word that got Groves into trouble. But even if this claim is true, and even if Galligan had been subjected to racial slurs directed at him by other students (a plausible enough allegation), why lash out so viciously against someone who hadn’t done that?  The only plausible answer is that he could.

Social media having long since displaced quicksand pits and piranha pools as the most dangerous place to hang out, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter were soon abuzz, complete with links to UT’s cheer team and admissions pages. 

Groves was immediately dropped from the cheer team and pressured to withdraw from the university. Whereas Curmie believes she is better off not subject to the whim of an athletics department and an admissions office (and, no doubt, an administration) more concerned with kneejerk virtue signaling than with intent, context, or proportion—the very essence of a university education—she understandably does not agree. 

Points to consider: 

Groves was 15 when she said the word, once. She was a kid. No one, and Curmie does mean literally no one, should be judged based on a single, frankly rather minor, lapse of judgment at age 15. Hell, Curmie did some remarkably stupid stuff when he was considerably older than that, and he’s betting you did, too, Gentle Reader. Much as Curmie thinks the term “cancel culture” is over-used, the concept does exist, and this is a prime example. 

The University of Tennessee behaved appallingly, their absurd over-reaction probably a function of trying to divert attention away from real incidents of racist activity by their already-enrolled students. If Groves had applied the epithet to Galligan (or anyone else) in her senior year, or used an equivalent term towards the LGBTQ+ community, or to members of a different religion, then withdrawing her admission might be appropriate. 

But it’s clear that she has grown up considerably in the last four years. If only the same could be said for UT’s cheerleading coach, athletics director, and director of admissions. A competent person in any of those positions would say to the screeching mob: “This young woman made a mistake when she was 15. If you say you didn’t, too, you’re either a saint or a liar, and we’re betting it’s not the former.” Instead, they adopted an especially perverse variant of the heckler’s veto in a gesture of appeasement that will become the new normal for them. 

Groves’s lawyer says, the “University of Tennessee caved in—in a panic, to a lot of hysteria, a lot of social media going on—and they didn't give her a meaningful investigation—which would have revealed that this happened years ago, and would have revealed the context of it.” Yeah, that’s about right. 

None of this, alas, is terribly surprising. Curmie’s politics are to the left of 85% of the US population, 95% of Texans, and 98% of the congressional district that re-elected Loony Louie Gohmert by a landslide. But he’s well aware that the biggest threat to his speaking his mind comes from that sliver to his left… well, them and the hand-wringing invertebrates (yes, Curmie knows that’s not good zoology) who make up the majority of university administrators. 

It’s extremely important to recognize that Groves did not (apparently ever) direct the term at an individual, nor use it as a term of disparagement at all, but rather she repeated an expression she had heard in her music. She is openly supportive of the BLM movement, and seems genuinely contrite at her past actions, not merely, à la a long list of politicians (for example), that she got caught. This is not the right scapegoat to choose. 

But Galligan doesn’t care: he got written up in the New York Times and had his 15 minutes of fame notoriety. Karma will return, however, as no responsible employer is going to trust him not to pull a similar stunt—and Curmie chooses that word carefully—in the future. Well, not unless he takes responsibilities for his actions. 

Moreover, “a few years ago,” Galligan’s own father, who is white, used the “n-word,” which he had heard his black in-laws use repeatedly, “prompting Galligan and his sister to quietly take him aside and explain that it was unacceptable, even when joking around.” A grown man can be “quietly taken aside”; a 15-year-old girl needs to be publicly humiliated years after the fact. And we need to wait until just the right moment, to maximize the damage. Even more problematic: Galligan is proud of the destruction he has wrought. 

Ergo: Jimmy Galligan is an asshole, and he will remain so in Curmie’s books until he expresses genuine remorse for his reckless, cruel, and unwarranted behavior. Curmie was about to say that whereas Mimi Groves is welcome in his classroom at any time, Jimmy Galligan is not. But that isn’t true. The teaching profession is one in which you play the cards you’re dealt, and Jimmy Galligan isn’t an unfamiliar figure. 

Curmie has known literally thousands of post-adolescents over his lifetime; he has been a student or a faculty member at a college or university for 93 of the last 95 semesters, and is about to start on semester 94. A lot of 19-year-olds have been part of that universe, and a lot of them turned out to be a lot better people as adults than they were as post-adolescents. It’s called growing up. Jimmy Galligan, like Mimi Groves, deserves the chance to do that. That doesn’t mean he isn’t an asshole right now.

A Quartet of Yearbook Controversies

Curmie was especially busy this May, as there was less time than usual between the end of spring semester and the beginning of the classes associated with his biennial trek to Ireland with students. The annual check-in with end-of-the-year high school activities is therefore happening a little (OK, a lot) later than planned. But, in the spirit of better late than never, here we go.

For whatever reason, different end-of-the-year events seem to be highlighted more in different years. Sometimes it’s prom; sometimes it’s the graduation ceremony itself; sometimes it’s senior days. This year, the hot topic is yearbooks. What I propose to do here is to look at four different controversies. In two cases, the school administrators got it wrong, realized it, and did what they could to make it right. In the others, the administration screwed up, then hemmed and hawed and muttered platitudes while actually doing bubkes. Whew—I was afraid that nobody was going to act like school administrators.

Let’s use that journalistic inverted pyramid structure on this one and start with the most egregious case. That would be in Wasatch County, Utah, where administrators decided prudishly, unilaterally, inconsistently, arrogantly, and without as much as consultation to Photoshop the pictures of female students in the school yearbook.

Yeah, there’s a dress code, which bears considerable similarity to every other dress code: a). it is incompetently written, with numerous mistakes of grammar and punctuation, b). it outlaws about everything, c). it gives absolute discretion to the administration to be arbitrary and capricious in deciding what constitutes a violation.

And a lot of girls’ photos were altered by the administration, probably illegally and certainly unethically. Equally importantly, a fair number of photos showing precisely the same kind of clothing weren’t altered. What that means, if nothing else, is that a lot of girls violated the policy as it could be interpreted by voyeuristic idiots like Wasatch County School District superintendent Terry E. Shoemaker. Seriously, if the examples that have been made available to the public are anything to go by—if they are even accurate but isolated examples—then the problem isn’t with the girls, it’s with the drooling middle-aged men like Shoemaker who get turned on a little too easily by the sight of a little adolescent skin. (Curmie flashes back to another case in Utah—about 75 minutes away, from what I can tell—a couple of years ago.

Seriously, the unedited photos I’ve seen are as innocuous as it is possible to be. There’s nothing, and I do mean nothing inappropriate about any of the unedited shots I’ve seen. Maybe, maybe covering up a tattoo or a bra strap could be forgiven (that is, after all, the sort of thing professional photographers are sometimes asked to do by their clients), but in the case of sophomore Kimberly Montoya (that’s her in the photos at the right: the real shot and the clumsily edited one), what got the old boys’ hearts a-palpitating wasn’t cleavage (there’s only the slightest hint of that in any of the allegedly offending photos) or a tattoo; it wasn’t a bare midriff or the glimpse of an undergarment… it was <gasp> shoulders. Yes, shoulders. That’s what got awkwardly covered up by the censorious asshats who dropped out of the Photoshop workshop after the first lesson and couldn’t even make their absurd editing look competent.

Turns out, there’s actually a line about shoulders in the dress code… not in the “extreme” clothing section, but under the definition of “modesty.” So the good folks running Wasatch High School aren’t quite ready to emerge from the 1950s, and by God, their students aren’t going to be allowed to do so, either. That’s ridiculous enough, but the arbitrary decision-making, the utter lack of transparency, and the smugness of the administration’s response are the greater problem. Sophomore Shelby Baum notes that “They didn’t tell you before they edited it, they didn’t give you an option to fix it, so you look funny in your yearbook picture.” Baum’s photo was altered in part to cover a dress-code compliant tattoo. And, of course, there was no objective—or even consistent—criterion for what was considered acceptable. Two girls wore the same top—one photo was altered to add sleeves, the other wasn’t.

Even Idiot in Charge Superintendent Shoemaker admits the process was flawed, although of course he’s righteously indignant that anyone might expect him or his lackeys to act like adults in the 21st century instead of something out of a bad community theatre production of The Crucible. “We only apologize in the sense that we want to be more consistent with what it is that we’re trying to do. In that sense we can help kids better prepare for their future by knowing how to dress appropriately for things.” News flash: the students were dressed appropriately, whether terminally constipated jackasses like Shoemaker think so or not.

Shoemaker did issue an unapologetic apology, blaming the students for not paying attention to the sign (4 feet by 5 feet, he hastens to tell us) that warned against “tank tops, low cut tops, inappropriate slogans on shirts, etc.” Guess what? None of the students in the pictures I’ve seen did any of that. And Shoemaker, like all moral cowards, passed the buck on the administrative snafus associated with his nonsensical censorship policy from school officials to the yearbook staff. What a sorry excuse for a leader this little putz is!

But wait (as they say in the infomercials), that’s not all! Turns out that boys didn’t really have to obey any standards at all. There’s a page in the yearbook with the headline “Wasatch Stud Life.” The sub-head reads “Studs doin’ what studs do best.” Curmie likes to imagine himself reasonably creative, but seriously, Gentle Reader, I couldn’t make this shit up. There are photos of boys with shirts gaping open, boys showing off tattoos, boys showing significant quantities of boxer shorts. Ah, but you see, they’re boys. Boys will be boys. Or studs. Or whatever.

Curmie is unlikely to be accused any time soon of being a raging feminist, although he’s certainly been accused of worse. But it’s hard to argue with the interpretation of Holly Mullen, the executive director of the Rape Recovery Center in Salt Lake City. An article in the Salt Lake Tribune describes her reaction:

The celebration of boys as “studs” while girls’ bodies are digitally covered is evidence of a bigger cultural problem…. “It speaks to allowing young men to dress and act as they choose and yet young women have to be kept in order,” Mullen said.

The notion that women must be controlled and directed so as not to inflame male sexual appetites only objectifies women and can contribute to sexual assault, Mullen said.

The dynamic often plays out in sexual violence, she said. “It’s a crime of control and taking away someone else’s control and autonomy. It sets them [men and women] up for that down the line.”

Yeah, what she said.

In other words, if there are mistakes to be made in terms of what photographs to include in the yearbook and how to edit them, the good folks at Wasatch found a way to make them. Their approach was ham-handed, opaque, incompetent, capricious, inconsistent, arrogant, puritanical, censorious, irresponsible, unethical… and, oh yeah, sexist in the extreme. Other than that, it went off without a hitch. Chances of a Curmie nomination for Shoemaker and his minions: Excellent.

And so we turn to story number two: the inclusion in Mesa (AZ) High School’s yearbook of a two-page spread celebrating the school’s teenaged parents. Curmie chose the word “celebrating” in the foregoing sentence carefully, by the way. I thought about “acknowledging” or “highlighting,” but the pages in question… well… celebrate some of the most ignorant, counter-productive behavior in which teens could engage. Sex at age 16 or 17 without appropriate birth control measures has disastrous consequences for everyone involved—from the mother to her relationship to the father to the child to society at large. Yes, teen pregnancy and teen parenting is part of life. So is heroin addiction; I don’t see the yearbook trying to spin that into a photo spread. (Maybe I shouldn’t have written that last sentence lest it give some idiot yearbook editor and irresponsible advisor an idea.)

It is true that if you look closely at the pages in question, there’s some ambivalence about whether this parenting thing was such a good idea, but, really, how many of us get past the headlines and the multiple soft-focus (metaphorically speaking) photographs. Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall wrote about this case as it was garnering national attention; the following is an excerpt from a comment I wrote on his Ethics Alarms page.

This yearbook spread does indeed glamorize irresponsible behavior, and clearly sets out to engender a case of the warm fuzzies, concentrating on the pseudo-heroic efforts of young mothers struggling with the difficulties of student parenthood while blithely ignoring the purely voluntary choice that put them in that position. (Of course, it is possible that one of the mothers might have been a rape victim and chose for religious or ethical reasons not to terminate the pregnancy. That’s another matter altogether.)

The yearbook feature does, in fact, empower a group of young women who, having made a mistake, are trying to mitigate the negative consequences by continuing their educations. But such an argument remains sufficiently destructive to the next generation of prospective mothers who see only a romanticized view of profoundly counter-productive behavior that there is no question that cooing over teen pregnancies is a net minus.

Particularly problematic for me was the argument in favor of including the feature: “Student parents don't have time to go to homecoming and do all that because they have a kid, so they don't really get to be seen on the yearbook, so we thought it would be a good idea to put them on the page where they could be seen.” Thus spake yearbook staffer Austin Contreras. He’s a kid, so I don’t want to be too hard on him, but the fact that teenaged parents don’t participate in school events is precisely why they shouldn’t be featured in the yearbook. Yes, include them in class photos, in candids if they happen to be there. No, don’t, to paraphrase an editorial in the Arizona Republic, “turn them leperlike from the colony and deny them an education.” But don’t “[glamorize] a life-altering mistake,” either. This seems reasonable to me. All of us make mistakes, but this is a huge one at that age. Acknowledge those who overcome the obstacles in their lives, but acknowledge, too, that some of those obstacles were self-created.

The problem here is the flip side of what happened in Utah, where censorial impulses ran amok and the administration butted into the yearbook’s operation in unnecessary and embarrassing ways. Here, the faculty advisor and other responsible officials failed to suggest that a really bad idea was a really bad idea. It’s too little, too late to proclaim in the wake of the controversy that “Yearbooks are an opportunity to commemorate students' school activities and achievements. The material presented reflects choices made outside of the school environment.”

Including the pages was dumb, but I’m less exercised than my friend Jack. Chances of a Curmie nomination: Fair.

Moving on to Mundy’s Mill High School in Jonesboro, Georgia. There, senior class vice president and apparently all-around good kid Paris Gray was suspended and threatened with not being able to graduate for a “quotation” that accompanied her yearbook photo: “When the going gets tough, just remember to Barium Carbon Potassium Thorium Astatine Arsenic Sulfer Utranium Phospheros.”

It’s been over 40 years since Curmie was in a chemistry classroom, but he can recognize a nerd joke when he sees one. The chemical symbols for those elements are Ba C K Th At As S U P. “Back that ass up,” in other words. Apparently this is what passes for riotously hilarious in some quarters these days.

OK. So. Young Ms. Gray was being ever so clever, and the editors, advisor, and whoever else was supposed to check on such things were too f*cking stupid to notice the obvious asleep at the wheel, so the passage made it into print. Naturally, the fact that the silly and not very funny joke made it past the dim-witted authorities was Paris’s fault, and what raised no alarms when the gag was submitted was enough to send administrators into crisis mode in the spring.

They blustered and made threats and did all the things dumb administrators do. Then what The Atlantic’s James Hamblin calls “Internet justice” struck, school officials backed down and apologized, and all was well with the world.

Let’s face it, this incident does raise issues about Ms. Gray’s readiness to be granted a diploma. For one thing, if you’re going to make a joke that involves words on a page, misspelling three words in a row is probably contra-indicated (that would be sulfur, uranium, and phosphorus, in case you’re wondering). Of course, it could be the editor who screwed that up (certainly s/he doesn’t emerge from this incident covered in glory). But it’s unquestionably Ms. Gray who wants us to believe that “back that ass up” means something like “You have to go back and start all over.” Um, no. Not now, not ever, and certainly not in the most famous (or at least notorious) use of the phrase, in the ‘90s rap song “Back That Azz Up,” which is, well, just nasty. That makes Paris either utterly devoid of interpretative ability or a liar trying to excuse her own actions behind a façade of fatuous innocence. My money’s on the latter, but I’ll pretend otherwise.

But if incompetent spelling and inability to comprehend text aren’t enough to keep Ms. Gray from graduating, neither should acting like an adolescent. The school was right to back down, and they did so in time to minimize the damage. Chances of a Curmie nomination: Slim.

Finally, there’s the case of Jessica Urbina (right), a student at San Francisco’s Sacred Heart Cathedral High School, whose picture was left out of the yearbook because she wore a tuxedo instead of a dress. It’s a dumb rule, and the lack of transparency is also an issue.

But there are three fundamental differences between this case and the one in Utah. First, it’s a Catholic school, and as such they ought to be granted a little more latitude in deciding what is and isn’t appropriate: there are lots of things Curmie might not like about the way they run things, but—within some fairly broad parameters—they have a little more autonomy than a public school would, and school officials were trying to follow Diocesan rules.

Second, Ms. Urbina’s picture was not altered so she “[looks] funny in [her] yearbook photo.” It may not seem preferable to omit the photo altogether rather than to change it. But we’re not talking about a voluntary touching-up here. What happened in Utah was, effectively, misrepresentation, which to my mind is worse than omission.

Finally, and most importantly, school officials issued a comprehensive, public, and apparently sincere apology. I was particularly struck by the following paragraph:

Many people suggest that the past few days have been deeply revealing about our school community. We agree. We are an imperfect community that can and does fail. We are a community that is open to self-reflection, and to the constructive criticism and leadership of its students, as well as to the criticism from members of our broader community. We are a community that strives to grow, improve and do what is right. We are a community that sees, in all situations, an opportunity to learn. While we would have preferred to have this learning be less public than the current situation, especially for the impact it has on individuals and families, we are a community open to sharing our struggles and joys with the wider world so that we can all learn from each other, whether from successes or failures. More than 300 years ago, St. John Baptist de La Salle, one of our founders, said that our students will learn far more from us by our actions than by the words we speak. This is one of those moments.

School officials, like everyone else, are fallible. They got one wrong, realized it, and did whatever they could to rectify the situation. They behaved like grown-ups. So did Jessica and her family. And, ultimately, everyone won. Chances of a Curmie nomination: Zero.

Mitt Romney's Taxes: The Story That Isn't (But Is) Relevant

Readers of a certain age will remember one of the most oft-spoken lines of the Watergate scandal: “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” I’m reminded of that in looking at the mini-controversy over GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s tax returns. There’s not really a whole lot to the case itself: Romney is stinking rich, has a gaggle of high-priced accountants and tax lawyers and similar minions who stretch the law to precisely the breaking point and ethics a little further than that. In other words, he’s no different from any other ridiculously wealthy politician, whether that be Jon Corzine or Meg Whitman or Michael Bloomberg. There is, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, no there there.

Still, there was a Washington Post story by Tom Hamburger detailing how Governor Romney “has taken advantage of an obscure exception in federal ethics laws to avoid disclosing the nature and extent of his holdings.” Curiously enough, Cleta Mitchell, “a Republican lawyer who has represented dozens of candidates and officials in the disclosure process, including [oh, so coincidentally] Romney’s leading challenger for the GOP nomination, Rick Santorum,” thinks Romney’s secrecy about his finances “turns the whole purpose of the ethics statute on its ear.”

And “Joe Sandler, a Democratic Party lawyer who has shepherded candidates and nominees through the disclosure process for 26 years [including for the John Kerry Presidential campaign],” proclaims that “Romney’s approach frustrates the very purpose of the ethics and disclosure laws.” Go figure: political rivals think (or purport to think) that Romney is up to no good. In other news, dry ice is cold.

But despite the arcane nature of the allegations, Governor Romney saw fit to send forth an emissary to articulate the reasons we should all believe the rich guy. Unfortunately for the Governor, the talking head chosen for this assignment was senior advisor Eric Fehrnstrom, best known as the guy who committed this year’s signature campaign gaffe, the Etch-a-Sketch line. He didn’t do a whole lot better with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. Even a lightweight like Todd sets up a fairly tough question: “I understand you guys are following the letter of the law, but are you following the spirit of sort of what presidential campaign candidates have done in the modern era of releasing more details, more tax returns, than what you’ve released?”

Fehrnstrom is, presumably, a really bright guy. He just doesn’t play one on TV. He sniffed that:

The Governor has provided all the disclosure that’s required by law, and that is significant, but then he’s gone one step further than that: he’s voluntarily put forward hundreds of pages of tax return information…. we’ve put out 2010 tax return information; we had an estimate for 2011, and we think that’s sufficient.

Let’s parse that, shall we? First off, it’s significant that a candidate for President of the United States obeyed the damned law? Is that what he’s saying? That’s the impression one gets from the tape, although the transcript alone might be read to mean that what’s required by law is significant disclosure. It isn’t, by the way, given the public’s right to know whether a decision is based on the good of the country or of the President’s portfolio.

Secondly, Governor Romney has put forward “hundreds of pages of tax return information,” but it’s all from the same year. That’s right: hundreds of pages from the same year. My most complicated year had some stuff most people don’t, at least all at once—moving expenses, a little rental income, some capital gains, some dividends and interest, enough mortgage payments to make for itemized deductions, and so on. It totaled maybe 15 pages; throw in my scratch pads for calculations and you might get to 20. I’m pretty certain that if you added up all my tax returns for the 30+ years I’ve been filing tax returns, they’d barely total “hundreds of pages.”

One of two things is true: either Mitt Romney’s taxes are so complicated they require such documentation, or they aren’t, and all the excess is intended simply to obfuscate, to make it more difficult for journalists and opposition researchers to find the problematic needle in the haystack of irrelevant data. Romney, of course, makes more money (without actually, you know, working) in a month than a lot of people will make in a lifetime of labor. (Yes, really.) And he pays less, in percentage terms, in income taxes than taxi drivers and 3rd grade teachers do.

So it’s not surprising that his taxes go on for days: those hired guns have got to earn their keep, after all… it’s probably not literally true that he spends more to get his taxes prepared than the average American makes in a year, but it sure seems that way. Given Romney’s apparent embarrassment at being who he is—rich, well-educated—reminding us of the “hundreds of pages” of tax information for a single year might not be the most ideal strategy. The idea of the diffident übermensch doesn’t work very well to begin with; calling attention to it is as long on stupid as it is on disingenuous.

Then, of course, there’s the concept of “sufficient.” Frankly, that seems to be a theme for the Romney campaign: he’s not exciting, he’s not interesting, he’s not consistent, he’s not honest… but he’s sufficient. Sufficiently not crazy. Sufficiently not ideological. Sufficiently prepared for debates. Oh, and sufficiently not Obama.

Finally, this little escapade allows reporters and prospective voters to remember the last go-round. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post quotes Jim Messina of the Obama campaign:

Governor Romney provided 23 years’ worth of tax returns to the McCain campaign so they could determine if he would make a suitable Vice President. He must meet that same standard now so that the American people may judge whether he would be a suitable President, and whether there are any conflicts of interest that could cloud his judgment.

One is tempted to wonder what nefarious dealings might be brought to light if, having actually considered ol’ Mitt as a running mate, John McCain passed on him for a dimwit like Sarah Palin.

What we do know of Romney’s finances from his 2010 tax returns shows millions of dollars of income and offshore accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands. That’s not likely to win him a lot of credibility in the “just folks” sweepstakes, but few people who’d have considered voting for him anyway are likely to be bothered much by those revelations. Further disclosures, should they happen, will be predicated on political motivations alone… is it better to maintain one’s privacy and have people suspect you’re hiding something or to release all that data and remove any doubt.

My suspicion is that more tax returns and accompanying information will appear shortly after the nomination is completely wrapped up. This stuff isn’t going to go away as a side-story, and dealing with it now is better than dealing with it later. Besides, people’s imaginations will conjure worse transgressions and creative accounting than Romney is likely to have committed. Or at least that can be proved. Probably. We hope.

Paul Ryan Isn't as Smart or as Honest as We Thought: And That's Saying Rather a Lot

Paul Ryan is in the news again: twice, in fact. Neither of the stories casts him in a good light, although one seems to want to do so. Let’s go there first.

On Thursday, Congressman Ryan signaled his willingness to make optional his controversial (to say the least) proposal to shift Medicare from a fee-for-services system to a voucher system. Indeed, Ryan aides pointed to an April interview in the Weekly Standard in which he seems to have been saying that even then. Except, of course, that he wasn’t.

Let’s face it: the argument in favor of the Ryan plan is that it saves the government money. How? By shifting some of the burden of seniors’ health care away from the taxpayers in general and onto the individual recipients. This is a defensible position in pragmatic if not political terms. But, just as the benefits of “Obamacare” rely on the participation of everyone—including those less likely to require high-cost services—so does Ryan’s plan only reach its goal of reducing costs if a significant number of people subscribe.

But no sane individual retiree would choose Ryan’s plan over the status quo for the precise reason that the scheme is appealing to deficit-cutters: the government would pay less towards the health care needs of the elderly. Given the choice, then, between Ryan’s voucher plan and the current structure of Medicare, not even Ryan’s own mother would choose Ryancare. Be it noted: this doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea (I think it’s an abomination, but that’s not the point). It means that for Ryan’s proposition to work, it cannot be voluntary.

Rep. Ryan himself, of course, wants to have it both ways. He seems quite reasonable if allows an option, but of course he has to understand that doing so completely destroys whatever efficacy his plan may have going for it. So, back in April, to a fawning John McCormack at the Weekly Standard, Ryan argued that an optional system could still achieve the budgetary goals of the program:

because it wouldn’t be an open-ended fee for service system, like the current one for the under-55 plan. They would get a set amount of money to go toward the traditional fee for service and then, like current Medicare they’d probably buy coverage to supplement it. I would think a person would prefer a comprehensive plan like Medicare Advantage is today, but you can do this in a way that doesn’t have a budgetary effect, that it doesn’t bankrupt the program.

In other words, people would be free to choose the current system, except that it wouldn’t be the current system.

Thus, Ryan is being disingenuous in two different ways, completely apart from the Panglossian predictions on which his whole schema is founded. What Ryan is proposing as an option, then, is neither what he pretends it is (i.e., the current system) nor a source for any appreciable deficit reduction. And, of course, any movement towards making Medicare less universal ultimately increases per capita costs by reducing Medicare’s ability to use its incredible purchasing power to negotiate better rates on behalf of all of us—Medicare recipients and taxpayers alike.

I understand the impulse of Democrats to accuse Ryan of walking away from his own proposal, and to try to concentrate attention on it, given its capacity to be a bigger albatross for the Republicans than Watergate, which could at least be blamed on a handful of rogues. No, the entire GOP political class has quaffed deep of this particular Kool-Aid, and no one—not even the Tea Party—thinks they’re on the right track. Still, the Dems are making the wrong argument: the problem isn’t a lack of conviction on Ryan’s part. It’s the fundamental fact that his underlying logic is even less logical, less consistent, and less honest than we’d previously believed.

Speaking of less honest, the other Ryan headline comes in the form of an article by Daniel Stone of The Daily Beast. Stone alleges, and provides no little evidence, that those tax cuts to energy companies proposed in the Ryan budget aren’t simply crass, counter-productive and inane: they’re also self-serving.

Importantly, I don’t mean self-serving in the “helping out my campaign contributors” sense that, alas, is pervasive on both sides of the aisle. In the absence of a smoking gun in the quid pro quo department, it’s always difficult to determine whether Corporation X or Union Y supports a candidate because they like the way he votes, or whether he votes that way because that’s how his biggest financial backers (not to be confused with his constituents) want him to. No, this is much more obvious: Ryan gets well into six-figures a year in income from two kinds of companies: those that lease land to energy companies and the energy companies themselves.

Or course, it’s mere coincidence that the companies like these are precisely those which, for reasons never made entirely clear, get ginormous tax breaks under the Ryan plan. After all, one of his minions said it was all on the up-and-up:

Ryan’s office says the congressman wasn’t thinking about himself or the oil companies that lease his land when he drafted the budget blueprint that extended the energy tax breaks. “These are properties that Congressman Ryan married into,” spokesman Kevin Seifert said. “It’s not something he has a lot of control over.”

Seriously, where do they find these people? Is Representative Ryan so stupid that he doesn’t know what these investments are in? Or so arrogant that he thinks he’s above getting called out on what is at the very least the appearance of a conflict of interest? He lacks the intellectual or financial wherewithal to put his assets in a blind trust? Or what?

Here’s Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington director Melanie Sloan: “Sure, senior citizens should have to pay more for health care, but landholders like [Ryan] who lease property to big oil companies, well, their government subsidies must be protected at all costs. It smacks of hypocrisy.” (Be it noted that I don’t implicitly trust edicts from CREW… it’s just that this time, they’re right.)

Not long ago, Ryan was being touted by the right as some sort of budgetary genius. Of course, that was before the people at large actually heard his ideas, which have been roundly rejected by voters of every stripe. Democrats unquestionably have Ryan to thank for their victory in the supposedly safe GOP stronghold of the New York 26th in last month’s special election: even if you buy into the Republican mantra that the presence of a third-party candidate swung that election for Kathy Hochul, it’s difficult to see how to spin the disintegration of Republican Jane Corwin’s double-digit lead at precisely the time Hochul started hammering Corwin on the latter’s support of Ryan. Even Tea Party enthusiasts think Ryan’s gutting of social programs is extreme. I think we can take as given that the Democrats will find a way to screw this up, but making Paul Ryan the face of Republican over-reach is both good policy and good politics.

Ryan, of course, claims to be misunderstood, poor lamb. He’s not really the heartless asshat we perceive him to be. No, apparently, he’s stupider than that. And more corrupt.