Daffy just quacks me up

Dear Dopey,

For our money, the daffiest practitioner of democracy these days is
GOPer Ken Arnold of Gurnee, who is running in the 8th District of Illinois (that’s the seat that Melissa Bean now occupies).

From his throne of power and knowledge, he issues forth regular and thoroughly interminable “white papers” on almost every sort of public issue.

Indeed, he offers many suggestions that are not only not public issues, but only come up in conversations with people who are taking anti-schizophrenia drugs regularly. He’s even been endorsed in the primary by the Chicago Sun-Times as a “thinker” which shows there are not enough anti-psychotic drugs to go around.

For example one of his massive tomes is an intricate mathematical equation like Queeg determining who filched the strawberries. (“Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers...”)

Arnold’s strawberry solution solves two great issues with one stroke of Arnoldian genius. Couple our industrial development plans with our duty to compensate Indians for the wrongs done to them by, now get this, putting all the new petrochemical plants and nuclear generation stations on Indian reservations.

You solve Indian unemployment/alcoholism and “Not in my backyard” obstructionists in one swoop. Yeah, and Indians wouldn’t mind at all. Yikes!

Or his plan to seize all the nation’s abandoned railroad rights of way and turn them into transmission lines for electricity and gas.

Then there’s his plan to make all future nations that we “help” by bombing into the Stone Age pay for the privilege with long-term loans for their eventual “nation building.” (Or maybe they might just say no to the entire exercise. That would certainly gum up the plan).

But our absolute fave is the white paper that suggests we do away with Martin Luther King Day as a national day of remembrance and, instead, celebrate National Martyr Day.

Here’s his logic: “ …This day would be a day of commemoration for all civilian Americans who gave their lives or suffered grave harm in the pursuit of the noblest of American ideals. Such civilians would include not only people such as Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy -- but Sitting Bull and 9/11 hero Todd Beamer. It would be the opposite of Veteran's Day in that it commemorates civilians who sacrificed their wealth, health, physical comfort or safety, or even their very lives for a greater, American cause. And perhaps each year, in a Presidential pronouncement dated on this day (still Martin Luther King’s birthday), one more American (present or past) can be solemnly named an American Martyr with the details as to what principles they most embodied within the ideals representing America.”

The man may have too much time on his hands. He makes Ron Paul look like the second coming of Dwight Eisenhower.

OK, let’s all just a grip on sanity for a second and acknowledge that there will be passionate (maybe even obsessive?) advocates in this martyr’s derby for almost everyone who has died in the nation for almost any reason. Somebody will demand a special notice for the aborted fetuses, and what about the millions of slaves who died premature deaths because of their mistreatment. Not to mention those executed, rightly or wrongly, under capital punishment.

And isn’t this exactly what the nation needs? Somebody who wants a national debate on who is a martyr, as opposed to somebody that just died because dying sometimes just happens.

Martyrs? We got your martyrs here, baby.