Our Vaccine
A couple Fridays ago, I went downtown to see Jon Stewart — Live! In Person! — do his standup act.
It was the end of the week when President Obama, confronting a campaign of ludicrous lies by Donald Trump, obtained his “long form” birth certificate from Hawaii and released it to the public. It was one day before Obama and comedian Seth Meyers surgically eviscerated Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was two days before Obama announced that we had tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden.
Stewart’s routine was a mix of comic stand-bys — such as a bit about computers rapidly becoming obsolete — and jokes “ripped from the headlines.”
He said he prayed that Donald Trump would run for president. Gee, that sounds so quaint now.
He talked about the big switcheroo from the “cool new generation” of Republican governors, like “backward chair guy,” Ohio’s own governor, John Kasich, who has stripped state workers of bargaining rights, and who called a policeman who pulled him over for a traffic violation “an idiot.”
At the end of the show, Stewart took a few questions shouted from the audience. Someone said, “What should we do about Kasich?” Very loosely paraphrased, his answer was something like this:
You have to understand that this guy is your vaccine.
Sure, it hurts, and you feel a little sick. But there’s only a limited amount of damage this guy can do. The things he’s doing are waking up your political immune system. When your newly-formed antibodies kick in on election day, your political system is going to heal itself.
My antibodies are itching to go.