Knuckleheads up

Over at Townhall, where there's a central stupidity-conditioning plant maintaining a constant level of stupidity at all times of day and night, someone called Charlie Kirk (Mme Tussaud model pictured above) is talking himself into some serious butthurt over comments by Michelle Obama on the Jimmy Fallon show:

Michelle Obama was asked about the challenge Obamacare faces in not attracting the requisite number of young enrollees. Her response was "A lot of young people think they're invincible, but the truth is young people are knuckleheads”. She went on to add that young people often cut themselves while cooking or injure themselves by dancing on bar stools.

Apparently young people need Obamacare if for no other reason than to replace missing digits and treat bruised tailbones.

Now Michelle was chuckling as she made this statement which is of course designed to provide non-verbal cover to an otherwise outrageous verbal remark. But let us not provide quarter to the First Lady just yet. Her remarks, offered with smile, are incredibly telling and should generate reasonable degrees of outrage from the demographic she so flippantly dissed.

It seems that when young Charlie was captaining the football and basketball and wiffleball and debate teams in his Texas high school "knucklehead" was fighting words, not necessarily offered with smile (I really love that use of "smile" as a mass noun, like "service with smile" or Victor Herbert's operetta "The Land of Smile", making a simple facial expression sound so strangely creepy and fungoid) but nevertheless incredibly telling and flippantly telling, too. Young Charlie, or Mr. Charlie, as he is generally addressed by his many conservative black friends at Baylor, is a Millennial himself and does not take kindly to this kind of language. And while he did not vote for Obama himself, we may be assured, if he was at that point 18, he is aware that many did, and what he wants to know is, were those young voters knuckleheads?

How can a Millennial be an intelligent voter one minute and a knucklehead the next? If they are knuckleheads over health care then they were knuckleheads before when they cast a vote for Obama. The First Lady can’t have it both ways. The same group of people whose votes were bought with millions of dollars has just been told they were dupes; that their votes mattered deeply but were cast in ignorance

Well you know what, sonny? Life is actually a leetle more complicated than it may seem to you from your perch at the peak of Turning Point USA where you are perhaps the world's youngest Wingnut Welfare Queen enjoying your phone calls from Neil Cavuto and dead Andrew Breitbart, and down here in our world sometimes people are smart about some things and not about others.

Via NPR.

And I'm dead serious there, kiddo. I was pretty smart myself when I was your age—not, I mean, at captaining the Offensive Saxophone team and getting calls from Neil Cavuto but at knowing stuff, all sorts of stuff, quantities of stuff that seem unimaginable from where we sit now that Dr. Google has freed us from the need to have any long-term memory at all—and yet I believed that I personally would live forever and was firmly convinced that I could smoke cigarettes without any danger of cancer since I just didn't have that cancer type of personality. Which turned out, as it may not surprise you to learn, to be not true, I mean not the personality but the theory. Oops. Glad I have insurance.

Similarly, 10 or 12 years ago many people not that much older than you are now were conspicuously smart but believed that when 9/11 changed everything they should go to Afghanistan and get their legs blown off to make our country safe, and it wasn't until they went to Iraq instead and got their legs blown off to make Mr. Bush feel that he was just as tough as his conspicuously tough daddy or whatever his mysterious purpose may have been that they realized there was a syllogism that did not work right involved in that decision. Some other young people who were smarter on that subject are still angry at the ones who weren't, but I expect they were dumb about other things in their turn. That's how old I am.

And in the same way many people not older than you at all were smart enough to vote for President Obama but not to realize that they need health insurance, not only from those pesky barstool dancing injuries, which were perhaps more prevalent in my day than they are now, but also from unexpected cancers, HIV, brand-new polio-like maladies creeping out of the nowhere, peanut allergies, and I hate to think what else. Then again Obamacare covers them under their parents' policies until, hopefully, they get a little smarter.

Speaking of being old, when an older person like Mrs. Obama (as I'm sure your mother would prefer you to call her) or dead Mr. Breitbart calls you a knucklehead it is meant affectionately. Those lovely kids who got so excited to vote for Obama but can't get it together to insure themselves are knuckleheads. When we mean it without affection we will call you a stupid fucking asshole, or words to that effect. You yourself are probably very smart in your own way and yet it seems you are such a pompous young prick your own mother is probably afraid to call you a knucklehead. I will certainly want to call you a stupid fucking asshole. And I say that with smile.

Evil smiley. By Bareck at DeviantArt.