The Daily Dose/May 29, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off
We don’t do predictions too often – preferring to make fun of people and events utilizing the shield of hindsight – but the prediction we made about President Trump during the 2016 campaign proved to be accurate:
He will be as embarrassing a president as he was a candidate.
Whether he’s meeting with third rate dictators who don’t deserve a second glance or blathering whatever happens to be on the top of his head, this has been proven true. The latest example of President Trump not knowing what he is talking about came this week when he insisted American taxpayers are not paying the tariffs he imposed on Chinese imports and that there will be humans on Mars in the not too distant future. Here are the quotes:
You know, foolishly, some people said that the American taxpayer is paying the tariffs of China. No, no, no — it’s not that way. They’re paying a small percentage.
We’ve already established in this column this is false. Tariffs are paid by those doing the importing, not the country exporting the items. American businesses are paying the tariffs and they will pass the cost on to their customers, which makes it merely another tax on us.
Japan will join our mission to send U.S. astronauts to space. We’ll be going to the moon. We’ll be going to Mars very soon.
No, we won’t. Heck, a middle school student with a modest interest in science knows this is twaddle because we are no closer to putting a man Mars than we are to, well, putting a man on Mars. Maybe, perhaps, if the national will was there and we marshaled every resource, we could have humans on Mars by 2030. Maybe. That’s without too many of the setbacks and deaths that have attended exploration since time immemorial. A more reasonable expectation is that we can have them there by mid-century, presuming America is still around then, which we don’t think is guaranteed. Had America wanted to, we could have used the momentum generated by Apollo and men on Mars in the 1980s. But America took a flier on that, which isn’t too surprising because interest in manned space travel decreased significantly after our first moon landing.
What’s interesting about Trump’s constant falsehoods we don’t think he’s intentionally lying. We think he genuinely believes the Chinese are paying his tariffs and that America and Japan really can go to Mars very soon. In fact, if you gave him the choice of five dates that man first landed on the moon – including July 20, 1969, and last Tuesday – Trump would probably guess wrong.
Our loss. A president should know these things, and America should have the good sense to elect people who do. A hundred years from now, when all new people are looking back on the country that used to be America, they will scratch their heads and wonder why American voters didn’t do something, why they continued to tolerate partisan, fractured, and incompetent government.
And they won’t have an answer.
Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: Sparrow gets a good workout in while The Wife asks him to reset her alarm clock. Today’s Diary.
She has long been in the habit of setting the time on hers ahead 23.45321 minutes and, combined with her scientifically-arrived at formula for setting the alarm time, the alarm was now going off in the middle of the night and she asked if I had suggestions about what time I should set the clock and alarm for.
“What time to you want to wake up???”
“Four o’clock.”
I rubbed my chin with a hand, feigning deep thought. |
“How about I set your clock for the correct time and then set the alarm to 4am???…Would that help?”It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life.
The drivel simply does not stop: please click on the button to read The Diary of a Nobody. $5.99 includes all entries, past, present, and future.
On This Date
In 1953 – Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, is summited for the first time by Britain’s Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepali/Indian/Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. The only picture of one of them from the summit features Norgay, but since Norgay did not know how to use a camera there aren’t any pictures of Hillary on the summit. In one of mankind’s great displays of teamwork, both went to their graves declining to say who reached the summit first.
In 1911 – The first Indianapolis 500 is run. 40 cars started, 26 finished, and the race was won by Ray Harroun, who completed the race in 6 hours and 42 minutes and an average speed of 74.602 mph, which was a bit more than a second faster than runner-up Ralph Mulford. Harroun won $10,000 (about $272,000 in today’s money) for winning, out of a combined purse of $27,550. The winning car, known as the Wasp, is on display at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
In 1971 – The Rolling Stones are at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 with Brown Sugar. The song spent two weeks at the top and also went to #1 in Canada, Holland, and Switzerland and peaked at #2 in Great Britain. It was the group’s sixth of eight #1s in America.
Quotebook
Marriage, the last refuge of men unable to fend for themselves.
Garrison Keillor
Leaving Home
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
Theme From Dukes of Hazard (Good Ol’ Boys) was Waylon Jennings biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #21 in 1980.
Today’s Stumper
How many #1 songs have the Rolling Stones had in their native Great Britain? – Answer next time!
