Arrows of wisdom

This is a late installment of the usual arrow-firing of Memorial Day weekend. We thus wrap up one political season, which has set the stage for the next, which will open with another arrows column over the Labor Day weekend, unless I forget and show up late again.

President Trump—He has defined the presidency down. The dictionary people will need to revise the meaning of buffoon to “one who reeks of absurdity and ineptitude but manages to survive successfully in important jobs.”

They’ll also need by the Trump influence to redefine “lie” as “an obviously false statement that listeners have been conditioned to disbelieve, or to assign no consequence, and which will be reversed by the speaker in days if not hours or minutes; a tactic by which a simple purposeful misstatement achieves a desired result or buys time, or perhaps merely amuses the one misstating.”

Gov. Asa Hutchinson—I read on social media in a post from a farright fanatic that the governor’s overpowering primary win was a victory for the “John Brummett wing of the Arkansas Republican Party.”

I had not known there was one (nor had the Republican Party), much less that the governor, if truly aligned with such a wing, can now be expected to raise income taxes and motor fuel taxes for a major highway program and repeal the lame job-seeking verification plank in Medicaid and bulldoze Jason Rapert’s monument to self.

Let me be serious: It is frightful that there are professed conservatives out there who deem or label a conservative governor a liberal conspirator with a no-account columnist simply because he tries to make government work.

Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin—Beware, thus, of what, or who, comes after Asa. Our next governor, if trends hold, will redirect the state toward that frightfulness. Jan Morgan liked Griffin so much she was appropriating him as her running mate until Tim kept peace in the Capitol by endorsing Asa.

French Hill—A man was waving his campaign sign at the Kavanaugh Markham intersection the other morning, as if early voting for November already was underway.

This early intensity—a Hill television commercial, Tom Cotton PAC spending to attack Clarke Tucker, intersection sign-waving—is one part weirdly wasteful and one part reflective of Republican fear.

Hill voted to gut health insurance and enrich bankers, and now the Republicans can think of no way to commend his re-election other than to tell the good ol’ boys that Tucker is a cross-dressed Nancy Pelosi, which the good ol’ boys will believe as if it came from the mouth of Sean Hannity himself.

Clarke Tucker— See immediately preceding item. His high visibility in the primary—with that effective and ubiquitous health-care commercial—has the Republicans in quite a worried lather.

I suspect this arrow stays upward until the Pelosi morphing starts to stick and the right wing spreads the hyperbole that, by calling health care a “right,” Tucker would create a new entitlement for a poor woman to get a facelift on the taxpayer tab.

Health care is not a constitutional right. Tucker, well-studied in constitutional law, was not saying it was. He was saying it’s a right of human beings that self-governing citizens can choose to honor. You’re not creating a new entitlement when you call an ambulance to transport a car-wreck victim to a hospital. You’re merely acting as a human being. We need more of those—human beings.

Baker Kurrus—He has gathered up the city budget and commenced poring over it, understanding as he does that public policy is best demonstrated by public spending and that the foundation for advancing new public policies is to have a budgetary grasp of the current ones. He will not be a mayoral candidate excelling in soaring vision and rhetoric. He will be a mayoral candidate who’ll have a command of the nuts and bolts and who will start to soar only as jobs get done.

That’s not an endorsement. Warwick Sabin and Frank Scott remain under worthy consideration. It’s just an analysis of style, as evidenced best by Kurrus’ steady and unrelenting labor as state-appointed school superintendent, which achieved the perception of soaring only when the community came to appreciate it the old-fashioned way—by losing it.

Arkansas Supreme Court— It’s near-future is to remain as bad (Courtney Goodson) or get implausibly worse (David Sterling).

Time marching on—Once Arkansas was one-party Democratic; now it’s fully U-turned from that. Once Washington and Benton counties were quaint and remote; now they provide the economic and cultural hubs and oases of the state. The Razorbacks once were a football power, and then a basketball power; now the UA is a baseball school. People once got lost; now they have GPS.

And people once got truth or versions thereof from warring newspaper columnists; now they get rightwing propaganda from Fox News.

The one thing that never changes is that you can only get wisdom’s arrows right here.