Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Just Pull the String

Recently I read a book (Big Brother by Lionel Shriver) in which one of the characters had a successful small business that made look-alike dolls for mail order customers. When the customer sent in a picture of “the victim,” the company would make a look-alike doll that could then be used as a gift. Sounds like a basic type of company with a basic type of a product. However what made this company unique was that the dolls also spoke. The mail order customer would send in eight or ten things that the pictured person would often say, and so the final product was a talking doll that both looked like and said the same things as “the victim”. One of the beauties of this product was that it could be used as either a gag gift or as a serious loving gift depending both on the picture and the accompanying quotes that were also sent in.

It seems to me that the country could save a lot of time and money if we replaced some actual living politicians with these dolls. Someone could just pull the doll’s string and the doll would say what the particular politician would always say.

This week the initial formulation for a tax plan came out. Edward Kleinbard, a non-partisan university professor and former Chief of Staff to Congress Joint Commission on Taxation stated that it was much too early to figure out who would and who would not benefit the most as the outline of the plan was too preliminary. However, even though the plan was very preliminary, the usual cast of characters said what they always say.
For example, Chuck Schumer (D,NY) almost immediately said that the tax plan is “a massive windfall for the wealthiest Americans.” Now granted that this statement has more two-syllable words that the usual Chuck Schumer statement, it is basically the same as usual. Sen. Bernie Sanders called it “morally repugnant, and bad economic policy.” Again why not just pull the strings on the Sanders or the Schumer doll?

Diane Feinstein (D,Ca) was quoted as saying, “I don’t believe that Californians should suffer in order for Donald Trump to give tax cuts to the rich!” This statement might be a bit more complicated for a pull-string doll as she actually had three of her typical statements all rolled into one. Here one would have to probably pull three strings to include her usual Democrat drivel on three of her favorite things:
Pro-Californians
Anti Donald Trump
and
Tax cuts for the rich.

Now in order to make this a more informative piece, I could look and quote many more of the Democrats. But why do that? Why go to all that trouble when one can just pull the strings on their individual dolls?

So far we haven’t heard much from the usual cast of Republican characters, but here it is more difficult as we would have to have dolls that had their thoughts programmed instead of their words.
For example, the John McCain doll would think, “What can I do to be sure that President Trump is not successful?”
The Susan Collins doll would think, “What’s the next thing I can vote ‘no’ on”? or
“I need to get on television more, if I want to be Governor of Maine.”
The Rand Paul doll would think, “No matter what is proposed, I have to take a position further to the right on the issue.”
The Lisa Murkowski doll would think, “I need to spin this so it appears that I am actually helping the people of Alaska.”
Unfortunately, these thinking dolls are not yet available – I guess that we will just have to wait for another book by Lionel Shriver.

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