On the Right, Elmer Gantry edged out Mussolini and the handsome guy from Sears & Roebuck menswear catalogs ran a close third.
For the Left, Beria squeaked past Trotsky but Nikolai Yezhov sank without a ripple.
Yessirree, any color of future you want -- as long as you wanted "bleak." But at least they're narrowing down the choices, right?
Today's vocabulary word: "sharashka." Remember, that's what you want, not the regular gulag, so be sure and eat all your calculus!
Thanks for sending me down that Wiki-hole. I ended up at:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%29
I'm guessing you already knew about "The Thing", but your original link got me there. I had no idea so many of the Soviet aerospace designers (or the inventor of the eponymous theremin) had originally been sent to gulags.
Very apt description of last night in Iowa...
ReplyDeleteOn the excuse that actual Russians were involved, here is one to pass along to Tam.
ReplyDeletehttp://nypost.com/2016/01/31/inside-the-1-million-wedding-ruined-by-an-accidental-gunshot/
You too think of the Donald as Il Duce. In my cheerful moments, I think that he might be a hard-nosed, pragmatic chief executive. In my dark moments, he is Benito Mussolini. In my very dark moments, he is Caligula.
ReplyDeleteAs for Cruz, even Texas Monthly, which does not lean right, has good things to say about his intelligence. But damn if he doens't make me think of the rah-rah-Jesus youth pastor with a creepy secret.
As for Hilary, I don't lean toward the USSR so much as some sword-and-sorcery epid where her voices echoes down stone corridors, making the torches flicker as she shouts, "The throne is rightfully mine!"
Make a term in office hobbesian, and you get nasty short brutes to run for the position.
ReplyDeleteIt's a self-reinforcing cycle, of course and alas - since to get the job you have to promise to do the impossible, for the ungrateful. Then when you can't, they blame you for it.
Hahahahha!
ReplyDelete....
Oh......