Joni Ernst's latest dalliance: The grim reaper

Will the Iowa Senator's shameless 'we're all gonna die' remark make Election Day her private Day of the Dead? Probably not.

Sen. Joni Ernst dismissed Iowans’ worries about proposed cuts to Medicaid and other programs by saying, “We are all going to die.” Ernst’s quote became a couple of Raygun T-Shirts, one of which is shown above. Will the Republicans’ callousness toward her constituents’ concerns make a difference in her re-election bid? Probably not, Daniel P. Finney writes in the Paragraph Stacker.

One can't argue with Sen. Joni Ernst’s logic: “We are going to die.”

Ernst smugly chirped the one-liner at a town hall meeting last week at Applington-Parkersburg High School.

A cynic might say it's a callous and ignorant thing to say in front of a room full of constituents who are concerned about cuts to federal aid for the poor and Medicaid.

But are we really expecting sensitivity from a politician who rose to fame by running commercials about castrating hogs as a metaphor for how she would take on Washington's excess?

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One might further argue that it would be a terrible idea to follow up that gaffe with a snarky social media follow-up post — shot in a cemetery, no less — that mocked her voters’ apparent fundamental misunderstanding of the circle of life and then tell everyone to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

None of this matters, of course.

We must remember that this is America, and there are no minimum standards for our elected officials. Shame is for suckers and decency for chumps.

The duly elected president of this nation is a convicted felon. If he's breathing, he's lying. This is the person American voters chose. He’s also the person Ernst works so hard to imitate. If President Donald Trump were Gladys Knight, she would be a Pip.

Iowans chose both Trump and Ernst, who was recently outed by ProPublica for romantic relations with the legislative affairs officers of both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. Ernst, a combat veteran, sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon and has major sway in budgets.

A romantic relationship between someone who helps oversee the budget for the military and people who are essentially military lobbyists might prompt even the most optimistic souls to wonder about the mixing of politics and bedfellows.

Fortunately, there are no optimists in the U.S. Senate. There are exactly zero rules that prevent senators from having romantic relationships with lobbyists and other legislative advocates.

Once again, no minimum standards are the rule.

That said, when you're right, you're right.

And Sen. Ernst is bang on about this one: We are all going to die.

That's a fact.

Here are some other things all humans are going to do:

• Breathe. Ernst would have done well to take a breath before she started babbling at her session.

But why bother?

As the senator points out, we’ll eventually stop breathing. As a Republican, she's more concerned with the unborn — potential people who've never taken a breath — than those currently breathing or struggling to breathe.

• Poop. Everybody poops. Most adults do it in the bathroom. Ernst makes hers into public policy.

• Live in a social context. For example, one might infer from the context of the meeting Ernst held, that people were not rejecting the notion that they were going to die.

They were rejecting the notion that they should die sooner and in more pain than necessary because Trumpettes such as Ernst would rather cut benefits to pay for food and medicine for the poor and struggling than make their rich donors pay an extra nickel in taxes.

A person might do that if they lived in a social context. But the Great Castrator is as corrupted by the D.C. pay-for-play system as the rest of her fellow brand ambassadors for the 1%.

• React to stimuli. That's fancy scientific talk for “People notice things and respond to them.”

How might voters react to Ernst’s snide dismissal of her callousness?

Well, we know liberals are full of what Shakespeare called “sound and fury signifying nothing.” Democrats could lose to a potted plant that had gone unwatered for a month.

Nobody much cares what they think or say.

So that leaves the Republicans who voted for this lunatic brigade led by Agent Orange.

Will they sit still for Ernst, who mocks the needs of the poor and suffering and then has the unmitigated gall to invoke Jesus?

Jesus, if I recall my Sunday school correctly, was known to wash the feet of the poor, heal the sick, and show mercy and kindness to prostitutes.

The “M” in MAGA certainly doesn't stand for “mercy.”

Ernst doesn't stand for anything. She's an empty suit with the moral center of a chemical toilet.

So that leaves those folks who think the senator has fallen out of line with Iowa values — whatever that might mean in this dumb and dangerous age — with a conundrum as to how to deal with this issue.

In other words, they're going to have to do one more thing all humans do, albeit reluctantly:

• Make a decision. Is this how Iowans want their senator to act when people raise legitimate concerns about the goings on in D.C.?

There was a time when open mockery of any part of your constituency would be verbal harakiri.

Ask Hillary Clinton about her “baskets of deplorables” talk.

But that was a million years ago, back before the Great Stupification.

I’m not one to read political tea leaves, but my guess is today's voters have already forgotten Ernst’s casual cruelty.

Trump has set the blueprint for how to deal with this sort of thing: Whenever someone asks a question about a horrible thing you said or did, blame dottering old Joe Biden.

If that doesn’t work, go full racist and blame undocumented immigrants for stealing your speech on their way to commit any number of horrible crimes ascribed to them by the color of their skin and the language they speak.

Ernst will go on, likely unscathed by her savagery.

The decision Iowa voters face is less about Ernst's individuality but about the core values of the state: Is this the kind of face we want to present to the nation?

Probably.

Iowa voters are just as dumb as great swaths of the rest of the country.

We are intellectually lazy and willfully ignorant.

Reviewing a new candidate beyond their party affiliation is more work than most Iowans are willing to do before they hit the ballot box.

And, as I’ve said several times, Ernst is right: We are all going to die.

It’s people of her mindset that make that seem like a blessing.

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Daniel P. Finney is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, but don’t hold that against them. Please visit their page to view a full roster of writers and consider subscribing to their columns. Writing is hard work; people ought to get paid for it. If you enjoy it, throw them a couple of bucks. They earned it.