Article by conservativecurmudgeon in "RedState":
Throughout my entire life in the Great Lakes State, Michigan has had some real political doozies slouching and piddling around. Most notable are the loathsome career Democrats: Zoltan Ferency, Lynn Jondahl, Bill Hart, Bobby Crim, David Hollister, Coleman Young, Bob Carr– and the ever lovely Debbie Stabenow, who has been hanging around, picking up the slack since the French and Indian Wars.
However: we’ve reached a new apex of foul with Gretchen “Karen” Whitmer.
Once ensconced, and with a closet full of scarves and Vera Bradley, they begin to Virtue Signal as if they were Lillian Hellman herself. Build Schools! Ban Guns! Raise Taxes! Regulate! For God’s sake, STOP SMOKING! Wear your F@**#ing Seatbelt! Oh, and when there’s time: make everyone around you MISERABLE, especially your husband who get accosted at the hardware store every time he peeks his head out in public because his freakin’ wife is such a damnable, obnoxious scold.
Most of the time, these Mediocre Mamas are the electoral victims of their own stupidity, and when they vie for higher office are stopped either by party regulars that find them insufferable and obnoxious, or by the voters who couldn’t stand them when they were seventh-grade Hall Monitors, and sure as hell can’t stand them now that they are on the County Commission.
But, every once in a while one of the these Ladies oozes through the electoral process, and gets elected to a suburban representative post in the State Legislature, where (by the magic of capillary action) slither and skulk their way up the leadership ranks where eventually they are given Keys to the Kingdom. Think Bella Abzug, without the feminine aesthetic.
Thus –we in Michigan are graced with Fetchin’ Gretchen.
She is a truly detestable, hypocritical politician: Raised in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Grand Rapids (Forest Hills, just down Ada Road from Betsy DeVos’s hometown), married– now on her second go ’round– to a Dentist, forever griping about the unfairness, the injustice of a life having to be lived surrounded by wealth, civic tranquility, material plenty, and a manicured landscape.
Dear old Dad was an apparatchik in Rino Republican William Milliken’s Commerce Department as it’s head, and later used this bit of entre to become the 20-year director of Michigan Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The privelege of institutional graft flows through the veins of women like Whitmer. Myopic doesn’t begin to describe the world-view of such women, and is a slander against the nearsighted.
Truly a Woman Of The People, Fetchin’ Gretchen moved to a singular stronghold of entrenched Democrat Party intrigue: Southeast Michigan. She showed her stripes early on, running for a State Rep seat in 1994 at the ripe old age of 23. She lost. She tried again; she lost.
But, convinced she had Great Wisdom to impart, she kept trying. Eventually, she won a seat in the Legislature– and the social-climbing technocrat was on her way.
That Karen –er, Gretchen– is of only middling intellect is apparent from the moment she opens her mouth: The usual platitudinous tripe blurps out in the cadence of those who spend long car rides listening to NPR. She has all the right lexicon, the jargonese: “Communities of Color”, “Environmental Justice”, “Climate Crisis” roll off her tongue with the best of the Marxist Left.
As became immediately evident with the latest Crisis Covid, however, Karen Whitmer’s mammoth brain went into lock-down mode when confronted with having to deal with actual issues outside the crib-rails of her demented world view. Thus, her only refuge was linguistic and superficial.
So, it was with great interest that I heard her say (and I quote) when responding to the embarrassing fact that her political cronies had been awarded a no-compete state contract: “…the Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t have a political bone in its theoretical body”.
Nuh-huh. Whatever, Gretchen. I mean, Karen.
Please, remember: The Great Oracle of Lansing, Fetchin’ Gretchen is a… wait for it… wait for it… a Communications Major! So, it goes without reason that someone who found the writings of Dan Rather a more important cannon of literature in training for a life of public service than, say, Blackstone or Hume.
And the lack of simple human awareness in the statement about Political Bones in the Body of the Bureaucracy is simply stunning: Only a person who is utterly awash in politics would be unable to grasp how thoroughly corrupted by “politics” –if not by simple worldview– the entire bureaucracy is. I don’t care how much the Department of Overlap and Redundancy Department pleads that it is guided by altruism and science: Government governs, it doesn’t (indeed, it cannot) nurture; as such, it must reject science, it must collect to itself all means of coercion, when it’s power is threatened.
…and it exists for political reasons, and for the projection of will-to-power by the governing elites. I don’t care if it’s the highway department, or the natural resources department, or the Kleenex department. They are ALL political– sinew, fat, muscle AND bone.
But: Only a set of eyes from Outside the political, governmental framework can see it. Thus: The Gretchens, The Karens are necessarily blind.
So, I was reminded of the jaunty Iraqi fellow who took to the airwaves in Baghdad in early April of 2003, festooned with microphones, claiming with a perfectly straight face that American and Coalition Forces were nowhere near the Baghdad Airport –right after every television camera in the world had just broadcast footage of American military hardware and personnel swarming the place. His nom de guerre quickly became “Baghdad Bob”…
His soon-to-go-blam world of prestige and consequence forbad him from acknowledging what practically every other human already knew: His time was “up”.
Anyone who has ever dealt with a State Health Department knows they are political, stem to stern, eave to footing. They are peopled by folks that are bizarrely disconnected from economic reality, whose pensions are fully funded without market influence, who exist in a bubble of ethereal living; where the likes of untrammeled beard-hair can cause plagues, but bat-droppings in communist virus labs are to be expected –and to bring up such things is racist.
Politics, twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five. And there are No Americans at the Airport!
https://www.redstate.com/diary/conservativecurmudgeon/2020/04/23/fetchin-gretchen-karen-whitmer-channels-bahgdad-bob/