More than once I've chastised my fellow liberals for calling the other guys stupid. Ronald Reagan, Tommy Thompson, Scott Walker -- at one time or another, we've called them dumb while they ran circles around us.
But I need to make an exception to that rule. State Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend)? The man's an absolute idiot.
Grothman went out of his way to put out a press release claiming that Kwanzaa was not a real holiday. And in an embarrassing appearance on CNN on Wednesday night, the one reason he offered was that it has only been around for about forty years. Of course, at some point, Christmas had only been in existence for four decades. I guess the value of a holiday is measured by the length of time that it has been celebrated. Thanks for that insight, senator.
The first question out of the box is why should this be an issue at all? Wisconsin's average family income lags the rest of the nation. Our incarceration rate is twice that of Minnesota and we have the same crime rate. Our economy needs modernization. There's a lot of serious stuff for the senator to be working on. Why a Wisconsin state senator -- and one from a district with one of the smallest African American populations -- felt the need to opine on Kwanzaa is hard to understand.
Maybe he just wanted attention. Friday was a slow news day, so he thought he'd insult a bunch of people and see who noticed. Turned out nobody did until yesterday. I guess CNN and other news outlets felt that once they put the fiscal cliff to bed they could move on to the big Glenn Grothman Kwanzaa story.
Grothman does this kind of stuff all the time. In fact, he does it so much that I hesitated to write about his latest idiocy because it just gives him more attention. Also, he loves to get under the skin of liberals.
So, mission accomplished, Senator Grothman. You've got yourself some national attention and you've made liberals angry. Now, what else have you accomplished in your twenty years of feeding at the public trough?
Glenn Grothman is a national embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin. He's a buffoon. A yahoo. A laughingstock, who would be harmless enough if he weren't taking up space in the Capitol and making people wonder if there's something in the milk up here.
In his release, Grothman quoted himself as saying, "With tens of millions of honorable black Americans in our country's past, we should not let a... nut like Karenga (the founder of Kwanza) speak for them."
The citizens of West Bend might ask the same thing.
