Dan Quayle saved American democracy? Whoda thunk it?

4 thoughts on “Dan Quayle, American hero

  1. The Trump era really lowered to bar for what passes for an intelligent sounding politician. In addition to Quayle, I find myself respecting and hanging on every word George W says now. When he was in office nobody could get over his inability to pronounce “nuclear” correctly.

    1. I got over that while he was in office, at least enough to think he should have been impeached and tried as a war criminal for the lies he told to get the US into a war in Iraq.

      Yes, Trump made him look better. W was always lucky in the sense that what were disasters for America – Trump, 9/11 – were good for him.

  2. Shitty pot shots on the spelling thing. Those guys well know that the potatoe faux pas was more or less forced on him by giving him a card with the wrong spelling. He was trying to play along. Should he have corrected the card? Sure. You try campaigning for president sometime, see if your brain doesn’t turn into mush by the fifteenth photo op.

    It’s pure character assassination, was then, is now. Quayle isn’t an idiot. Now, he’s not a good guy, a good politician, and he didn’t deserve the office. And he lost. But that wasn’t fair play and everyone involved knew it then and now.

    (See also the “Aleppo” mistake with Gary Johnson. He didn’t hear the word correctly and was asking him to restate it, he wasn’t claiming ignorance. He’d already spoken about Aleppo in recent days. But looking for a reason to get rid of the first viable third party candidate in recent years, you’d think he claimed he’d molested cub scouts instead of asking someone to clarify a misheard word. UNLIKE Quayle, Johnson was a good guy, and just imagine our world now if the country had been given an option during those debates of a decent, smart man instead of Hillary or Trump?)

    1. I’ve told my story many times about Dan Quayle attending the king’s funeral in Oslo when Bush was preoccupied with the first Gulf War. Danny wore a tan suit with no overcoat, and nothing to cover his dress shoes, leaving him to wade around in the slush with his shoes and socks soaked and his pants all filthy like a little kid’s. He was a total laughingstock. The Norwegian tabloid newspapers even called him a “drittsekk” – literally a “bag of shit,” but that doesn’t translate the tone properly. It’s not that strong. It’s more comparable to calling somebody “a total douche” in America. That’s still far from a gentle compliment. The Norwegians are known for their candor, but they normally reserve that term for lowlifes, not for the surrogate of the most powerful man from their most powerful ally.

      Quayle could not have been a total idiot because he made it through law school, but he was a totally unsophisticated Indiana hayseed who was a fish out of water in international politics, or probably even in the international house of pancakes. He was such a yokel that he not only failed to dress properly for a funeral, and for Norway in winter, but he didn’t even know enough to realize that he needed to ask somebody about those things. If Jethro Bodine had been a real person, he would have been Dan Quayle.

      After his visit I pretended to be Canadian for weeks.

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