The good ol’ days

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

I miss the good ol’ days.

You know, that era in politics when a candidate — no matter which party they belonged to —  did or said something so incredibly stupid that they would sink in the polls and perhaps even lose their races.

It was an age of accountability and sometimes I fear we’ll never see it again. 

In 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart entered the race as a clear front-runner. However, his campaign self-destructed when he was asked by reporters about rumors of “womanizing” and taunted them that they should “follow me around,” which directly led to a dalliance Hart had with a young beauty queen named Donna Rice, including photos of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap aboard a lobbyist-piloted yacht named — you can’t make this up — Monkey Business. Hart wound up losing the nomination and faded from politics.

When Rick Perry ran in the 2012 Republican primary, many considered him a front-runner. However, Perry fumbled during a debate when he couldn’t name one of the three federal agencies he had proposed to eliminate. He hung around, bleeding support, but finally dropped out of the primaries after a brutal fifth-place finish in Iowa. 

Joe Lieberman, who passed away recently, was on track to be a front-runner in the Democratic primaries in 2004, trading on the name recognition earned as Al Gore’s vice-presidential nominee in 2000. He ran afoul of Democratic activists after his robust support of the Iraq War and became an object of ridicule for trying to spin a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire as a sign of “Joementum.” He ultimately dropped out.

Vice President Dan Quayle served under President George H.W. Bush and was often ridiculed as an intellectual lightweight after a series of blunders, most famously the “potatoe incident,” in which Quayle tried to correct a 12-year-old at a spelling bee over the student’s spelling of “potato,” which Quayle (incorrectly) insisted ended with an “e.” Quayle never heard the end of it. 

Those were the days.

Now it’s a complete free-for-all. By comparison, here’s a “lowlight” reel of some of the most baffling statements and actions of Republican nominee Donald Trump, who is currently leading President Joe Biden in the polls:

Trump has repeatedly failed to condemn white supremacists, telling the Proud Boys during a debate to “stand back and stand by,” and after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Va., he claimed there were “very fine people on both sides.”

There was that whole “stolen election” thing, of course. He incited the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, which led to an insurrection culminating in more than five deaths and an attempt to overthrow U.S. democracy. Trump has referred to those incarcerated for attacking police and invading the Capitol as “hostages” and “political prisoners.”

He wondered if people could inject bleach inside their bodies to get rid of COVID. He mocked and ridiculed a physically disabled reporter. He referred to dead American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” 

Trump tried to kick transgender service members out of the military, passed a tax cut that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy (adding between $1 trillion and $2 trillion to the federal debt, according to the Tax Policy Center) and threatened — though failed — for years to introduce a health plan to overturn the Affordable Care Act. 

He spearheaded a plan that saw children separated from their parents and incarcerated. He has echoed the language of Adolf Hitler, referring to immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America. He has continued to refuse the release of his tax returns, issued a travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and told an estimated 30,000 lies while in office.

He vowed to be a “dictator,” but only on his first day back in office, pardoned convicted war criminals, was found liable for sexual assault, personally profited off the presidency while in office, belittled parents of a Muslim-American soldier who had been killed while serving in the Army and was caught on a hot mic saying, “when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything… grab them by the pussy.”

Trump was indicted on 91 felony charges in four separate criminal cases: one for paying hush money to a porn star he slept with while his wife was pregnant with his son Barron, one for interfering in a federal election, one for interfering with the election in Georgia, and one for taking highly sensitive national security documents when he left the White House and refusing to return them when asked to do so by the government. 

Just last week, while speaking in Pennsylvania, Trump said, “Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable — I mean, it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways.”

The list goes on. There’s never enough room to list all the nonsense.

There are those who will say, “There he goes, attacking Trump again.” It’s not an attack, it’s a brutal presentment of facts. Do we remember when facts meant something? 

It wasn’t that long ago, but it now seems like a distant memory.