Political Wordplay: Sander’s “Lamebrain” and Obama’s “Blamebrain”

I enjoy word play. For God’s and fun’s sake, we need a little comic relief from this world of half-brains. In the first GOP debate, Doctor Ben Carson remarked that he was the only candidate to take out half a brain. No longer, half brains are at work.

Media Lamebrains

In the October 11 Politico Magazine, Jack Shafer came up with this inspired article title: “Bernie Sanders vs. the Lamebrain Media.” Shafer describes Sander’s criticism of the media for failure to comment on or question his cherished Socialistic agenda for the people, by the people, and for the people.

Sanders take umbrage and expresses outrage at the lamebrain’s media failure to focus on these views.

• Pro-big government

• Pro-labor and pro-union

• Anti-Wallstreet and big banks and hedge funds managers

• Anti-business and anti-corporate profit

• Anti- income differentials

• Anti-poverty

• Anti- 1%

• Pro-free education and welfare benefits

• Pro-Medicare for all

• Pro-high taxes on rich

• Pro-women’s rights

• Pro-free abortion

• Pro-foreign policy withdrawal

• Anti-middle class woes.

Ergo, ipsi-facto, therefore, consequently, inevitably, and axiomatically, the media are lamebrains. Sanders has now extended his lamebrain list to include the “corporate media,” which, he says, “ trivializes “ the major issues that beset humankind” in favor of “underarm spray deodorants, automobiles, beer, cat food, politics, and whatever,” to make a profit to stay in business and grow rather than tending to what and for what humankind needs and bleeds.

Obama “Blamebrain” Game

Then there is the “Blamebrain game,” are practiced and perfected by President Obama. This game was on full display on the October interview on 60 minute in a Steve Kroft interview. In the interview, he shows his disdain for critis and shifts the blame to any one who downplays his quest for high-minded moral high ground, as if critics had half a brain and not an ounce of compassion. Everybody, it seems, ought to know the issues facing the world are not the 250,000 killed in Syria and the 4 million fleeing that embattled country, but climate change and world united against a nuclear Iran. Obama says “my definition of leadership would leading on climate change and mobilizing the entire world community to make sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.” Never mind that Israel, our Mideast allies, and the majority of the U.S. Congress disagree by believing that lifting sanctions will speed the race to a nuclear weapon. It is “they’, not he, who are to blame. “They,” mostly Republicans, Obama says without evidence to the contrary, want to send another 100,000 to 200,000 boots on the ground into Syria and back into Iraq, and “somehow we are going to be not just the police, but the governors of the region.” This is Obama’s familiar strawman argument, that his critics have no alternative but war and troops on the ground. To be lamebrained and blamebrained require only half a brain . To be constructive and serious takes whole brain thinking.