The Island of Dr. Grassley
How weird an election year is 2016? Weird enough that since February 13, Democrats have actually taken seriously the possibility of knocking Iowa's senior senator, Chuck Grassley, out of the seat he's held since 1981. That's no typo -- Grassley is the fourth longest-serving current member of the Senate, and nobody thought he'd be vulnerable in his run for a seventh term. At least not until Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dropped dead that Saturday morning three months ago, and within hours, Senate Republicans announced there was no way in hell they'd confirm any replacement appointed by Barack Obama. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley immediately agreed to tell Barack Obama to take his constitutional duty and go stuff it. And Democrats smiled, because even in Iowa, most voters want the Senate to do its damn job. Whether that'll be enough to make Iowans decide to chuck Grassley remains to be seen.
Also, we feel compelled to note early on that the senator's name anagrams to "gassy chuckler," which we think should become a more prominent campaign issue. You're welcome, Democrats.
Chuck Grassley isn't merely a national figure because of his long Senate tenure and his staunch conservatism, which is as staunch as conservatism comes. He's also a perennial Wonkette favorite because he does Twitter very weird. You think Donald Trump sends belligerent tweets? Here's a mastr of Twtr, frm 2009:
CHUCK GRASSLEY IS NO NAIL! He also had little patience for Obama doing health care reform RONG:
Sumtimz his twts were merely baffling, and sometimes they were bugfuck insane:
Why did so few Iowans attend a meeting on educating Libyans about wetland debt mitigation? Clearly, not enough ethanol being served.
Sometimes you had to wonder if a fifth-grade boy had borrowed his phone:
For Chrissakes, didn't Grassley know impressionable children could read this stuff? Even his most person-anal thoughts?
Grassley didn't appreciate people making fun of his creative abbreviations, not one bit. It was all the fault of Twitter and its limited technology bytes:
Which is all fine and technologically literate and all, but fails to explain the impression the poor Senator was turning into a robot long before Marco Rubio:
Not all of Grassley's tweets were trivial, however. While busily pretending to help with writing the Affordable Care Act (but really just obstructing it all the way), he teetered and tweetered between seeming to say "death panels" were real and denying he'd said any such thing. Besides, the whole "death boards" thing was a distraction from the evil Democratic plan for a GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER of healthcare:
At least we think that's what he was talking about. As for this angry policy tweet about ... something, not even Google Translate could help. It thought maybe the source language was Arabic:
This whole Tweetosphere obsession actually led to marital strife for Grassley in the run-up to his 2010 bid for re-Erection. The crazy old coot was even Tweetering during church, according to his wife, Barbara:
“I had had to tell him to knock it off,” she said, motioning as if slapping the senator’s hand. “Put it away.”
The man had issues, is what we're saying. Intern Riley speculated the senator's problem with "pulling it out" at inopportune moments went well beyond church:
Imagine Chuck Grassley running around the house with his fly unzipped, his man meat just floppin’ around everywhere as he frantically touch-types “140 byte” illiterate messages on his Twitter machine. Barbara yells at him, “Knock it off! Put it away!” So Chuck begrudgingly puts his junk back in his pants and then continues to leap about the house, tweeting as he goes la la la la.
Incredibly, that piece from The Hill about Grassley's Twitdiction mentioned a Grassley Tweet which somehow escaped Yr Wonkette's devoted attention:
The pants, the pants, the pants were on fire. He don't need no naber let the mthrfckr burn. Burn, mthrfckr, burn.
Others were amused as well:
Grassley somehow managed to make a cornball 2010 campaign ad about his Twitter problem, or prowess, or whatever the hell he thought it was. (It was a cry for help, is what it was.)
Grassley got reelected anyway.
He celebrated by telling the world how happy he was to live in a brand new country called “xceptionalNation”:
With the New Year came new concerns, including more concerns the Senior Senator had a problem with the N-word: "Nrg":
Happily, once some teenagers criticized his use of Englitch, Grassley clarified, in what may have been the first known "Grassley-to-English translation" of his own tweets (credit Jack Steuf for that joke, OK?):
Grassley self-translated again after complaining the North Atlantic Treaty Organzition got "'blood on' Nato hand," b-cause 'stimidity clusterfucks blowed legs off kiods, as clusters will do:
No! Belay that cluster order! Welcome to the new self-correcting Grassley 2.0:
But when Grassley refused to clarify himself, Yr Wonkette took our best shot at decoding the mysterious utterances. To wit:
Translation:
Chuck Grassley comes home. Chuck Grassley sees his peeps, but his peeps don’t see him. They only see his power and his money. He’s got problems too, you know. Life’s not all hos and blow. Life’s not his videos. SocSecity seldom does, and farm bill came. Chuck Grassley can never come home.
Works for us!
In a prime bit of Internet Goofery, Grassley's phone got sort-of-hacked by some smartass college kid who guessed his password (and no, that's not hacking, really). The evidence was indisputable:
Happily, things were soon back to Norble:
Eventually, the day we all dreaded arrived: Grassley was weaponized by the Apple Corporation:
Armed with this new tool, Grassley began tweeting like the same old tool as ever. He noticed, about six years after everyone else, that there was a distinct paucity of history on the History Channel. Grandpa Cornpants was not pleased:
No, not pleased ONE BIT:
Grassley's tweets remained as aggressive ever; in April 2012, he gave President Obama a good dressing down for having the temerity to say he rather hoped the Supreme Court would uphold the ACA. Horrified conservatives could not believe the POTUS would try to unconstitutionally influence the SCOTUS by barging in with his unsolicited opinion, and Grassley made it clear this so-called constitutional expert knew NOTHING about the Constitution:
To be sure, the intellectual force of Grassley's attack was blunted slightly by the knowledge that six hours previously, he'd tweeted this sphinxlike mystery:
Finally, in October 2012, we reached the apotheosis of Chuck Grassley's Twitter, which inspired what's probably Yr Doktor Zoom's personal favorite Wonket post what he has wrote here:
It is not merely one senator’s speculation about the outcome of an encounter between car and beast. Nay: It is literature itself:
- Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Senator Carlos Hierbalia was to remember that distant evening when he and Federico hit a deer. He assumed the deer had died. The internet was so recent that many things lacked hashtags, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.
- We were just outside of Dyersville on the edge of the prairie when the deer died. I remember saying something like “I think that deer’s dead; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge deer, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Des Moines. And a voice was screaming “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
One of these days, we're going to have to write that e-book, The Experimental Literature Of Charles Grassley.
Grassley remains active on Twitter, even though Barry Bamz Obama is no longer his BFF like he was back when Grassley was not doing shit on the ACA. And while his tweets are still gibberish, they feel a bit like the last seasons of Northern Exposure or The X-Files: It's familiar, but that shark got jumped a while back:
Or maybe Grassley could listen to the very vocal majority and do his goddamn job.
There are four Iowa Democrats who'd like to replace Grassley; they're facing off in a primary on June 7. There are two frontrunners: a popular liberal state senator named Robb Hogg, whose election might serve as a kind of rebuke to castration fetishist Joni Ernst. The other is a well-funded Democratic Establishment lady named Patty Judge, whose slogan is "This is one Judge that Chuck Grassley can't ignore." We like both! Here, watch the Democrats debate and decide which one you think should wish Chuck Grassley into the cornfield. With votes!
Have some bitcoinage you want to give to Robb Hogg, that he might mow the Grassley? Donate here! Want to add to the campaign bankroll of Patty Judge, who'd like to overrule the sitting senator? Her donation page is here! If you'd like to support further deer-relatied literary efforts on Wonkette, you can send a few bucks our way, too!
[Politico / The Hill / Politico / Sioux City Journal / Iowa Public Radio / Des Moines Register / Iowa Senate Debate on YouTube]
