Temporally.
On Monday, this Monday, years after this particular hard-fought but now entirely disproven theory was cold and buried deep in the ground, theoretical presidential would-be candidate Sen. Rand Paul said this:
“I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”
By Tuesday, Rand Paul was frantically trying to undo the damage. In addition to
commandeering a New York Times photographer in order to document the act of he himself getting a vaccine, he chastised the press mightily for mentioning that thing he actually said with cameras actually filming it, because he was
not implying vaccines were giving kids "profound mental disorders," he was just noting that the two things bore a specific relationship in spacetime, which is what Stephen Hawking would do if Stephen Hawking was an American-born and elected to higher office and
also a moron.
Paul attempted to clarify his comments in a statement Tuesday, saying ”I did not say vaccines caused disorders, just that they were temporally related – I did not allege causation. I support vaccines, I receive them myself and I had all of my children vaccinated.”
Other things that are "temporally related" to the administration of vaccines are learning to crawl, learning to talk, and learning that you should not put your peanut butter sandwich in the VCR slot even if it does look like it would fit there perfectly, damn it. But nobody ever waxes anti-philosophic on the "cases" of children who learn these things "temporally" adjacent to getting a shot from their doctor's office. I once got a vaccination and that very same year somewhere else in America a plane crashed, but I drew no
temporal connection. I could have, but it would have not added to the political debate or made me appear statesmanlike. Or perhaps it would have, because
statesmanlike is a low hurdle, these days.
I am again impressed by just how often Sen. Rand Paul (and most other politicians) presume their audiences to be made up of absolute morons. Rand Paul said the first thing to show sympathy to a prominent conspiracy-minded group that, like every last sodding conspiracy-minded group he and his daddy before him ever courted, feels left out when the major players of the day are not properly coddling their own pet notions. He said the second thing to court all of the people who think the first group are Wrong Because Facts, and he's hoping both groups will have their own newsletters in which they will emphasize the "good" thing he said without mentioning the "bad" thing he said and won't that all just work out fine?
It often does, among morons, but increasingly people who are not absolute morons are able to see the camera footage for themselves and note that temporally Sen. Rand Paul is trying to play both sides of the issue-of-the-day within a mere 24 hours of each other, which in olden Mitt Romney days would be called "flip-flopping" and which in the new Rand Paul days is more properly "making shit up as you go."
Temporally. Dear God, there have got to be people better suited to governing the country than this.
Comments are closed on this story.