BLUNT’S CHOICE OF ALLEGORIES…. I try not to be overly sensitive about rhetoric like this, but I’m not sure what Roy Blunt is talking about.
Representative Roy Blunt, the former Republican whip who is giving up his House seat in Missouri to run for the Senate, offered his take on life these days in the nation’s capital to those gathered at the conservative Values Voter Summit on Friday.
He told a tale about British soldiers who had built a golf course in India and had to adapt to the game in a whole new way. They didn’t anticipate that they’d be joined on the course by monkeys, who would swoop out of the nearby jungle, grab the golf balls and toss them around, he explained.
The golfers had to establish a firm rule. “You have to play the ball where the monkey throws it. And that is the rule in Washington all the time.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see the relevance of the monkey/golf allegory here. As Blunt described the British golfers’ predicament, he noted that the players “tried to eliminate the monkey problem, but they never got it done.” Instead, they had to adapt to the monkeys’ ball-throwing habits.
Mike Madden added, “Blunt, who’s running for Senate in Missouri next year, didn’t explain precisely why he chose an analogy about monkeys to illustrate the difficulties posed by the party that opposes the country’s first black president. (They both like to screw up the white man’s golf game?) Perhaps it was just a really, really stupid parable to choose.”
Perhaps. Listening to the audio, though, it’s worth noting that the right-wing crowd thought this was hilarious.
