08 Oct The Morning Call is tired of bored shepherd boys
THE BOY WHO CRIED PEE-PEE TAPE
Once upon a time, there was a shepherd boy who was bored as he sat on the hillside watching the village sheep. He talked to his dog a little bit and played his shepherd’s flute. But it was still pretty uninteresting up on the hill by himself.
On the surface, this is understandable, right? Who wouldn’t be bored watching sheep on the hillside? Hard not to feel sympathetic with the guy. Not exactly the most intellectually stimulating job around. Poor kid.
But just wait ‘til you hear what happens next!
One day as he sat watching the Sheep and the quiet forest, and thinking what he would do should he see a Wolf, he thought of a plan to amuse himself.
His Master had told him to call for help should a Wolf attack the flock, and the Villagers would drive it away. So now, though he had not seen anything that even looked like a Wolf, he ran toward the village shouting at the top of his voice, “Wolf! Wolf!”
As he expected, the Villagers who heard the cry dropped their work and ran in great excitement to the pasture. But when they got there they found the Boy doubled up with laughter at the trick he had played on them.
A few days later the Shepherd Boy again shouted, “Wolf! Wolf!” Again the Villagers ran to help him, only to be laughed at again.
Then one evening as the sun was setting behind the forest and the shadows were creeping out over the pasture, a Wolf really did spring from the underbrush and fall upon the Sheep.
In terror the Boy ran toward the village shouting “Wolf! Wolf!” But though the Villagers heard the cry, they did not run to help him as they had before. “He cannot fool us again,” they said.
The Wolf killed a great many of the Boy’s sheep and then slipped away into the forest.
Yikes!
We don’t want to frighten anybody, but we have even heard – but have been unable to confirm – that the wolf actually ate the boy himself! Whether that’s true or not is kinda beside the point. It’s still awful, isn’t it? Of course, as awful as it may have been, it’s hard not to think that the boy got what he deserved.
Now, we mention all of this today because a small group of shepherd boys (and girls!) are genuinely unhappy that we – the Villagers – don’t really care that there may or may not have been a wolf near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. These shepherds have been carefully, methodically laying out the evidence that Bill the truck driver from Boise and Jim the carpenter from Shakopee and Peg the Sonographer from Fort Worth constitute such a severe risk to “democracy” that they must be held in secret detention facilities and treated like terrorists. They’ve been doing so in an effort to convince the people of the nation that Donald Trump is a wolf who tried to steal the election and destroy said “democracy.” And now they’re grumpy that no one believes them or wants to pay any attention to them.
It’s really kinda sad.
On Thursday, these shepherds will start hosting big, dramatic, PRIME TIME hearings in which they make their case that Trump is very wolfish. They’ve hired the former chief of ABC News (and the guy who buried Amy Robach’s Jeffrey Epstein story) to help them put on a dramatic show. They’re gonna present evidence of this, that, AND, most especially, the other thing. They’re going to prove that Donald Trump actively and purposefully tried to undermine the electoral process, to undermine the nation, and to place himself in the Oval Office via an extremely broad and well-organized conspiracy.
And it really, really chaps their hides that no one sane will be paying attention.
We’ll be honest with you: we think this whole thing is nuts. We think the conspiracy idea is goofy and fabricated. We think they all hate Trump and will do whatever they can to “get” him.
At the same time, we’re not impervious to evidence. If they have proof that Trump did something awful, we’re open to it. We have no investment at all in protecting him and denying the truth.
Like most Americans, however, we’re gonna need that proof to be iron-clad – largely because we have been hearing the same story about Trump stealing the White House for almost six years now. More to the point, we’ve seen the “evidence” of this theft fall apart, time and again, under more thorough investigation. We’ve heard about the Russia conspiracies and the pee-pee tape and all the other crazy nonsense that turned out to be just that, crazy nonsense. So…you’ll have to forgive us, Congressman Schiff, if we believe that you’re full of s**t until you prove otherwise.
The truth of the matter is that most people don’t care about partisan squabbling. And of those who do, most people are tired of the same-old unproven accusations that have flooded their consciousness since 2016. They’re exhausted by it. They’ve had enough. And they’re not going to tune in – real wolf or not – because they’ve been lied to before, over and over and over.
That’s not the people’s fault, of course. It’s the Committee’s fault. It’s Adam Schiff’s fault. It’s Rachel Maddow’s fault. It’s ALL the mainstream media’s fault. The people are only behaving sensibly under the circumstances.
As our old pal Aesop put it, after telling the story of the shepherd boy and the wolf, “Liars are not believed even when they speak the truth.”
You would think that the little shepherd boys and girls on the Jan. 6 Committee would have learned that by now – especially the one whose mother was the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree, we guess, and then rolls off, coming to rest among the nuts.
