Currently, my 16-month-old daughter's single favorite thing to do is watch Elmo's World. And say Elmo in anticipation whatever I crack open my laptop or turn on a TV. And pick up my phone, place it to her ear, and try to call Elmo on it.
Her second favorite thing to do is to grab things that are inside of other things, remove them, and place them neatly in another location. If there's a purse or an attache laying around, she will open it, remove the contents small enough for her to be able to move — old receipts, wallets, lip gloss, etc — and place them all on a couch. Or my hand. Or the dog, if he's sleeping nearby.
Sometimes, however, she gets too ambitious and attempts to grab something she's not yet tall enough to safely reach or strong enough to comfortably move. Which is what happened yesterday evening, when she attempted to pull the diaper bag sitting on the dresser on to the floor. But the bag was too big and the dresser was too high, so she couldn't quite handle it and would have pulled it on top of herself and totally fell backwards with it if my wife hadn't noticed her struggling and stopped her mid-pull.
Anyway, I thought of my daughter this afternoon when Sean Spicer added the signature piece to his burgeoning and sublime collection of remarkable gaffes. (Seriously, this dude has enough gaffes to make leftover gaffe sandwiches and stew a hearty gaffe soup.) While attempting to frame the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad, he suggested that Hitler (Yes. That Hitler.) didn't use chemical weapons during WWII or against his own people. Apparently the gas chamber — only the single most infamous device of murder wielded by the Nazis — was just a big room with some secondhand Newport smoke it in. Not really all that different than the check cashing place next to the Rite-Aid on East Ohio Street in Pittsburgh.
Of course, for those who've studied the peculiarities unique to the culture of White Mediocrity — the anthropological subcategory exclusively comprised of candy corn-ass White people who're convinced they're king-sized fucking Snickers — none of this is a surprise. This is what happens when they're promoted above their abilities and allowed statuses they haven't earned and platforms they don't deserve. They reach for shit their mediocre-ass arms are too short to grab. Just as a tiger is going to eventually just go tiger, because that inevitability is coded into his DNA, an aggressively mediocre White man is going to go mediocrewhiteman as long as he's able to.
If the world were truly just, Donald Trump would be hawking 17-year-old Hyundais in a vacant Youngstown, Ohio lot and Sean Spicer would be his mascot on the sidewalk, holding a "No Credit, No Problem" sign, dressed in a giraffe costume, and using his lunch breaks to masturbate in the bathroom of the Arby's across the street. But life aint fair, and White Mediocrity rules Washington, so all we can do is hide the diaper bags.