You Have to Be an Actual Moron or a Wannabe Dictator to Want Your Wife's Face on the $10

By Jia Tolentino  |  September 17, 2015 | 2:50pm
Politics

There is plenty to be disturbed about in the answers provided by the smoldering pieces of Brooks Brothers factory trash that gathered together last night to persuade us, unsuccessfully, that they could hypothetically be trusted with nuclear codes. For example, ladies and gentlemen, here’s what the future of the Republican party wants to put on the new, female-fronted $10 bill, which will be issued by 2020:

Rand Paul: Susan B. Anthony
Mike Huckabee: “MY WIFE”
Marco Rubio: Rosa Parks
Ted Cruz: Rosa Parks (with Hamilton on the $10 and Jackson on the $20 bill replaced instead)
Ben Carson: “MY MOM”
Donald Trump: “MY DAUGHTER—OR ROSA PARKS”
Jeb Bush: Margaret Thatcher
Scott Walker: Clara Barton
Carly Fiorina: N/A YOU IDIOTS
John Kasich: Mother Teresa
Chris Christie: Abigail Adams

Fiorina’s answer is the only one I can stomach. “I think it’s a gesture; I don’t think it changes our history,” she said. “We’ve got to recognize that women aren’t a special interest group.” And yeah—symbols matter, but “women’s issues” are actually a zero-sum game with the current GOP, and there’s not a woman in this country who’d be better off with noted English citizen Margaret Thatcher on their tenner than with, for example, guaranteed paid maternity leave.

But the distraction of a gesture isn’t the worst thing here; neither is, amazingly, the fact that Heb Boosh and “Never Gonna Get It” Kasich’s best answers were respectively a UK politician and a Macedonian-Indian nun. The worst thing is that three of these candidates picked family members.

You have to be so incredibly deep in the family-values-pandering intestinal tract to do that with a straight face. You have to be so narcissistic—either unaware of political economy or blind to it, although I’m not sure which is worse. “My wife, for the currency!” “My daughter, because we’ve never fucked!” I mean, really, you have to be on a moped of turbo-charged idiocy careening straight through an El Chapo-size tunnel whose ventilation system is nothing but a warm, moist stream of Focus on the Family farts.

Either that or you have to be a caricature of a dictator—like Saparmyat Nyazov, the former head of Turkmenistan, also known as “Turkmenbashy” (literally meaning “head of Turkmenistan”). During his time in office (1992-2006), between instituting one of the most wildly repressive, blatantly absurd torture-loving, ethnically-cleansing, gold-plated secret-police nation-states in contemporary history, Nyasov changed Flag Day to his birthday; drained the country of billions of dollars of resource money; declared himself “President for Life”; held parliamentary elections in which he picked all candidates; forced all doctors to un-swear the Hippocratic Oath and instead pledge allegiance to him; and began every radio broadcast with an announcement that anyone who slandered him would have their tongue shrivel and fall out.

He also renamed the month of April after his mother. Congratulations, Republicans, we’re all going to have so much fun in hell.

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