Stimulus and Response

Sampling from Twitter #breadbags

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst's response to President Obama's State of the Union Address last week was derided on social media for this one passage:

You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry.

Like Pavlov's canines, Democratic partisans responded with mockery of her tale of poverty past (though she wasn't ashamed back then: "But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet.")

WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan on this sad but predictable response:

Response on the left to Ernst and the bread bags was snobbish, superior and dumb to the point of embarrassing. First, they couldn’t believe it—no one wears bread bags on their shoes in a storm, how absurd, she must be developmentally challenged. Then they denigrated what she said, putting pictures on Twitter of themselves wearing bread bags on their feet, accompanied by comments that had all the whiff of the upper class speaking of the quaint ways of the help.

Angry, superior, all-knowing, yes, in 2016 let's put them in charge for another eight years.