Things are getting more than a little flaky in these here United States.
Why would we here at AP say that?
Just take a look at the race for Governor of Arizona, a state which is suffering a horrendous drought, is about to run out of water from the Colorado River, and has a Southern Border where
thousands of people swim across the Rio Grande to get here, only they’re not supposed to do that without papers.
Gov. Doug Ducey, who is not popular, is a Republican, but he’s term limited. And in the race to succeed him is a woman named Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor, and she is a Republican, and,
being a Trumpian acolyte, she won’t agree to concede the November 8 election if she loses — all as reported in today’s Denver Post. Sound familiar?
Lake’s opponent is Katie Hobbs, the Secretary of State, and she’s a Democrat, which means that she is much more sensible than Lake.
So we assembled the entire corps of our associate solitary reporters, which now includes dozens, including our Moscow-based associate solitary reporter, associate solitary reporter Foma
Kheroshonsky, and showed them, from Netflix, the 1962 Frank Sinatra version of the neo-noir psychological thriller, John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate," which stars Sinatra
(1915-1998) as the brainwashed Sergeant Ben Marco; the recently deceased Angela Lansbury (1925-2022); and Lawrence Harvey (1928-1973).
The movie received an approval raging of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manchurian_Candidate_(1962_film), which means everybody should see it, because it portrays the dangers of McCarthyism (and we’re not talking about House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy or the late Senator Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005)).
Anyway, and cutting to the chase, there is a scene in the film where the Lawrence Harvey character, who was brainwashed in Manchuria by Soviet and Chinese Communist agents to be a programmed
assassin, is at a bar in Manhattan playing solitaire, and when he turns up the Queen of Diamonds — which triggers him to do whatever he has been told to do — overhears a bartender say, to a
bystander, “Go jump in a lake” —— to do exactly that, so he jumps into a lake in Central Park, where Marco rescues him.
Which is why associate solitary reporter Jim Mangam, who covers Arizona politics for us, accosted Lake during a campaign appearance in Tucson, yesterday, and told her to go jump in a lake. Only
she refused to do that so she could primp her hair.