Kool-Aid vs. Hawaiian Punch

When I was a kid, I often accompanied my late Mother to the supermarket. I would gaze longingly at products like Scooter Pies, KaBoom cereal, Kool-Aid, and Hawaiian Punch. My Mom, a wise woman in the ways of nutrition well ahead of her time, would go for none of it. Cookies were graham crackers. Cereal was Raisin Bran. Beverages were milk and water. Once in a long while, I would prevail upon her to buy a sweet drink. Hawaiian Punch had some actual fruit juice in the assay, so it won. Truth be told, there was that brief interstice when the astronauts seemed to drink Tang, so we got a couple of containers of Tang. If it was good enough for Buzz Aldrin, it made its way into the Rubenstein house at 25 Falcon Place.

I'm taking the long way around to the theme here: Kool-Aid vs. Hawaiian Punch is the analogy for this election. We have a candidate who wants you to drink the Kool-Aid: Don't believe a word he said before, believe the words he says now, like the Etch-a-sketch his campaign manager described. The nutritional assay is that he was "bipartisan," except that he wasn't, vetoing 800 bills in a single term, many of them over-ridden; he is moderate, so don't pay attention to his self-characterization as
"severely conservative"; he was a successful businessman, so he can generate savings and revenue for the Federal Government, except that he won't tell us how, he picked a running mate who has a defective plan which he does not embrace, or does embrace, depending on when you are listening.

On the other side, we have the Hawaiian Punch, an actual Hawaii resident, back in the day, with just enough nutritional value to make him worthwhile. An imperfect candidate, sometimes brooding and aloof, sometimes calculating, but one who has been steady at the tiller even with the most vicious opposition, the most scurrilous and hurtful press ever from the right wing echo chamber.

My Mom was a wise woman: If you have to search for something sweet, go with the Hawaiian Punch. Don't drink the Kool-Aid.