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Mayor plans to impress Latinos by eating lots of tacos

By   /   January 27, 2012  /   1 Comment

Politics doesn’t seem like it’d be a very fun job. It’s the only job I know of where your ability to stay employed requires you to find a majority of the people in your town/state/country to give you their approval for you to keep your employment. Which seems like it would suck, considering how grossly unpopular I am.

But the positive thing being, since political positions do require a majority quorum and, therefore, a mandate from the people, then theoretically only the best and the brightest should be serving in public office. Theoretically speaking, of course. But, in reality, we get this instead, because reality is terrible.

  • A Connecticut mayor is in hot water for making racist remarks about Latinos after four of his police officers were charged with using excessive force against undocumented immigrants.
  • East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo made the controversial comments earlier this week after a local reporter asked what he’d do to reach out to the Latino community in response to the arrests.
  • “I might have tacos when I go home, I’m not sure yet,” the 60-year-old Republican told WPIX reporter Mario Diaz in a video that has gone viral online.

Sigh. I say that both because that was a very stupid statement to have made, and also because sighing is very refreshing.

Now assuming those words weren’t quite stupid enough for you in printed form, I encourage you to view them via the miracle of video by clicking here, because then you can see them actually being said, followed by a great many words afterwards which increasingly become even stupider. And as you sit and watch it, you will have a kind of a realization in that, after just hearing that one statement he made, you may have believed that Joseph Maturo, Jr., a mayor of an actual U.S. city, was sort of a racist.

But the longer you sit and listen to him (and he just keeps talking, for what feels like hours), the more you will come to realize that while, yes, he is very racist, he is also appallingly stupid. Like, he is the kinds of stupid that you frequently encounter in your acquaintances or neighbors or even just people walking through the mall who almost walk into you because they veer into your walking path for no apparent reason where you think to yourself, “Wow, is that guy ever an idiot.” But none of those people are elected officials! They aren’t mayors of East Haven, Connecticut! But this guy is! How did that happen, East Haven? Explain yourself!

It's all very confusing, because usually you don't expect dumb people to be wearing glasses.

So anyway, for reasons unexplainable, a bunch of people got upset at this mayor for saying he would placate the Latino community for his police force intimidating them by eating tacos for supper. Don’t ask me why. I don’t understand people and the things that make them angry. But people did get angry, and rather than just writing sarcastic blog posts about him on the Internet, some choose to express their opinions by mailing tacos to Joe Maturo. Which, on the one hand, is a perfectly viable form of protest, because it worked that one time to keep CBS from canceling Jericho. But on the other, wait, I thought you people wanted to punish this guy for being dumb. This is how you show your displeasure, by mailing him tacos? That’s not a punishment. That is awesome. What do I have to do to get you people to mail me tacos? Just tell me what racist statement I have to make to be mailed tacos and I will do it. Because I enjoy tacos, but I would enjoy tacos that much more if people delivered them to my house.

So naturally, Joseph Maturo, Jr., POLITICAL SUPER GENIUS, felt the need to explain his racism away to all of the people mailing him tacos by going into further detail on what it was he meant to say when he said he would eat tacos to get all the Latinos to stop yelling at him for his cops beating them up all the time. And naturally, he explained away his racist statement by proving that he was, actually, somehow under the impression that everyone else but him was stupid.

You can see for yourself by watching the video on the CNN link that I linked to a few paragraphs above. But, assuming you’re lazy like me, it went something like this: What Joseph Maturo meant to imply by saying he would go and have tacos for supper was that he didn’t feel discriminated against when he went to go eat tacos in the Latino community, and therefore he didn’t think anyone in the town was being discriminatory towards anyone at all. That’s all he was saying.

Um…

Look, Joe (Can I call you Joe? I hope that I can call you Joe.). Here’s the thing, Joe. I realize that you are not a terribly intelligent person, as you have taken great pains to display over the last couple of days. That’s fine. It’s certainly not a crime to be unintelligent, for whatever reason. But I fail to understand what exactly it is you’re trying to pull here. Go back and watch the video of what you said originally. I’ll wait. …. Good? Okay, good. See, when you were asked “What do you plan on doing for the Latino community?” your answer was, “I may go have tacos for supper tonight.”

Why did you answer that? I’ll give you a hint. You weren’t trying to make a point about how you could have dinner in a Mexican restaurant because of how unintimidated you are by Latinos. What you were actually trying to say, quite clearly, was that you didn’t really plan on doing much of anything for the Latino community, but that you might have tacos for supper (At home. You said at your home. Not in a restaurant. You said you’d have tacos at home.), because that was a sort of metaphor for all of the nothing that you were planning on doing. That was what was going on in inside your head when you said that. It was the first thing that you thought of, and like most stupid people, it immediately fell right out of your mealy mouth. Please don’t try to equivocate that away after the fact. It is very readily apparent to anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex that that was what you meant.

But anyway, as a note for all of your aspiring politicians reading this, which I assume thata great deal many of you are, let this be a lesson to you. If you are ever asked how you plan to reach out to Latino voters, the most important thing you can do is not say by eating tacos. Because that will make people mail you tacos. Which I guess is something you don’t want to have happen.

Bismarck resident Erik Hagen is the author of the SodBlog and, as far as he can recall, has never mailed a taco to anyone for any reason. Send your tacos to or visit his website at sodblog.com.

 

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I came into this world naked, covered in blood and slightly hysterical. Very little has changed since.

1 Comment

  1. Disgusted says:

    OMG! This man sounds EXACTLY like our very own incompetent Bismarck asst. city attorney Paul H. Fraase. They even look a lot alike. (brothers? cousins?) I have had the unfortunate experience of listening to Paul’s incoherent ramblings on more than one occasion and would swear under oath that this man was his mentor. How on earth do these people obtain these positions? Positions that should require both intelligence and common respect towards the people they SERVE! Public servants so easily forget the word “SERVE”.

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