A long time ago I met the famous, larger-than-life, Senator Bob Dole. That was the second time, technically. The prior meeting he was a sudden no show. Instead he sent me to a staffer who shared a small space with a bird. Seriously, I was directed into a room with a lonely bird in a cage, and I’m sure Bob thought that was hilarious. I vaguely remember them quipping “it was a gift from a visitor, now what are you here for?”

I was tempted to give him a bird of my own, but instead just rescheduled.

For every smooth take I’ve read recently on what an amazingly kind man Bob Dole was, I wonder if these people ever experienced the angry man burning hot magma known to explode from him.

When I finally met with him he had assigned seats around a rectangular table based on status, judged by how much you could do for him. Women weren’t given time, as he’d call on men to answer his very directed questions. Only the first third of the table was invited to speak.

And in what seemed like true Bob Dole fashion he started and practically ended the meeting on the same anti-populist, reductionist, clarion note: what can you do for him. The juicy bone he threw out to the table that rings in my ears even to this day was: “why would I help people that won’t let me invest in them to get a piece of the action”?

That was real. My meetings with Senator Dole seemed like he didn’t want to be there unless he could extract something. Thus I actually preferred his chirping bird, which might explain my decision to leave politics.

Here are other stories some have shared about Dole, to further help set context for the late Senator’s constant cruel and acerbic witticisms:

Murder of politicians, ho ho ho.

When asked if he had read a murder mystery written by a Republican Senator, President Clinton said yes and noted “It’s a Democratic senator who gets murdered.” Dole then quipped “Yeah, it has a happy ending.”

Calling politicians dumb, hah hah.

You hear Gingrich’s staff has these five file cabinets, four big ones and one little tiny one. No. 1 is ‘Newt’s Ideas.’ No. 2, ‘Newt’s Ideas.’ No. 3, No. 4, ‘Newt’s Ideas.’ The little one is ‘Newt’s Good Ideas.’

And athletes? Brain damaged, lol.

There was a certain football player who forgot his helmet and then started talking supply-side theory.

Economists? Murder them hardy har har.

A bus filled with supply-siders goes over the cliff, killing all aboard. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there were three unoccupied seats.

To be fair, Dole was right about supply-side advocates being a serious threat. They totally wrecked his state of Kansas.

Unfortunately, despite his sharpest attacks, he failed to stop a “pitbull without lipstick” platform of the GOP from unleashing soul-crushing inequality.

Self-loathing after such failure was perhaps his best humor.

I was supposed to go for the jugular. And I did — my own.

Casting a wide net over those letting down the country, Dole called his peers out along with himself, hehe.

If you’re hanging around with nothing to do and the zoo is closed, come over to the Senate. You’ll get the same kind of feeling and you won’t have to pay.

His little bird in a cage, angrily chirping, was indeed by his definition… “free”.

Lately there seem to be more and more stories of very young drivers killing themselves with a brand new Tesla.

Details are few in a new Oregon police report, yet so far all signs point towards an unsafe car causing the death of an inexperienced driver.

Preliminary investigation indicates that London was driving a white 2022 Tesla Model Y 4-door sedan when his vehicle collided with a black 2022 Freightliner flatbed tow truck…

A trailer of any kind has been known to easily confuse Tesla’s poorly engineered cameras and software. Did they misread a flatbed, yet again?

It makes me wonder when police can start issuing tickets for driving under the influence… of Tesla. Here’s another recent case, with a Florida father sobbing in regret.

Driver reaction times have to be sub-second to avoid being killed by Tesla’s basic frequent software errors, even with their latest release to public roads, as I’ve recently demonstrated. In other words, you can’t trust Tesla engineering AT ALL, NOT EVEN FOR A SECOND.

This tragic news comes about a year after another high-profile Oregon Tesla crash, where the car ignored road markings and drove directly into oncoming traffic killing two people.

The crux of the reporting was about unaccountable police in America, predators squeezing a tiny town (and anyone daring to drive through) into an extortion racket.

Brookside, Al [population 1,200] had very little crime reported to the state, yet used fines and fees to bring in half the town revenue.

Additional awards were collected by these journalists and their “Banking on Crime” series.

“The chief’s pretty upset about that post you put on Facebook,” he recalled the officer saying [about losing freedom of speech]. […] “We had cameras in dispatch and there were multiple times when … he would bring an inmate into his office and shut the door,” she said [about losing freedom of religion]. “I witnessed that he would evangelize to them. And the only way they’d be able to get out of jail is if they accepted Christ. They’d be given a Gideon’s Bible because the previous mayor was a Gideon, and they’d be released from jail.”

The blistering reports deftly exposed the Alabama town for all its awful corruption; the ways police operated as militant evangelical Christian profit centers where poverty and race were criminalized.

In other words, their war on alcohol, their war on drugs… it’s always just been a cover for white supremacist platforms.

“Following the Civil War, Southern States enacted Black Codes to subjugate newly freed slaves and maintain the prewar racial hierarchy,” she wrote in the Timbs v. Indiana decision. “Among these laws’ provisions were draconian fines for violating broad proscriptions on ‘vagrancy’ and other dubious offenses.”

Prewar racial heirarchy. Also known as America’s origin story of creating a caste system for profit.

Using the law to control and profit off poor people in general, and poor Black people in particular, continued through the 20th century. Especially in the South, where the convict-lease system incentivized incarceration to provide cheap labor and enrich private contractors. It survived through that whole century and stormed again into the 2000s, as private probation companies invaded states like Georgia and Alabama and many more.

When you realize America’s Revolutionary War was all about profits by a small group of white men (not about freedom or liberty), which historians now plainly state as matter of fact, then this Alabama town just shows how some Americans are just very, very slow to accept guilt and defeat in Civil War.

Of course this tiny police department, run by white supremacists, in the middle of nowhere, was buying expensive military vehicles as if at war.

They saw themselves as Taliban-esque Christian male warriors, touchless crusaders out to terrorize Blacks… like President Woodrow Wilson’s “America First” post-1915 Clansmen (e.g. Red Summer).