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The Mean Girl Strategy

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Today’s post comes from Congressman Loomis Beechly, representing Minnesota’s 9th district – all the water surface area in the state.

Beechly addresses some "cool" people.
Beechly addresses some “cool” people.

Greetings, Constituents!

I’m enjoying my summer break at home in the 9th district by spending endless hours fishing, swimming, floating around on inner tubes, and thinking about clearing out weeds along the shoreline. I probably won’t do any aquatic plant management though, becuase I always wind up taking a nap once I start to read about it.

One thing I’ve learned about lawmaking is that it gets very, very dreary once you start to read and study the regulations you’re considering. Working out a compromise with other people can get even more complicated! Thinking is hard!

It’s much more fun to just react emotionally to random things you’ve heard. That’s why I’m so excited about this new development in the 2016 Presidential contest, courtesy of Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Party.

He has issued a challenge – if NBC and CNN choose to air some planned and assumed-to-be-complimentary docu-dramas about expected Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Republicans will refuse to cooperate with them on the broadcast of 2016 presidential debates.

This is smart because in the last election cycle, Presidential Debates were showing signs of getting to be too popular. If you’re like me, you don’t want to get drawn into something that a lot of people look at where you don’t control every detail.

I’m not a Republican (or Democrat), but I want to congratulate Reince on finally getting us to the place where we all want to be – from a capital where people work hard on details and pay lip service to compromise and bi-partisanship, to a Congress where there’s no need to pretend – all the animosity is out in the open and the Mean Girl Strategy can be freely applied.

You may remember the Mean Girl Strategy from Junior High – “Be friends with Hilary if you want, but if we catch you hanging out with her, it’s over between us forever!”

Some people may call this childish and petty, but those people are losers and should be shunned!

This gives us a nice, easy short-cut to our difficult decision making. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how incredibly difficult it is to represent you in the Halls of Congress, but let me be blunt – your flip-floppiness on major issues leaves me wondering, sometimes, what I should do. For example, on the recent events in Egypt I’ve heard from you that we should:

  • Cut off all aid to Egypt’s military
  • Increase aid to Egypt’s military
  • Invade
  • Bomb the pyramids
  • Fund more Walleye farms on the Nile.

Too many options! What am I supposed to do?

When it comes to complicated issues like this, it’s much easier to figure out who we all hate so we can listen to their pronouncements and just be against whatever they say, regardless of the reasoning.

Soon I’ll be going back to Our Nation’s Capital to do the Work You Elected Me To Do – pointing my finger and stomping my foot!  Yes, it’s a difficult assignment, but not nearly as hard as it could be!

Your Congressman,
Loomis Beechly

When the work gets complicated, what’s your favorite short cut?

50 thoughts on “The Mean Girl Strategy”

  1. Something’s off – I may be the first one on here…

    My favorite shortcut is to find someone to do the work with me. Cuts the work in half, and has been found to work for garden harvesting, cooking dinner, and teaching an evening of folk dance.

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    1. Ha, I had the same exact thought when I read the question. Maybe it’s because I’m spending a LOT of time lately thinking about how all the household chores are about to become mine and mine alone when Teenager heads off to college in two weeks!

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Sarah Palin and our very own MB are the Queens of the MGS (not the evil additive MSG, MONOSODUM GLUTAMATE or Mean Strategy Girl). They seem to have mastered the art of the manipulative, “hang out with her, and we aren’t friends anymore” shunning thing. Me, I go right to Shame and Blame–it is your fault, not mine. Go do the work or you are lazy and don’t look at me too hard or you might discover MY warts. After all, a good defense is the best offense, right?

    Quiet on the trail. Everybody is on vacation–or moving the adult children.

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  3. Prince Reibus made a fool out of himself last week in an interview with Candy Crowly. He was lambasting CNN and NBC for considering running the Hillary mini-series. Candy then asked him if he’d also ban debates from FOX since this channel is also considering running the show, to which he replied, “I don’t know anything about what you’re saying!” I love it when a direct question pulls the rug out from under such a stupid person’s argument!

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  4. Define “complicated” – there’s “complicated” that’s fun, because you have to untangle it, and there’s “complicated” that’s crazy making because there isn’t a good place to dig in. For the former, I just keep tugging on parts until I figure out how the snarl works (after warning any interested parties that this could take a while). For the latter, I try to assess what bits can be lopped off (either to get someone else to do them, so they can be ignored, or to try to finish them later) and do the other bits that are either easier or more fun (or both).

    Today’s task: figure out which bits of the painting I should tackle first so Husband can keep going on the parts he can handle. Even though it is sometimes crazy making, I like doing the detail painting – cutting in a straight line of paint right against the trim of a window without slopping over can be very Zen-like and satisfying.

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  5. I am firmly convinced that only I ever matured past junior high.
    My favorite short cuts are pouting, lying, swearing and blaming others.

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    1. You might be right about many or all of us not getting past junior high with regard to maturity, Clyde. However, I’m not sure you have become more mature that a person in junior high when it comes to those favorite short cuts you mentioned.

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  6. Good morning. I’m not very good at getting those complicated things done that I don’t want to do. If I want to do something I can do it even if it is complicated. If I really need to do something that I don’t like to do, which is complicated, I will try to make a plan for getting it done. Even with a plan in place, I will often be slow at getting such unpleasant things done. I might get such things done if I write notes to myself reminding me that they need to be done. Some things might not get done and end up being among the messes that really need to be cleaned up which I am trying to ignore.

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  7. I have a hard time with complicated in August. Maybe that’s because my brain is taken up with trying to decide what recipe to make next with tomatoes. The harvest has started… the number of cherry and santa tomatoes has exploded , but just had my first cheese, tomato and lettuce sandwich for lunch with a great big tomato. My straw bale garden needs to be rechristened as the straw bale jungle!

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  8. Don’t forget about Capresi Salad. Last night I did it for a themed potluck: State Fair. Stuff on a stick. Put the cherry tomatoes on the sticks with the basil and cubes of fresh mozarella–divine.

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    1. This is on the list for the next couple of days: BLT salad, Fresh Tomato & Corn Salsa, Mediterranean Orzo & Tomato Salad, Bistro Egg Salad w/ Tomato. I like several “heat up” dishes made in the fridge so thought I’d go w/ cold this week!

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        1. I was going to ask how you did BLT. I thought maybe the abundance of tomatoes drove you to throw away your convictions about not eating meat.

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    1. So if you have something in front of you that you don’t want to do, you take a nap, Edith? In the same situation I might decide to do some reading or a suduko.

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      1. Well, I don’t usually take a nap. But it sounds so good…to retreat away from things and people and forget about complicated stuff for a while. And if Ollie the cat decides to nap with me, that’s even better.

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  11. It seems to me that my entire life is a short cut. First of all, I’m barely over 5′ so I only have to clean half of the cottage since everything about eye level is literally out of sight. Secondly, after I finished two graduation programs in the late 70s, I decided to stay away from any reading deeper than People Magazine. There’s currently nothing more time-consuming in my everyday life that would require more than a couple of hours. I attended my monthly high school classmate breakfast this morning and raised a question which I’d like to pose to the Trail: why does time seem to go faster the older we get??? July 4th turns quickly into September which turns rapidly into Thanksgiving with Christmas only hours beyond. This question haunts me lately, especially since life itself is
    far less active/busy than in past decades. One would think time would crawl rather than speed up, but that’s just not the way I’m experiencing it. I’m good at making up stories to explain most things, but this one alludes me.

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    2. CB, I have also noticed that time seems to be flying by faster as a grow older. I don’t really know why this is happening. Here’s a guess. Aging seems to have done something to my ability to remember things. As my mind accumulates more and more memories, it seem to have more trouble recalling things that are stored there or not do as much storage. I don’t have any proof that this is happening. It is just what I seem to be experiencing. Maybe that has something to do with time seeming to go by faster. If our minds are decreasing in their ability to store or recall memories as we grow older, it might seem like time is going by at a faster rate. Something that I know happen more than 5 years ago seems like it happen only a couple of years ago.

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  13. Interesting story, Clyde. That reminds me of the work of the Yes Men. They do stunts some what similar the one done by Plastic Jesus. One of the Yes Man stunts was a fake press release that announced that Dow Chemical had made payments to the people in India who suffered from a major accident at one of Dow’s plants.

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  15. There IS no shortcut for home harvest (well, unless I had a pressure cooker). And no more people than two fit in the kitchen. Suddenly EVERYTHING is ripe: pears, tomatoes (finally!), cukes, zukes and yellow squash, green beans; and we processed some of everything yesterday. Uffda.

    Off to a family reunion today, near Blue Earth – should be a lovely day – have a good one, Babooners.

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  17. OT – Does anyone know if a food shelf can take “overstock” from a pear tree in our back yard? We’ve already processed gallons of chunky pear sauce and pear butter, and there’s no way we’ll use all. They’re not all perfect, some have little hard nuggets in them. If anyone wants some pretty tasty bartlets, come on over!

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  18. This has been a perfect weekend, couldn’t ask for anything nicer. Beautiful moons, nice breezes, hardly any mosquitos. A lovely summer.

    I suppose my favorite shortcut is picking up a pizza for dinner so I don’t have to cook anything.

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