Tale of two Pruitts has a surprising outcome

The art of politics in Kentucky is the means by which politicians obtain campaign contributions from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other.

If you are a politician, it may be impossible to keep the rich from having to be around poor people, but there are things you can do that help, like charter schools.

Most of us do not really know what charters are, let alone their schools, but assume they are similar to those pitiable church schools which dot the landscape with people who only want to read one book and declare science to be their enemy and speak to each other in the language of Mary, Queen of Scots’ little boy.

You remember James, the one with the Version.

The Nobel Prize in Machiavellian politics may not automatically go to the president this year because there is a border-state governor in the running, so Machiavellian that they call him “Matt the Knife,” and he invented a way to clear-cut all state boards five minutes after you are sworn in.

We’re not sure how this works, but we think you abolish a board, rename it and appoint an equal number of the rich to the new board, or you expand it however many votes it takes to get done whatever it is the rich want you to do and then appoint some additional rich.

Weyerhaeuser hasn’t taken over that many boards.

So we were surprised when the good Kentucky Pruitt got publicly humiliated and fired for being a non-combatant in the War on Education and the bad Pruitt in Washington was not force-marched back to Oklahoma for needing a soundproof booth to talk to coal operator Don Blankenship in.

Stephen Pruitt’s ouster was so hurried that the new state Board of Education hadn’t had time to look up how to fire somebody. Nobody likes a botched execution. But in the end we will have private schools, funded by public money, where the smart will avoid the dumb and the “have” kids will not have to contend with the “have-not” kinds.

We must be fair and balanced and will go left, since hope must endure that an anti-Trump tide will cleanse the Congress like salts running through a widow-woman. The debate between the gay and the black and the woman to see who can run against Rep. Andy Barr was more akin to an old Socialist convention, with each trying to understand the position of the other so they can get around it. Sounded like a group of old Marxists.

Republicans paint themselves in their primaries into bad corners. Likewise, whoever wins the Democrat nomination in the 6th District will have to answer for his or her liberalism come November. They would be better off standing on a fence with one ear to the ground, not easy but taught at the McConnell School of politics at the University of Louisville, whose new board recently fired an educator named Pitino.

This story was originally published April 27, 2018 at 9:30 PM with the headline "Tale of two Pruitts has a surprising outcome."