McCain Mocks Mormon History

Jonathan Chait has a nice post at The New Republic about McCain's shallow, twittering mockery of various bits of budgetary pork, and about Maureen Dowd's witless applause of McCain. As Chait points out, McCain's "method" is to pick anything that can be made to sound silly. Dowd, of course, lauds this method as the height of wisdom.

In the list of "silly" projects McCain scorns is this:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. "Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?" McCain tweeted. ...

Get it? McCain can pun! And he can make fun of Brits who play silly sports while wearing sweaters (like Churchill)! Who ever heard of a Mormon cricket anyway?

Pretty much everyone in Utah, I would think. Since an infestation of Mormon crickets nearly wiped out Brigham Young and the rest of the Mormon settlers of Salt Lake during their first year, those crickets are pretty much stuck in the locals' historical memory. There's a monument in Temple Square to a pair of seagulls, because if seagulls hadn't eventually eaten many of those crickets the Mormons in Salt Lake would have starved to death.

So that's all it is. A local pest species that once almost killed off the original founders of the state. No big deal. After all, why spend a whole million to prevent local agriculture from swarms of ravenous locusts? And anyway who would know such a thing? Apparently not a Republican Senator from a neighboring state. Good thing there are no Republicans in Utah.