What's a Fool?

I learned a few decades ago that a fool isn't necessarily a buffoon or a jester, as I had always thought. A better definition is a person whose self-perception is badly inconsistent with how most people see her.

As illustrated so well in this old tarot card, showing a man blithely wandering toward the edge of a cliff, the fool is a staple of comedy writing. He lives in his own little world and is constantly surprised when things don't go his way.

Given my political leanings, I can't help wondering if this isn't a metaphor for the Right.

Let's see...

• Newt Gingrich is running for office in the party of "family values."
• A newly elected member of Congress from Wisconsin complained publicly that his $174,000 salary isn't enough for him, his wife and six kids to live on. And then his party tried to suppress the video, claiming others' use of it is a copyright violation.
• Wisconsin Republicans claim that private school vouchers will help kids do better in school, but when the standardized tests the Right seems to value so much are finally given to the voucher kids, the kids do worse than the poor Milwaukee kids left behind in the public schools. The Republican response? Never give them that test again, so their results can't be compared. And expand the vouchers to all the kids, not just low-income ones.

There's a lot more that could be said, and not all about the Right, of course. But they seem to play the fool in big ways.