My earliest Thanksgiving memories took place around nine dog years ago. For years, our family gathered up whatever our mother cooked for the day, and we hauled it all the way to my grandparents' house about 100 feet away.
It was sort of tight quarters in Bingham Canyon, so we didn't have to travel far to get everyone together. My mom's sister and brothers would all be there, they, too, not having far to travel to be with us.
I'd guess about 20 or 25 kids and old folks gathered for the traditional pilgrim meal of turkey, potatoes and gravy, corn and stuffing. That was followed by only one kind of pie: pumpkin.
The adults all had some kind of wine or other elixir in front of them, while the kids drank soda. Those drinks were the fortification for what always followed, the backroom poker game.
All around the table were stacks of pennies, nickels and dimes. There were a few quarters and the occasional 50-cent piece. I don't remember any silver dollars.
Every now and then, somebody would win a hand and toss their kid a dime and tell them to scram. And, of course, we did, only to return to become a pest and make off with another loose piece of change.
It wasn't a big game, but the stakes were likely high for the time. For instance, if there were six people playing cards, and if each player had between $3 and $5 in coins in front of them, there would have been enough money on that table alone—between $18 and $30—to have paid for the entire Thanksgiving meal that was just consumed.
A 20-pound turkey—the most expensive single item on the table—would have cost around $4. After that, each of the casseroles, side dishes, salads and pies combined would have cost less than $15. Our entire family could have eaten for under $25, which is why there were lots of nickels and dimes left over for poker.
It's no secret that the price of Thanksgiving dinner has risen tremendously over the years. It's also no surprise that people often scream bloody murder when they feel like they're being gouged at the checkout counter, often blaming Joe Biden these days for not keeping consumer commodity prices down.
It's also said that—not the wily, wild ones—but the turkeys living the good life on domestic farms are not the smartest of animals, sometimes drowning by looking upward in a rainstorm. That isn't true; it's an urban myth.
Not that any given turkey is a genius, but they look upward because their vision is monocular, not binocular. So, they tilt their heads a lot. They sometimes even stare upward for long stretches of time, rain or shine. In neither case is such behavior an exhibition of being stupid, which begs the question: If a turkey isn't as dumb as they were thought to be, what—or who—could possibly be dumber?
Enter Jason Chaffetz.
A couple of days ago, Chaffetz took to Fox News and said: "We went to go buy a turkey today. It was $90! It's all a choice by Joe Biden." His complaint was then eXcreeted on X, the increasingly sentimentalist fascist social media site formerly known as Twitter, where Chaffetz was gleefully torched by many.
Blaming the U.S. president for damned near anything is the daily course of things, and always has been. But to blame the president for what was a patently dumb choice by Chaffetz himself surely places Utah's former, groveling congressman for the 3rd District among those turkeys staring up at raindrops—the difference being Chaffetz really could drown doing so, because, yes, he is that dumb.
He is also a shameless conniver, which makes him not only dumb, but dangerous, too. He will lie for the sake of lying and care not a whit for being what was formerly a core value of people in Congress and the media—honesty.
But, let him be the idiot. He's the guy who famously slept on a cot to save money as a congressman, right? At normal grocery store prices, Chaffetz could have bought about 70 pounds of turkey. That $90 is around four times the cost of a full dinner when I was a kid, a time when the average U.S. worker earned under $6,000 annually.
Chaffetz is likely worth millions (he left his $175,000 annual congressman salary for a gig at Fox News and unfettered speaking fees). I'm betting those $90 are less than he pays his terrible barber, for which he gets a crappy hairdo but doesn't blame Joe Biden for some reason. And he's a commoner? Hooey.
Caught in his lie, Chaffetz later posted a picture on X—with the words "Happy Thanksgiving!!"—of a turkey that was priced at $4.99 a pound, was 22.85 pounds and bore a price tag of $114.02. The turkey in question is from Diestal Turkey Ranch, a family farm in Sonoma, California, dedicated to nearly everything Jason Chaffetz regularly mocks.
It is a regenerative, sustainable farm and ranch. It doesn't use preservatives or antibiotics; it recycles and is dedicated to protecting the local environment. In other words, Diestal appears to be a woke enterprise. It doesn't matter if Diestal swings red or blue, they do the right thing. Chaffetz cannot.
I have $90 in my pocket. My 5-year-old, poker-watcher self wants to make a bet: I bet Chaffetz is lying. I'll send that $90 to the charitable cause of Chaffetz's choice if he simply produces the receipt for his turkey—not a day-late, dollar-short picture of a bird in a store freezer.
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