My mother loved game shows be they lowbrow. middlebrow or highbrow. She was a working woman but as a realtor, she set her own hours. She was often there when I got home from school with some sort of game show blasting on the tube.

Her favorites were Jeopardy and Password. In fact, she was a Betty White stan long before it was fashionable because of Password. White’s husband Allen Ludden was the host of Password and Betty was a killer player who was nothing like the lovable ditz she played on The Golden Girls.

Another favorite was What’s My Line? The show had a long run on CBS but was in syndication by the time I recall watching it with mom. The panel usually consisted of the type of people who don’t do game shows anymore including Bennett Cerf the co-founder of Random House. That was a fact that pleased mom as she was an avid reader. If Mr. Cerf mentioned a book, it often meant a trip to the library or bookstore. One of my earliest pun memories was saying “Cerf’s Up” whenever Bennett was introduced.

You know what that means, a brief musical interlude:

The format of the show was simple yet somehow elegant. It began with ordinary people trying to fool the panel about their occupation or other odds & sods. The final segment involved the panel masking up and a well-known guest signing a chalkboard. It was called-you guessed it-the Mystery Guest segment. The Mystery Guest often used a silly voice to fool the savvy panelists.

Here’s a full episode with Groucho Marx killing it on the panel and Claudette Colbert as the Mystery Guest:

That concludes this lengthy stroll down memory lane.

The quote of the day follows up on yesterday’s post about stupid Republican tricks as personified by Forrest Gump’s evil twin.

It’s time for our Mystery Guest to sign in with the quote, which comes from 2013:

We must stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It’s time for us to articulate our plans and visions for America in real terms. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. We’ve had enough of that.

We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters. We need to trust the smarts of the American people. We have to stop dumbing down our ideas and stop reducing everything to mindless slogans and tag lines for 30-second ads. We must be willing to provide details in describing our views.

Nobody listened. The current GOP is ten times dumber than it was in 2013.

I won’t make you guess. The Mystery Guest is the guy with the giant belt buckle:

In case you’ve forgotten him it’s former Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal hereinafter PBJ.

PBJ not only failed in his attempt to secure the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, he dropped the anti-stupid shtick in 2018 to pander to the Kaiser of Chaos:

Jindal articulates his new, pro-stupid philosophy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today. He addresses Trump supporters who appreciate the president’s policy accomplishments but “wish he’d stop tweeting and picking fights” and prefer “he acted more presidential and stopped insulting reporters, entertainers, senators, foreign leaders and Gold Star families.” Jindal argues that this belief — that Trump should stop speaking like a professional wrestler who has sustained serious brain damage that constricts his vocabulary to a third-grade level — “misses the point entirely. Trump’s style is part of his substance. His most loyal supporters back him because of, not despite, his brash behavior.”

The sucking up didn’t work. PBJ didn’t get a job with the Trump regime. He’s currently a 50-year-old has been. He’s gone from Whiz Kid to Wheeze Kid in the blink of an eye,

I didn’t expect to ever write about PBJ again, but life is full of surprises. I wonder what’s in PBJ’s box of chocolates. Probably peanut butter cups…

That concludes our Magical Mystery Guest tour. The last word is obvious:

The last word was not only obvious, it was premature. It’s Shapiro’s birthday, let’s serenade him with another Beatles song:

Adrastos Out