The only thing I disagree with Romen Borsellino on in this column is that “clowns,” despite pop culture’s incessant need to make them villains, clowns are not dangerous. These people absolutely are dangerous. The “American Dream” and the promises that entails was always more aspirational that reality. The founders excluded women, slaves — who were only a fraction of a human — and other white men who didn’t own property. But now the American Dreams seems even more like a cheap hustle by a used car salesman trying to get you to by a Ford Taurus with 876,000 miles on it, promising you it’s got years of life in it when you’ll be lucky to get it off the lot without the engine dropping out. Watching Marinette Miller-Meeks joyfully exclaim that she wants to flip of people she disagrees with shows what a corrosuive influence the “p**** graber-in-chief” has become to the core of these self-procalimed Christians, and greed-head corporate flunkies. Chuck Grassley is a sad impersionation of the guy who held the government accountable for exesses. Joni Ernst, who was always crass, enjoys affairs with lobbiests trying to curry favor with her committees. Zach Nunn looks like the kind of guy who carried the equipment bags for the jocks so he wouldn’t take a dodgeball to the face in P.E. They’re all creeps, and what saddens more than anything is how much they remind me of so many of my fellow Iowans. We’re dumb and getting dumber, proud of it in fact. We’ll rape the enviroment and drink cancer by the gallon if it helps agribusiness conglomerates make the rich slightly richer every second. We fools. And fools and their country are soon parted.