Song of the Day 7/31: Prince, “On the Couch”
JD Vance, the Ted Cruz of the North, did not write in his memoir that he once had sexual congress with a latex glove wedged between his couch cushions. But when someone on the internet said he did – the since-gone-viral tweet cited specific pages, which helped sell the gag – the claim took off. It was swiftly debunked by the media, which made no difference at all. JD Vance and couches will be linked in the public mind forever, like Dan Quayle and his “potatoe” or Sarah Palin and “All of them, Katie.”
Somebody tracked down the wit who wrote the original tweet, and it turns out he knew exactly what he was doing.
He views Donald Trump’s running mate from “a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect” because he had a similar upbringing to what Vance described in “Hillbilly Elegy” but drew vastly different conclusions about social issues. He … insists that he never intended to spread election misinformation but instead just sees some ineffable quality in Vance that calls to mind the term “couch fucker.”
Rick was also inspired by an apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson, who supposedly asked a campaign manager to start a rumor that an opponent had sex with pigs. “Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager responded, according to Hunter S. Thompson’s book “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.” “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
On this cut from 2004’s “Musicology,” Prince is singing about sleeping on the couch, not sleeping with the couch – though it’s Prince, so he probably would sleep with the couch, and he’d write a really sexy song about it, too. JD Vance, on the other hand, did nothing of the sort – but you wouldn’t put it past him, because, as Puck pointed out in a comment, he’s sofa king weird.
“the since-gone-viral tweet cited specific pages, which helped sell the gag”
Reminds me of the fake summary of the Obamacare bill that circulated as a chain email while the bill was being debated during that Tea Party Summer of 2009. Like Project 2025, the ACA bill was tl:dr so it lent itself to summary explainers, whether helpful or malicious. The fake ACA summary included over 50 claims like so:
Old coots would show up at their congressperson’s town halls clutching printouts of this email and angrily read it out loud as if it were the actual bill.