Senator Joni Ernst in a campaign ad. (photo: YouTube)
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
22 January 15
enator
Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) shared more folksy stories of her childhood on
Wednesday, telling reporters that she used to wear a bucket on her head
for no apparent reason.
“I’d be walking outside our house and see a bucket
lying there, and I’d say to myself, ‘That’s a perfectly good bucket, I
think I’ll put it on my head,’ ” she said. “It wasn’t because I needed a
hat or anything. I must have had, oh gosh, a half-dozen hats or so. I
just wanted to wear a bucket.”
Ernst said that during her youth, she was known for
poking a hole in a large piece of corrugated cardboard and wearing it as
a poncho.
“I can’t for the life of me tell you why I did that,”
she said. “I just liked the look of it, I guess. Nobody paid much
attention to it. People sure don’t notice your cardboard poncho when
you’re wearing a bucket on your head.”
When asked why she was sharing these stories, Sen.
Ernst considered her answer carefully. “I think people like to get to
know their representatives in Washington as people,” she said. “And it
helps to know that one of them used to wear buckets on her head,
corrugated cardboard ponchos, and scuba flippers instead of gloves. Did I
tell you I used to wear scuba flippers instead of gloves? To this day
I’ll be darned if I know why I did that.”