Breadbags

Guest blogger, Charlotte Allen, of the LA Times, berates people for mocking Republican Joni Ernst’s irrelevant, stupid, and obviously-fake anecdote:

You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry.

But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet.

People are not mocking her because they’re rich coastal snobs1 and she’s some rural salt-of-the earth. They’re mocking her because everyone who used bread bags on cold, wet days back in the 70’s and 80’s knows you put them on the inside of your shoes to protect your socks, not the outside to where they would cause you to slip on snow and wouldn’t last ten yards on asphalt.

Also people of that generation know only a few would be so rich (and stupid) enough to wear nice shoes on a school day.2 This was back when shoes and clothing were expensive, and Gore-tex was still patented and only in expensive ski jackets.3

Finally, this trick is also not related to the income or urban/rural divide, since I grew up in the richest (by far) suburb in a large midwestern city, and we kept old bread bags for this very reason.

The fact that these two sentences are littered with at least three major errors shows that Joni Ernst never actually never did the bread bag trick. The fact that this right wing nut job disguised as a “guest blogger” in the LA Times is defending such obvious stupidity shows that neither did she.

In the case of Charlotte Allen, by being born in the 40’s she is too old to know about bread bags in shoes.4 In the case of Joni Ernst? Either she was too rich then;5 or she is too stupid to have corrected her too-young speechwriter.6


  1. OTOH, the blogger, Charlotte Allen, brags about how she writes for periodicals based in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC and went to school in Stanford , Harvard, and USC. Speaking of rich, costal snobs? The hypocrisy… IT BURNS! 
  2. Exception: When I went to private school, we were required to wear leather shoes in school. In that case, people often wore docksiders or penny loafers which some others would call “nice shoes.” If you were worried that they’d fall victim to salt and water before you outgrew them (unlikely as you were going through puberty and wore these shoes all day every weekday), you would buy a pair of galoshes to cover them up or wear boots and switch them before class started. 
  3. Now tell me you wore 80’s ski jackets taped to the outside of your shoes and then we’re getting somewhere! 
  4. Plastic bread bags were popularized in the 70’s 
  5. We can eliminate her coming from a warm weather state since she grew up in Iowa. 
  6. Clothing got cheaper, better, and (in cold weather areas) lined in Gore-tex.