AUGUST 2016 BONEHEAD ABUSRDITY OF THE MONTH

1. Republican Senator Snowball Jim Inhofe. The lunatic, Imhofe has become infamous for the ridiculous arguments he offers to deny climate change science, like tossing a snowball on the floor of the Senate in an effort to prove that the globe isn’t warming. Recently he recounted a story of his granddaughter asking him why he didn’t know anything about climate change. His response: kids are being “brainwashed.”
 
During a radio interview, Inhofe stated:
 
“You know, our kids are being brainwashed? I never forget because I was the first one back in 2002 to tell the truth about global warming stuff and all of that. And my own granddaughter came home one day and said ‘Popi . . . why is it you don’t understand global warming?’ I did some checking and Eric, the stuff that they teach our kids nowadays, you have to un-brainwash them when they get out.”
 
I’d like to think Imhofe could be “un-brainwashed” when he leaves the Congress, but his anti-science brain has not only been washed, its been dried and bleached. The saddest thing is that he and his climate-science-denying colleagues probably won’t live to see the full horrors their ignorance has wrought on the earth.
 

2. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell is the latest to gently remove his trunk from Trump’s tail and move into not quite #NeverTrump land. The Mitchster now says he has reservations about the candidate at the top the GOP ticket.
 
When Don Trump sewed up enough votes to secure the nomination, Republicans at all levels hurried to queue up behind him. No matter what had been said in the primaries, there was the good of the party, the will of the voters, Reagan’s 11th commandment, and the most compelling force in conservatism “that’s the way we always done it” all working to get their cabooses tied to the Trump train.
 
But a funny thing happened on the way to Cleveland: Donald Trump kept talking. Republican officials who had apparently passed the primary season in a cone of silence started to notice that, even by the standards of a party that embraces both Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz, what Trump was saying seemed … unsupported? No, that’s okay. Stupid? Uh, didn’t we just say Gohmert? So blatantly racist, nationalist, misogynistic, and religiously intolerant that it was clear he’d traded in his dog whistle for a bullhorn? Not really a problem. They noticed that his polls were dropping? That, they noticed.
 
McConnell recently made headlines for declining to say whether Trump is qualified for the presidency. In an interview with Washington, D.C. bureau reporter Geoff Bennett, McConnell said Trump is not yet a credible presidential candidate. Naturally, the turtleman gives Trump plenty of pivot room, saying that he would need to change to win the general election and revealing what Republicans mean when they say “presidential.”
 
“... people are looking for a level of seriousness that is typically conveyed by having a prepared text and Teleprompter and staying on message.”
 
See, Trump’s problem isn’t that he’s a reality show idiot. It’s that he doesn’t know how to read a script. Notice what’s not in there? Any hint that the substance of what Trump is saying matters at all. McConnell isn’t any different from many other Republican officials. He doesn’t care that Donald Trump is wrong, or uninformed, or dangerous. He just wants him to take a break in his 70 years of acting like a jackass and pretend to be a politician for four months. Despite calling Hillary Clinton "intelligent and capable" in the interview, he still hopes Republicans win the White House this fall.
 
3. Donald Trump. I vowed to not include a Trump absurdity this month, but I couldn’t resist the following. In an interview with USA Today, Trump was asked about comments he made on Meet the Press about the sexual harassment case that led to the ouster of Roger Ailes. The Donald responded that it was “sad” that former Fox News employees were “complaining” about being sexually harassed, and he appeared to question the truthfulness of their claims. When the columnist, Kirsten Powers, asked Trump what would happen if Ivanka Trump faced similar treatment, he replied:
“I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case.”
 
Not surprisingly, the jaw-dropping comments spurred a swift backlash, with women’s advocates and others saying that to tell a woman who is being harassed to leave her job was tone-deaf, misguided and unrealistic. But, what can you expect from a misogynist?
 
4. Vice-Presidential Candidate Mike Pence. Pence offered this absurdity on the Humayun Khan affair:
 
“Donald Trump and I believe that Captain Humayun Khan is an American hero and his family, like all Gold Star families, should be cherished by every American. Captain Khan gave his life to defend our country in the global war on terror. Due to the disastrous decisions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a once stable Middle East has now been overrun by ISIS. This must not stand.
 
“By suspending immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism, rebuilding our military, defeating ISIS at its source and projecting strength on the global stage, we will reduce the likelihood that other American families will face the enduring heartbreak of the Khan family. . . . Donald Trump will support our military and their families and we will defeat the enemies of our freedom.”
 
Wow! Aren’t you sick and tired of Republicans blaming Obama, and now Hillary, for every ill that afflicts our country? And, how about their aversion to facts? What’s wrong with Pence’s claim? Let me count the ways:
 
· Capt. Kahn died in 2004, when Barack Obama was still an Illinois State Senator and Hillary Clinton was in her first term in the US Senate. Kahn was there in a country that was a mess because of the policies of George W. Bush, of invading Iraq, an invasion for which Mike Pence voted.
 
· While Americans continue to die in Iraq, the level is miniscule compared to what happened on Bush’s watch.
 
· The entire Middle East has NOT been overrun by ISIS:  in fact, the territory they control has significantly been reduced.  Yes, there are groups related to ISIS in a number of places, but the actions they take are far more common in Europe than elsewhere in the Middle East.
 
Merely saying that he and Trump consider Capt Khan a hero and that all Americans should cherish Gold Star families does not erase the fact that the Trump team and their apologist right-wing media darlings have demeaned and belittled the Khan family.
 
5. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Alien bugs must have infiltrated Giuliani’s "brain," leaving him, like so many of his GOP brethren, with a terminal case of hyper-partisanship tunnel vision as well as historical amnesia. Summing up his take on Islamic terrorism, the former mayor observed:
 
"Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office."
 
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Rudy Giuliani the Republican mayor of New York City in 2001 when two airliners piloted by radical Islamic terrorists struck the towers of the World Trade Center? Giuliani has become so ridiculous he’s not even worthy of being parodied on Saturday Night Live.
 
6. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill. The bonehead senator, well known for once telling a newspaper that people drive faster through black neighborhoods, is at it again. In a statement made during an interview with the editorial board of the Illinois State Journal-Register, Kirk said that Barack Obama was “acting like the drug dealer-in-chief” when his administration used the delivery of a $400m payment to Iran as what it called “leverage.”
 
“We can’t have the president of the United States acting like the drug dealer-in-chief… giving clean packs of money to a … state sponsor of terror.” “Those 500-euro notes will pop up across the Middle East,” he added, referring to the currency in which the money was paid because US law makes it illegal to have transactions with Iran in US dollars. “We’re going to see problems in multiple [countries] because of that money given to them.”
 
Republicans have aggressively criticized Obama over the payment, which coincided with the release of four American prisoners held in Iran in January and was made public at the same time. The Obama administration has vehemently rejected the charge, saying only that the US government delayed the payment until after the American prisoners got out “safely and efficiently.”
 
Justification aside, Republican outrage strikes me as yet another example of either hypocrisy, double-standard, or historical amnesia—you pick. Seems I recall President Reagan illegally selling arms to Iran, who was on Washington’s list as a state sponsor of terrorism (we were also supporting Iraq at the time in its war with Iran), then diverting profits from the sale--also illegally—to the Contras fighting the democratically-elected government in Nicaragua. Par for the a-historic right-wing course.
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And the winner is:
 
Donald Trump could probably win the bonehead award every month, so I won’t pick him for August. In the interest of sharing the wealth, this month’s winner is Rudy Giuliani.