1. Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill. Merrill, Alabama’s top election official, thinks that making it easier to vote would “cheapen” the legacy of civil rights leaders who fought for voting rights:
"These people fought—some of them were beaten, some of them were killed—because of their desire to ensure that everybody that wanted to had the right to register to vote and participate in the process. I’m not going to cheapen the work that they did. I’m not going to embarrass them by allowing somebody that’s too sorry to get up off of their rear end to go register to vote," he said.
Merrill’s statement translates as: “if you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and travel to where you can get voter ID, which may be in the next county or in your county but only open one day a month, then you don’t deserve the voting privilege.”
This from the top elections official of a state that enacted a strict voter ID law and then announced it was closing dozens of locations where people could get those voter IDs, with heavily black areas hardest hit. Seriously, the logic that black people are no longer risking death to vote, so making it any easier would be disrespectful to the people who fought to get to this point and really the most respectful thing is to make black people work extra hard to vote is the logic of racism, which, by the way, happens to benefit the Republican Party.
2. Congressman Louie Gohmert. In case you think I’ve exaggerated in labeling Louie Gohmert America’s Dumbest Congressman, here’s a sampling of his recent absurd utterances:
“The Only Chance For A Dictator In America Will Be A Democrat”
“Child Abuse ‘Universally’ Turns Boys Gay”
“Christians Will ‘Literally’ End Up In Shackles Because Of Hate Crime Laws”
“I’ll Be In Jail If Hillary Clinton Is Elected And Changes The Supreme Court”
He also linked homosexuality to Noah’s flood . Gohmert is, without a doubt, our most absurdly dumb congressman.
3. Pamela Taylor, Director of Clay County Development Corporation in Clay County, West Virginia, and the County’s mayor, Beverly Whaling. These two bonehead bigots apparently thought Donald Trump’s election was a good time to start spouting off how dumb and bigoted they could be. Following the results of the presidential election, Taylor posted the following on her Facebook page:
"It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady in the White House. I'm tired of seeing an ape in heels."
Whaling responded to the post saying "Just made my day Pam."
No comment necessary.
4. Breitbart’s Steve Bannon has a new title to add to his resume—chief strategist and senior planner. He’s now Donald Trump’s top man in the White House. Bannon is known for his anti-Semitism, white nationalism and conspiracy theories, (in ruminating about the genetic superiority of white people, he once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners), but he’s also not a fan of educated, progressive women. While defending Sarah Palin and other conservative women, he said he thinks educated, progressive women are nothing more than a bunch of “dykes.” This wasn’t some secret audio recording. He said this in a radio interview in 2011.
This man is the top advisor to the president of the United States. Think about that for a minute. Already Republicans like Reince Preibus and Newt Gingrich are taking to America’s media giants to explain that Bannon went to Harvard, he was in the Navy, etc. They are trying to normalize a man who denigrates women, a man who promotes White Nationalism, a man who dehumanizes people of color, a man who is proudly anti-Semitic. We cannot let them normalize this man and his views.
Expect Bannon and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch a spirited assault on minority voting rights under the banner of "protecting" the integrity of elections. Trump’s recent false claims about voting fraud, probably culled from false information provided by advisors Bannon and Roger Stone, is framing the likely assault.
With Bannon, Sessions, and possibly anti-immigrant, “show me your papers,” legal fixer Kris Kobach, rumored to be the next head of Homeland Security, Trump will have a formidable team poised to institutionalize discrimination practices against Blacks, Latinos, Jews, women, immigrants, you name it.
5. Radio Personality Bryan Fischer. On his American Family Radio program this month, Bryan Fischer floated the idea that people who work for the federal government ought to be prohibited from voting because they have a “conflict of interest.” Citing an absurd election map recently posted by Breitbart, Fischer declared that most Americans voted for Donald Trump, while only the elites on the coasts and in Washington, D.C., voted for Hillary Clinton (conveniently ignoring the fact that Clinton wound up with over two-million (and growing) more votes overall.)
For this reason, Fischer then suggested that people who work for the government ought to be stripped of their right to vote. Baselessly asserting that 90 percent of donations made by federal employees went to Clinton, Fischer declared that “we ought to seriously think about whether people who work for the federal government should be allowed to vote, simply for conflict of interest reasons.”
“To me, that’s a fair trade off,” he said. “You want to work for the federal government, you want to get that paycheck, you want to get that job security … you want all that, that’s fine; you’ll have to trade that for the opportunity to vote. Take your pick.”
Members of the military, of course, also receive their paychecks from the federal government and, under Fischer’s standard, would also have a “conflict of interest” regarding who becomes president, so presumably he would support stripping them of their right to vote as well, right? So would all those one-percenters who buy our elections. Wait, that might not be a bad idea.
6. Former Rep. Michele Bachmann. Leave it to Trump’s victory to bring out the best in Michele Bachmann. In an appearance on the End Times radio program “Understanding the Times” last week, Bachmann once again declared that God secured Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election. She told host Jan Markell that the election reminded her of 1 Kings, in which Elijah goes up against 450 prophets of Baal, who are supported by the Baal-worshiping king Ahab, to see whose God can light a fire over their sacrificial offering. After Elijah triumphs, he orders the prophets to be slaughtered for defying the God of Israel.
Bachmann said that Trump, like Elijah, won a “decisive victory” despite receiving little support from the nation’s elites: “This in my mind could only be described as something analogous to Elijah and the prophets of Baal because in the natural, never would this have happened, this only happened in the supernatural and I believe it is because believers saw that we were on the precipice.”
Later in the interview, Bachmann alleged that “there were well over 2 and 3 million votes, at least, so far, that were cast by people who were illegal and unable to vote” in the presidential election, a discredited conspiracy theory that has since been embraced by Trump himself.
Earlier in November on the American Pastors Network’s “Stand In The Gap” radio program, Bachmann credited Donald Trump’s election victory to the prayers of right-wing Christian activists. She said that prior to the election, prayer warriors were spread all across the country and tasked with offering up “very specific” prayers “for specific states, for specific counties, for specific percentages in cities that we needed to have” and God delivered.
“We saw the Lord answer so specifically that only the hand of God could do that,” she said. “Let’s pray and join and ask the Lord that godly believers would be put in these key sensitive positions. People that the Lord will use for blessing for the United States and for the world. This was the number one story of 2016: God answering the prayers of his people.”
After expressing alarm at the possibility of Rep. Keith Ellison becoming the head of the Democratic National Committee, because he represents a “unique blend of both the most radical elements of Islam coupled with the most radical elements of Marxism,” Bachmann asserted that, conversely, “everyone should be thrilled that Steve Bannon is in the position that he is in” as a member of Trump’s incoming administration.
It’s God’s will.
7. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). While acknowledging that voting rights oversight was needed in the past, Sessions, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, said the 2013 Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act (VRA):
“was good news, I think, for the South, in that [there was] not sufficient evidence to justify treating them disproportionately than say Philadelphia or Boston or Los Angeles or Chicago.” After all, Sessions said: But now if you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren't being denied the vote because of the color of their skin."
That might have a little something to do with the law that prevented those states from denying people the vote because of the color of their skin, which means Sessions could not reasonably give those states credit for allowing black people to vote.
And what do you know! We’ve seen what’s happened since. In North Carolina, Republicans passed voter ID laws that a federal appeals court said “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” and a federal district judge described subsequent actions against black voters as being “like something that was put together in 1901.” Another recent judicial ruling declared that North Carolina’s voter restriction measures were not just racially discriminatory, but clearly intended to benefit the Republican Party.
The cat is now out of the legal bag. Don’t expect Sessions to call for the VRA to be strengthened now that we’ve seen that gutting it did in fact cause people to be denied the vote because of the color of their skin.
8. American Family Association President Tim Wildmon. The AFA posted a video on November 29 in which AFA president Tim Wildmon declared that this nation “avoided catastrophe” by electing Donald Trump because Hillary Clinton was prepared to use the power of the federal government to “criminalize” Christianity.
Speaking with his son Walker and AFA’s executive vice president Ed Vitagliano, Wildmon asserted that had Clinton won the presidential election, “the attacks on the Christian community would have gotten more intense.” Vitagliano agreed, saying that “President Hillary Clinton would have fully weaponized the federal government to come after Christians.”
“The secular progressive movement,” Wildmon said, “they have a contempt for especially conservative Christians and I think with the election of Donald Trump, we avoided catastrophe … I think that the secular progressive movement and the power of the federal government, especially the executive branch, was ready to really penalize and criminalize, who knows, Christianity in America, and we avoided that.”
Infidels thwarted. Lucky us!
______________________
And the winner is:
Many worthy candidates this month. I could have picked Bachmann, Sessions, or Gohmert, but since each has been a previous Bonehead winners, I’ve decided to go with a first-timer. Bannon is a good candidate, but he’s more racist, misogynist, xenophobe, anti-Semite and buffoon than bonehead. So this month’s winner is John Merrill.
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