OCTOBER 2017 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH

On guns and the Las Vegas shooting:

1. Republican Senators. On Sunday night, a man armed with an automatic weapon opened fire on a crowd of concert-goers in Las Vegas, Nevada, killing more than 50 and wounding more than 200 people. On script, a number of Republican Senators quickly took to Twitter to offer their thoughts and prayers.

Marco Rubio said: I’m praying for all the victims, their families, and our first responders in the #LasVegas #MandalayBay shooting. Senator Orrin Hatch: Woke up this morning to the horrifying news out of Las Vegas. Shocking and senseless. God bless the victims and their families. Richard Shelby: Praying for the victims and the families of the victims involved in the tragic Las Vegas shooting. Thankful for brave first responders. Pat Roberts: God bless the victims of the terrible and senseless shooting in Las Vegas.

And every single one of those Senators voted against the 2013 Assault Weapons Ban that would have prohibited:

… the sale, manufacture, transfer and importation of 157 of the most commonly-owned military-style assault weapons … In addition, the bill bans large-capacity magazines and other ammunition feeding devices that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Perhaps they should stuff their thoughts and prayers and instead support common sense gun reform. But that doesn’t pay as well as the NRA.

2. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa) and Fellow Republicans. In a speech in the House praising emergency medical responders in Las Vegas, Kelly and several of his GOP colleagues repurposed that praise in the abortion debate over their bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks. Defending the anti-abortion bill, Kelly said:

“There are little boys and little girls waiting to be born. If we do not stand for them, who will stand for them. If we are not the first responders, who will be the first responders?

At the same time, The GOP was silent on the deaths that have been created through guns and irresponsible gun ownership. Here we have Republicans talking about the sanctity of life when it relates to abortion, but not gun deaths. This is pure hypocrisy. Republicans love human life until it’s born, then it’s someone else’s problem.

Despite the horrors of Las Vegas—and Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Newtown, San Bernardino, and Orlando—Republicans remain unified in opposition to any meaningful gun control legislation. Last year they blocked Democrat efforts to ban gun sales to people on federal no-fly or terrorism watch lists. GOP kowtowing to the gun lobby is ignominious in the extreme.

3. Senator John Thune (R-SD). The massacre at Mandalay Bay’s outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas, where 59 people died and hundreds of others were seriously injured, is a clear manifestation of how much damage automatic and semi-automatic guns can do. Republicans have tried, once again, to go to their NRA crisis script: Step one, tell everybody that you have “thoughts and prayers.” Step two, tell everybody they shouldn’t talk about gun safety and legislation because we should all be telling everybody about our “thoughts and prayers.” Step three, say totally insane things after you’ve made sure the NRA’s checks have passed.

Raw Story brings us news that Senator Thune—who many may know as an opponent of net neutrality and affordable health care as well as just being a complete imbecile—offered the following advice to future potential victims of mass shootings:

“I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions,” he opined. “To protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”

Get small? Maybe he’s seen too much Steve Martin.

Domestic terrorist and mass murderer Stephen Paddock shot all of those people from a 32nd floor window in the Mandalay Bay hotel. The people he was shooting at could hardly have been any “smaller” to him at that moment. Maybe Sen. Thune can make himself so small he disappears from all of our consciousnesses-- forever?

The following are three Trump comments focus on what he had to say about Hurricane Maria- devastated Puerto Rico.

4. President Trump. The president spent the day when Hurricane Maria made landfall watching the Ryder Cup golf event. On Sunday, he dedicated the President Cup trophy to the victims of recent powerful storms that tore through Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, all the while defending the government's response to the disasters.

"On behalf of all of the people of Texas, and all of the people -- if you look today and see what is happening, how horrible it is but we have it under really great control -- Puerto Rico and the people of Florida who have really suffered over this last short period of time with the hurricanes, I want to just remember them," the president said.

"And we're going to dedicate this trophy to all of those people that went through so much that we love -- a part of our great state, really part of our great nation," he continued.

Just what Hurricane Maria’s victims need! A Golf Trophy dedicated to them. This is probably the most tone-deaf gesture I’ve ever witnessed any American president make.

So instead of sending his private Boeing 757 to help, the way Rap Artist Pitbull did with his private plane (to fly cancer patients to  the mainland for treatment), Trump dedicates a Golf Trophy? This is beyond pathetic.

At the start of his presentation speech Trump lionizes the Professional Golfers:

“These people, they’re special people. They are born, and then they work very hard, hard on this incredible talent. They really are, talented, talented folks. And really they are people who have good hearts.”

Unfortunately, NFL players don’t. And, as we shall see, either do Puerto Ricans.

5. Hate-filled President Trump. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz begged desperately for Trump to get directly involved and get someone in place to get things done to get deeply needed supplies deployed throughout the island of Puerto Rico before people die from neglect, saying:

“I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot figure out logistics for a small island… if we don’t get the food and water into people’s hands we are going to see something close to a genocide.” … “We’re dying here, we really are dying here.  If anyone can hear us.  Mr. Trump, let’s get the ball rolling.”

Wow! In criticizing President Trump, Mayor Cruz had violated the first commandment of the Trump bible: don’t cross the Don! If you do, you will surely incur a trademark vicious Trumpian vicious counterattack. Right on cue, it came from his golf course in New Jersey where Trump was watching the President’s Cup.

“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must not be nasty to Trump.”

Trump didn’t miss a beat in criticizing Puerto Ricans and praising the fantastic job his people have been doing, saying:

“ ….. they want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job…. The military and first responders, despite no electric, roads, phones etc., have done an amazing job. Puerto Rico was totally-destroyed.”

He also didn’t miss an opportunity to lash out at the hated media:

“Fake News CNN and NBC are going out of their way to disparage our great First Responders as a way to "get Trump." Not fair to FR or effort!”

The egotistical Trump is so shallow and petulant he thinks Mayor Cruz is only talking about him — not because she genuinely needs help — but because “Democrats told her you must be nasty to Trump?”

Would someone please tell the President that the Puerto Rico tragedy is not about him? It’s about getting the people what they need before it’s too late.  That you would turn this into a petty pissing contest, and imagine that this is some little conspiracy of Democrats whispering in the Mayor’s ear “Be mean to Trump, yeah, that’s the ticket...” is honestly lower than even I thought you might ever go, and I admit my expectations were already microscopic.

6. White Nationalist Donald Trump. Making outrageously offensive statements are Donald Trump’s stock and trade. I must say his most disgusting self-centered tone deaf and logic blind statements ever—worse than his attack on the patriotism of “sonoyabitch” NFL players, worse than falsely suggesting that there were non- violent Antifa members, “nice quiet neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and so many more-- were recently directed toward Puerto Ricans, whom he appears to blame for the hurricane destruction that befell the island.

When Trump touched down in Puerto Rico on Oct. 3—two weeks after the hurricane struck—he told Puerto Rico officials they should be proud” they haven’t lost hundreds of lives like in “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” adding that the devastated island territory has imperiled the U.S. budget by requiring hurricane relief funds. In his words:

“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack.”

Facing criticism for the slow federal response to the natural disaster, Trump of course praised himself and his administration for the “great job” and “A-plus” response to Hurricane Maria.

Trump’s insensitive comments highlight for me what this narcissistic man really thinks and feels. Puerto Ricans are not Americans. The island is inhabited by brown and black people who don't speak our white-man’s language. Its inhabitants are less human and less deserving of our attention. We provide relief out of our kindness and generosity, not because as American citizens Puerto Ricans have a right to federal assistance—certainly as much of a right as Texans and Floridians, who received prompt and extensive assistance, for which they weren’t criticized for straining the federal budget.

Trump visited Texas twice in the week after Harvey’s landfall. While Maria was destroying Puerto Rico, Trump was comfortably sequestered at his private golf club in Bedminster N.J. He then proceeded to seemingly blame Puerto Ricans themselves for their plight, lashing out at the mayor of San Juan, after she pleaded with his administration to “save us from dying,” for her “poor leadership ability,” and tweeting that the island’s citizens “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.”

With every passing day, more evidence mounts that Donald Trump is not only a racist, but epitomizes what it means to be a white nationalist. No wonder he pulled punches in criticizing the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville. Racist? White nationalist? Let me stress I do not use these terms lightly. The shoe fits.

Two final selections from a couple of morons:

7. Mike Ditka, Former NFL Player and Coach, and Current TV Commentator. From the Department of You Can’t Make This Shit Up, we have Mike Ditka, a former NFL player and Super Bowl winning coach, weighing in on the protests against police brutality and racial injustice:

“I don’t see all the social injustice that some of these people see,” Ditka said late in the interview. [...] “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of. Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people.”

No social injustice? Could Iron Mike be that ignorant or is he suffering from CTE? Helps explain why he gravitated to the Trump campaign.   

8. Breitbart News and Sarah Palin. A collection of right-wing websites teamed up with nitwit Sarah Palin to spread a fake news story that appeared to pin the Northern California wildfires that have tragically killed over 50 people on an immigrant man who was arrested at a park in Sonoma, California.

Jesus Fabian Gonzales—who “often sleeps in the park and is well-known to law enforcement”—was arrested Sunday after starting a small fire that he says he lit to stay warm, and one that “was so small a responding sheriff’s deputy was able to mostly put it out before firefighters arrived.” Gonzales was taken into custody without incident for one count of arson, but by Tuesday, Breitbart, InfoWars, and other sites were blaring sensationalist headlines, including one that stated that the “homeless arsonist behind Calif. wildfire that killed 40 people is an illegal alien”: Breitbart News and InfoWars offered no evidence to link the man’s arrest to the fires and their accounts of the man’s arrest were disputed the same day by Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano.

“There’s a story out there he’s the arsonist for these fires. That is not the case. There is no indication he is related to these fires at all,” Giordano said in a news conference also broadcast on the department’s Facebook page and area TV stations. “I just did want to kill that speculation right now so we didn’t have things running too far out of control.”

Speculation from, say, Palin, who tweeted that “bet you not a single mainstream news organization is going to cover this story. Not PC or something.”

No, it’s just fake, dumbass. In fact, USA Today notes that Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Crum said that “the only questions Breitbart News and InfoWars asked were about Gonzales's ethnicity and whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement had placed a detainer on him, which would hold him for an additional 48 hours at the jail.” Think they have an agenda here!

And one of the fake news websites that ran with the story also appeared to think California was being hit by one giant fire, rather than over a dozen major fires that firefighters are courageously battling, several of which were hours away from where Gonzales was arrested. But when your goal is to blame immigrants for just about anything, who cares about the facts?
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And the winner is:

Because utter ignorance does not make one ignominious, I eliminated strong contender Iron Mike Ditka.  So, the October IGGY award goes to Senator John “Get Small” Thune.