1. White House Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It’s about time to list Sanders as an IGGY candidate. Multiple lying certainly constitutes ignominious behavior. Her latest whopper involves confirming the story she told after Trump’s total fabrication of why he fired James Comey.
While Trump forced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to write him a cover excuse for dropping Comey on the incredible premise that Trump was upset over Comey being too mean to Hillary Clinton, Sanders attempted to post-justify the firing with another idea: that Comey was simply bad at his job.
MS. SANDERS: The President, over the last several months, lost confidence in Director Comey. The DOJ lost confidence in Director Comey. Bipartisan members of Congress made it clear that they had lost confidence in Director Comey. And most importantly, the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.
The idea that the FBI “rank and file” was anti-Comey and happy about his dismissal was one that Sanders returned to again and again.
When asked why she was so confident the rank and file within the Bureau lost faith in the FBI director, when an inside special agent previously wrote that “the vast majority of the Bureau is in favor of Director Comey . . .the real losers here are 20,000 front-line people in the organization because they lost the only guy working here in the past 15 years who actually cared about them,” Sanders offered this response:
“Well, I can speak to my own personal experience. I’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the President’s decision. And I think that we may have to agree to disagree. I’m sure that there are some people that are disappointed, but I certainly heard from a large number of individuals — and that’s just myself — and I don’t even know that many people in the FBI.”
But now thousands of FBI memos from that period have been released, and Lawfare has detailed their contents. The truth is that agents at all levels were shocked and upset by Comey’s firing, and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was pushing an enormous lie—which is the one thing about this affair that’s not shocking.
“Countless” is obviously Sarah Sanders’ term for “zero.” Because that’s how many FBI agents seemed to be in agreement with the decision as indicated by the recently released emails.
Since the Comey firing, Trump has been engaged in an ongoing effort to demean and degrade the FBI for the sole purpose of protecting himself from the continuing revelations being uncovered in the Russia investigation. And Sarah Sanders has continued to do what she’s done every day on the job—lie her ass off.
2. Anonymous Trumpster (?). The anonymous action described below is either totally absurd, and therefore worthy of an IGGY, or an example of Saturday Night Live satire, and therefore worthy of magnanimous recognition.
You can’t make this up: Donald Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Say what? Who would nominate the hate-filled, incompetent, bloated windbag, fraud for a peace prize? Well, we don’t know; the nominator, an American who recommended Trump for his “ideology of peace by force,” remains anonymous. The BBC is reporting that the nomination is being investigated.
The director of the Nobel Institute said there were concerns that Mr. Trump's nomination may have been falsified: "I can say that we have good reason to believe that [the nomination of Mr. Trump] is a fake, ” Nobel Institute Director Olav Njølstad told Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
There are a few reasons why the committee might consider Trump’s nomination a fake. At the top of the list is because he’s Donald Trump and has yet to speak a word that was not filled with belligerence toward anyone not named Donald Trump.
As we’ve learned, nothing is “unthinkable,” when the president of the United States of America is Donald Trump, so it seems possible—even probable—that someone in Trump’s camp tendered the nomination. Maybe it was the egocentric Trumpster himself. It could also be the work of a prankster. You be the judge.
3. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Ross appeared on CNBC Friday to argue that Trump's steel tariffs are "no big deal," and he brought props with him to prove it, including a can of Cambell's soup, a can of Coke, and a can of beer. Holding up the chicken noodle, he opined:
"In a can of Campbell's Soup, there are about 2.6 pennies worth of steel. So if that goes up by 25 percent, that's about six-tenths of 1 cent on the price on a can of Campbell's soup," Ross argued. "I just bought this can today at a 7-Eleven ... and it priced at a $1.99. Who in the world is going to be too bothered?"
Who indeed? Maybe Campbell, who noted "Any new broad-based tariffs on imported tin plate steel—an insufficient amount of which is produced in the U.S.—will result in higher prices on one of the safest and more affordable parts of the food supply."
Or maybe a family relying on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to be able to eat. Because that family gets, on average, "about $126 per month [per person], which works out to about $1.40 per person per meal."
So that can of Campbell's chicken noodle is already practically a luxury item. It'll be totally out of reach if Trump's proposed 30 percent cut in food stamps is enacted.
I wonder if Ross will stick to his “no big deal” stance when a full-blown trade war develops?
4. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. March came in like a lion and went out with a Lamb, and poor Paul Ryan is beside himself trying to minimize Conor Lamb’s PA-18 win and, if you can believe this, glorify Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally as having been a Republican salvation. Ryan said,
“The public polling wasn’t looking so good, and the President came in and helped close this race to where it is now, which is within a few hundred votes.”
Ryan told reporters that Democrat Conor Lamb “ran as a pro-gun, pro-life, anti-Nancy Pelosi conservative.” He did not mention that Lamb also ran a staunchly pro-union, pro-Obamacare and anti-GOP tax bill race, or that Lamb has said publicly that he will not vote for abortion restrictions favored by Republicans.
Ryan also claimed that “there are more Democrats in that district than Republicans,” though President Donald Trump won the district by 20 points in 2016. Though the race has been viewed by both parties as a brutal referendum on Trump’s presidency and a sign of building Democratic enthusiasm ahead of November’s midterm elections, where many far more purple districts will be contested, Ryan insisted that Trump did not negatively impact the special election.
Of course, the Republicans are rattling sabers and not conceding defeat. The National Republican Congressional Committee says it is "ready to ensure that every legal vote is counted," said Matt Gorman, the NRCC communications director. "Once they are, we’re confident Rick Saccone will be the newest Republican member of Congress."
For Donald Trump to have won this district by 20 points and for an up and coming young Democrat to win the House seat 14 months later is nothing short of a stunning reversal given the way politics usually works. Let’s hope that this is a sign of a beautiful blue wave in November. Maybe we can outdo 2006, where Democrats picked up 34 House seats.
The Republicans are embarrassed, and with good reason, and the spinning will continue as they become more and more aware of how toxic Donald Trump really is. Fox News is already spinning this as a Republican victory because “it wasn’t a blowout and Democrats should be scared.” Right. This year is going to be very interesting.
Next, a couple of tidbits on the Parkland shooting.
5. Governor Henry McMaster (R-SC). The ever-righteous governor gave a few of his deep Republican thoughts on Wednesday’s nationwide walkouts protesting gun violence, to a news crew from South Carolina ETV.
“It appears that these school children, innocent school children, are being used as a tool by [this] left-wing group to further their own agenda. It is not about the tragedy. It is not about the school children. And what we can all do, and what these students should do, I imagine a lot of them intend to do, is to pray and to hope for those families of the folks who were slain. . . But this is a tricky move, I believe, by a left-wing group, from the information I’ve seen, to use these children as a tool to further their own means. It sounds like a protest to me. It’s not a memorial, it's certainly not a prayer service, it’s a political statement by a left-wing group and it’s shameful.”
Do these mysterious “left-wing” activists include David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting you have so profoundly prayed and hoped for, Gov. McMaster? Why yes it does. McMaster’s idiocy wasn’t missed by Hogg, who tweeted:
“That's fine those future voters will not reelect you and outlive you too can't wait to see what the history textbooks our generation writes will have to say about people like you cough cough it’s called the first amendment.”
6. The NRA and Fellow IGGY Rick Santorum. As the nationwide fury over flimsy national gun laws continues, the National Rifle Association insists they are not, in fact, the conspiracy-peddling domestic terrorism lobby that their critics have declared them to be. As evidence of their non-crackpot, non-violence-defending stances, they spent the last week promoting lunatic conspiracy theories about the marchers with claims that they are the "violent" ones, and that it's not that American students have their own burning desire to not be murdered in school, it's that a secret cabal of "Hollywood elites" are tricking them into it.
“Today’s protests aren’t spontaneous,” the post declared. “Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones.”
This should be further evidence that whatever the group once was, it is now merely a violence-peddling, conspiracy-mongering cult. Organization literature and videos regularly promote lunatic theories of so-and-so coming to take your guns, or of terrorists appearing suddenly at your doorstep, or hint darkly of the need, possibly ultimately to take up arms against our nation's own government and start murdering people if the cult feels some future law has slighted them one too many times.
At this point this includes belittling survivors of actual shootings, because of course it does. And as always, the only "solution" any of the cult members will tolerate is the one where more people are doing shooting:
In another NRA TV clip posted Thursday, it harangued the Parkland survivors, saying “no one would know your names” if someone with a gun had stopped the shooting at their school. “These kids ought to be marching against their own hypocritical belief structures.” “The only reason we’ve ever heard of them is because the guns didn’t come soon enough.”
It is a cult. It is a lobby for gun violence, specifically. It is a garbage fire with membership cards.
The NRA’s ignominious dribble was echoed by former Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who now, as a self-styled “pundit,” exists only as evidence of a decaying media landscape dedicated more to sensationalism than to either news or the needs of the nation. The "news network" CNN pays him to come on television and say outrageous things, which they then can peddle as news of itself: the frothy mixture was perfectly willing to oblige with his own dismissal of student marchers. Why are you marching, and demanding laws? Why not shut up and learn to be more responsible victim?
“How about kids, instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations where there is a violent shooter?” Santorum said.
CPR classes? Before you get angry with Rick Santorum for being, well, whatever that is, take a breath: redirect that anger to CNN, which pays this tediously phony and otherwise unemployable pie-tosser to be an asshole on television so that they have something to talk about. Rick Santorum doesn't know a damn thing about gun violence. Rick Santorum couldn't care less if 17 Florida high schoolers were shot dead on a given day or 1700. He has nothing to offer our national conversation.
7. Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Convicted criminal and proud racist Joe Arpaio said this week at the Western Conservative Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, that while he’s mostly shut his piehole about his racist and debunked birther lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., he plans to resurrect it should he become the next U.S. senator from Arizona:
“I talked about another thing that made a little news,” Arpaio said. “I don’t talk about it anymore—until I become the U.S. senator…but that’s something to do with a document. If I ask you guys—I’m a nothing now, but if I was still the sheriff I could ask for your birth certificate.”
“So I’m kind of dropping that right now,” he said, “but I’m going to tell you something: 100 percent we proved that’s a fake document. One hundred.”
Joe has one thing right: he is indeed nothing now after getting his ass handed to him during the last election and nearly ending up in the slammer after disobeying a federal judge’s order to stop racially profiling brown drivers. It’s not clear if he would have gotten any jail time, and we’ll never know because he became the very first person to be pardoned by the birther-in-chief, Donald Trump. Birds of a feather racist together.
There’s plenty of speculation that Arpaio’s long-shot run is nothing more than a fundraising ploy—and he does love publicity stunts, the more grotesque the better—so this latest statement from him could just be another way to get himself another headline. What is most sickening is that since the Republican president of the United States worked orange-arm-in-arm with Arpaio to spread the ugly lie that is birtherism, the former Maricopa County sheriff is no longer the fringe of his party.
_________________And the winner is:
CPR classes! This month’s IGGY winner is Rick Santorum, with a boost from the NRA.
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