JULY 2019 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1.  Montana GOP Representative Greg Gianforte.  Gianforte announced this month that he was giving up his seat in the House to run for governor of Montana against Democratic incumbent Steve Bullock (I’m going out on a limb in assuming Bullock won’t become President). Yes, this is the same Gianforte that back in 2015 in a speech to the Montana Bible College poo pooed the concept of retirement by invoking Noah—yea, the Noah. The Huffington Post captured a transcript:

"There's nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it's been an accepted concept in our culture today. Nowhere does it say, 'Well, he was a good and faithful servant, so he went to the beach.' It doesn't say that anywhere…. "The example I think of is Noah. How old was Noah when he built the ark? 600. He wasn't like, cashing Social Security checks, he wasn't hanging out, he was working. So, I think we have an obligation to work. The role we have in work may change over time, but the concept of retirement is not biblical."

Just think, if Gianforte wins the governorship, he could rule for the next 550 years! Let’s hope, though, that Montana voters supersede the Bible and retire the moronic bible pumper before he sets foot in the governor mansion.  No disrespect for Noah intended.

2.: Ken Cuccinelli, the new acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Donald Trump has stacked his agencies with loyalists who are not only as shamelessly racist as he is, but also as devoid of basic human decency. That’s why they’re there. Take Cuccinelli, for example, who decided to go on television and say that the migrant who drowned along with his baby daughter in the Rio Grande only had himself to blame.

“The reason we have tragedies like that on the border is because that father didn’t wait to go through the asylum process in the legal fashion,” Cuccinelli falsely asserted to CNN,  “and decided to cross the river and not only died but his daughter died tragically as well. Until we fix the attractions in our asylum system, people like that father and that child are going to continue to come through a dangerous trip.”

But reports state that Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his baby, Valeria, only attempted to cross the river because they’d become desperate. Under Trump administration policy, asylum-seekers have been forced to wait for weeks, sometimes months, and, in some cases, years, on the Mexican side of the border in order to present themselves and ask for protection. The family had reportedly been waiting in Mexico for two months already.

The administration could do away with this metering policy right now. Instead, people like Óscar, denied their right to ask for asylum, become desperate, and are then forced into making more dangerous journeys. Then when tragedies happen, there are no sympathies, no condolences, no thorough, good-faith re-examination by the president and his administration on how we can better improve our system. Instead, officials like Cuccinelli blame the victims, like this dad and child who came here for a better life, and instead lost their lives.

I must say, with a justified sense of irony, that the Trump Administration's multiple attacks on our fundamental democratic principles and our time-honored sense of humanity may be doing more to "fix the attraction of our asylum system" than any rule changes they might establish.

3. Republican Representative Doug Lamborn. Families are being separated at the border, with sick children caring for one another and lacking food, water, and diapers. What is GOP representative Lamborn concerned about? In a phrase: Gay rat weddings!

If you remember not too long ago, gay rat weddings became, well, something of cultural phenomena. The popular kid’s TV series, Arthur, showed a same-sex wedding between a rat and an aardvark. The episode is aptly called “Mr. Ratburn and the Special Someone.” Adorable! But some people, including the entire state of Alabama, decided they didn’t want to air the episode. Because… Think of the children?

If that sounds like the start of a joke on The Onion, it isn’t. Here’s what Mike McKenzie, Alabama Public Television’s director of programming, said at the time, in a statement given to AL.com:

“Parents have trusted Alabama Public Television for more than 50 years to provide children’s programs that entertain, educate and inspire,” McKenzie said in his statement to Al.com. “More importantly — although we strongly encourage parents to watch television with their children and talk about what they have learned afterward — parents trust that their children can watch APT without their supervision. We also know that children who are younger than the ‘target’ audience for Arthur also watch the program.”

Now, during, of all months, Pride Month, Congressman Lamborn is harping on gay rat weddings. This time, he wants to defund PBS over it.

“PBS writers deemed it appropriate to preach their liberal views on same-sex marriage to America’s young children,” Lamborn wrote in a column for The Daily Signal. “Taxpayers now know with complete certainty that the goal of the PBS cartoon is to impart social liberalism to children. Enough is enough. It is time to stop sending our hard-earned tax money to support programming that is objectionable to many Americans.”

And what does he propose to do about it? Defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS, among other things, so he is “introducing a bill to cut off all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” (The unabashed moral beacon also tried to defund NPR in 2017).

Lamborn claims that “public media programming is becoming more antagonistic toward conservative and religious viewpoints” because nothing says antagonistic like threatening to defund an entire public broadcast.

Astonishingly, given the many mind managers that inhabit the Republican Party, Lamborn has not found any co-sponsors in the House for his defunding bill. Give him time.

4. California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter. There is apparently no end to Duncan Hunter’s sleaziness. Under indictment for misusing campaign funds, the dirtbag stunned observers at his August 2018 court appearance when he threw his wife, Margaret, under the buss, saying:

"When I went away to Iraq in 2003, the first time, I gave her power of attorney. She handled my finances throughout my entire military career and that continued on when I got into Congress. She was also the campaign manager, so whatever she did, that’ll be looked at, too, I'm sure, but I didn't do it," he added.

What a guy! Earlier this month, Margaret Hunter cut a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to cooperate and testify as prosecutors see fit. She may serve up to five years in prison. That’s bad news for Duncan Hunter because Margaret can waive spousal privilege and testify against him. And after the case prosecutors laid out today, who could blame her?

Now we learn that Hunter has been a serial adulterer, carrying on affairs with at least three lobbyists, a staff member from his office, and an official from the Republican National Committee. Prosecutors laid out evidence Hunter used campaign funds to finance all the affairs—dinners, ski trips, alcohol, Uber service to and from his meet-ups with other women. His lawyers are arguing that the money he spent in the course of having affairs with them should count as a legitimate political expenditure.

These women were, after all, professional contacts for Hunter. The relationships, the lawyers argue, “often served an overtly political purpose,” so “Unlike intimacy, the fact that an individual’s relationship with Mr. Hunter includes a professional aspect that directly, or indirectly, relates to his campaign or duties as a holder of Federal office, is directly relevant to whether Mr. Hunter could properly use campaign funds for an expense in connection with that individual.”

What a defense: Yes, he used campaign funds on his affairs, but he only had affairs with women who were also business contacts, so it’s all kosher. Prosecutors disagree, strongly. Hunter’s wife presumably also disagrees.

Hunter also made an effort to get the case thrown out because two of the government’s attorneys met Hillary Clinton once upon a time and got a photo with her. In his motion to dismiss the case, Hunter’s attorney argued he was being targeted because he endorsed Trump. The blame-avoiding sleazebag is a classic Trumpian.

What’s most astonishing is that Hunter was re-elected in 2018 and could possibly win again in 2020 in his heavily red San Diego district—even from jail. This speaks volumes about the kinds of people who have jumped on the Trumpian bandwagon.

5. Republican Rep. Rodney Davis. Davis has a novel explanation for why there aren’t more Republican women in Congress: It’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Mark Maxwell of TV station WCIA in Champaign, Illinois, reported this gem.

“There are too few members of our Republican conference that are women or African-American or are a minority,” Davis told a group of women on Monday. (He’s not wrong there.) “I get asked a lot, ‘what do you think as a Republican with the fact that you have many fewer women in your conference today than you ever have?’” he continued. “I like to remind people that it is Nancy Pelosi who in many cases spent millions of dollars to elect a male Democrat over a female [Republican] in swing districts.”

Um. Davis’ “many cases” boils down to two cases, which if won by Republican women would have brought the total number of Republican women in the House to a whopping 15, which is substantially fewer than the number of Democratic women elected for the first time in 2018, many of them in swing districts previously represented by Republican men.

So aside from having a truly special thing to blame Pelosi for—beating Republicans? seriously?—Davis is basically arguing that Pelosi should have been willing to have fewer overall women in the House in order to have a couple more of them be Republicans. This is a special kind of inane.

EMILY’S List responded in a statement: “To be clear: Of the 40 seats Republicans lost in 2018, 19 Republican men were replaced by EMILY’s List-endorsed Democratic women. We look forward to Congressman Davis joining them.”

6. North Carolina Lt. Gov Dan Forest. Forest announced he will run for governor next year, making him the first prominent North Carolina Republican to challenge Democratic Governor Roy Cooper. Forest has telegraphed his interest in seeking a promotion for almost a year, but most recently made headlines for delivering a hate-filled sermon in which he warned,

"[N]o other nation, my friends, has ever survived the diversity and multiculturalism that America faces today, because of a lack of assimilation, because of this division, and because of this identity politics." Forest also declared that "no other nation has ever been founded on the principles of Jesus Christ."

Well, no. America, as the First Amendment makes quite explicit, enshrines no religion into law, while plenty of other countries, as ThinkProgress’ Josh Israel pointed out, are in fact officially Christian.

Of course, this kind of Civics 101 is rejected by fact-denying fundamentalists like Forest, but his attitudes may not serve him well in a general election. Cooper was able to squeak out a 0.2% victory in 2016 not least because his Republican opponent, Gov. Pat McCrory, had vocally supported North Carolina's notorious "bathroom bill." That anti-LGBTQ legislation sparked a fierce backlash and threats of widespread boycotts, ultimately costing McCrory at the ballot box. If Forest wants to cast himself in a similar role as conservative crusader, he might just experience a similar outcome.

P.S. It's early, but a recent poll from Democratic pollster PPP found Cooper leading Forest 45-41, while a separate survey from a Republican outfit, Harper Polling, actually had Cooper ahead by an even wider 47-37 margin. Praise the lord!
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And the winner is . . .

Really, folks, you can’t make these things up. What a bevy of IGGY-worthy absurdists.

Since Hunter has previously been awarded an IGGY, and been a candidate on a number of occasions, his latest absurd outburst confirms his status as a permanent ignominious sicko. I  will henceforth no longer consider him for an IGGY. So, this month I’m going with Montana’s GOP Representative Greg Gianforte. I figure he has at least five centuries to win again.