JUNE 2019 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Fellow Military Hawks. Senator Cruz joined the hawk bandwagon in calling for the creation of a Space Force, except Cruz one-upped them all in offering an ignominious line of reasoning. To get the full effect of the Cruz absurdity, you need to experience it with the full pomposity with which Republican he brought this dire warning to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Since the ancient Greeks first put to sea,” said Cruz, “nations have recognized the necessity of naval forces and maintaining a superior capability to protect waterborne travel and commerce from bad actors. Pirates threaten the open seas, and the same is possible in space.”

No. No, it is not possible. Poor Somalis, living in chaos and an economic system that runs on bullets, may board rubber dinghies to assault tankers off their coast. No one, no one, is or will be cobbling together a backyard rocket to buckle their swash in space.

Cruz went on: “In this same way,” he said, “I believe we too must now recognize the necessity of a Space Force to defend the nation and to protect space commerce and civil space exploration.”

At other points in Cruz’s complete speech, he discusses how a Space Force may be needed to protect America in “asteroid mining in which a small asteroid could contain rare materials such as platinum worth billions.” Which seems to overlook a few things.

First, we’re not doing any asteroid mining. We’re not going to be doing any asteroid mining for decades, at best. Second, anyone with the technology to be a pirate against asteroid miners could just mine their own asteroid. Third, the material from asteroids only has value if there is somewhere to sell it; you can’t, shockingly, smuggle an asteroid back to Earth for easy sale at the local bodega.

But hey, screw facts. Ted Cruz is on the floor of the Senate, demanding billions to fight space pirates. That is where we are.

Not only is a Space Force an unneeded boondoggle, it promises to bring consequences that will prove costly to our national and domestic security. It will add fuel to interservice rivalries, bloat the defense budget, impose mind-boggling bureaucratic hurdles, undermine the capacity of our military forces to operate with any sense of coordination, and compromise domestic spending priorities which will bear the burden of expanded defense spending. Been there done that. Think back when the Air Force split off from the Army Air Corp after World War II. How did that work out? Each service developed their own priorities, which don’t always square well with combat effectiveness. Think of the low priority the Air Force attaches to close ground support for our troops—not something they relish, as our troops, as well as advocates for the highly effective A-10 Warthog, have sadly learned.

But wait, another independent service will mean more defense spending, which should make the military-industrial complex salivate. Therein lies the crux.

Cruz points out that nations such as China have developed satellite-killing technology, but those are essentially missiles launched from the Earth. We have them as well. It’s not clear how any “space force” would help with this situation in any way. You can’t sneak up on someone in space. You can’t dash out from the nearest shoreline, make a quick hit, and return.

There are no space pirates. Unfortunately, there is a Ted Cruz.

2. Fox News Favorite Tucker Carlson. On his Tucker Carlson Tonight show, the maniacal Carlson warned about the supposed dangers of Democrats’ threats to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee.

“These people are fascist,” Carlson proclaimed in response to footage of Reps. Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Steve Cohen (D-TN) calling for Barr to be imprisoned, a possible — but unlikely — discipline for contempt of Congress.

“Lock him up! Send him to jail!” the Fox News host mocked these Democratic lawmakers, with no sense of irony.

Come on, ThinkProgress! Stop being so obtuse. He said “lock him up,” not “lock her up.” Totally different.

With the support of Carlson’s network, President Donald Trump has made threats to prosecute political opponents a staple of his administration and campaign. Trump continues to encourage “Lock her up!” chants about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at rallies, more than two years after the 2016 election. The president has urged his Justice Department to investigate Clinton and other Democrats in numerous tweets. Trump also suggested recently that Barr should look into launching probes connected to Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and former Vice President Joe Biden.

Ah, yes, but if the president does it, it’s not fascism. Isn’t that a DOJ policy or something?

Then again, this is the same network that thought a president who wore a tan suit was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and then later pooh-poohed a 400-plus page report that clearly enumerated obstruction of justice, dozens of secret contacts with Russians bent on attacking our country, and a systematic coverup of those contacts. Oh, and they didn’t really care about the porn star payoff either.

Because, you know, fair and balanced.

I guess fascism is in the eye of the beholder, and after all, the entire GOP has been beer-goggling Donald Trump for nearly four years now. But seriously, a lot of people work at Fox News. Someone has to point out the irony to Little Lord Fauntleroy, right? Then again, they can’t be embarrassed. That’s been clear for some time now.

3. Republican Representative Duncan Hunter, Jr (R-Ca). The shameless hypocrite Hunter, currently under indictment over his misappropriation of roughly a quarter million dollars in campaign funds, continues to go out on a limb in his party's new defense of American war criminals. First Hunter argued for a pardon of former Navy SEAL team leader Edward Gallagher, accused by his fellow soldiers of repeatedly targeting innocent civilians in Iraq, , by dismissively telling a town hall that that he, too, was guilty of "taking a picture of [a] body and saying something stupid."

This admission of a plain breach of military rules by ex-Marine Hunter did not do much to discredit the more damning accusations against Gallagher, that he so consistently targeted innocent civilians with his sniper rifle that his fellow SEALs tampered with his weapon in order to throw off his aim. So, Hunter is now back with a more on-point defense of the intentional targeting of civilians, arguing that he did that too.

"I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians, if not scores, if not hundreds of civilians," Hunter said. "Probably killed women and children, if there were any left in the city when we invaded. So, do I get judged, too?"

Though the US-led coalition's assault on rebel-held Fallujah was indeed noted for what some considered indifference to the city’s remaining citizens, accidentally killing hidden civilians in an artillery fight against heavily armed opponents is, to most minds, substantively different from targeting individual children walking on riverbanks during non-combat periods and gunning them down in front of their friends or arbitrarily killing a wounded teen prisoner with a homemade knife.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, in declaring that "I frankly don't care" about the charges against Gallagher, "even if everything that the prosecutors say is true," professed to be indifferent to such distinctions.

Gallagher's alleged victim "might have been killed in a way that you don't personally agree with, because you say it's against the laws of war," Hunter said. "As opposed to artillery killing civilians, women and children, because it's kind of indiscriminate in a way. It's not a sniper weapon, right. Which is worse?"

Rep. Duncan Hunter may be the perfect distillation of what the Republican base had long been attempting to move towards, in their push to place ever more radical, ever less moral lard-brained sociopaths into the ranks of House Republicans: a defender of war crimes, a petty grifter of campaign funds and a man whose every political argument boils down to an insistence that each of his listeners dumb themselves down to his halfhearted level. You'd be hard pressed to find someone more truly representative of what the party has become, unless it’s, maybe, Roy Moore down in Alabama.

4. Alabama Republican Lawmakers. Did you know that in sunny Alabama a rapist is entitled to visitation rights resulting from his crimes, and can even sue for custody? This means that if Alabama’s recently passed draconian anti-abortion law, which makes no exception for pregnancy by rape, a rape survivor will be forced to bear a child if one is conceived, hence providing custody and visitation rights to the rapist.

Surely this implication would inspire Alabama lawmakers to pass an exclusionary bill to terminate parental rights to rapists. Well, a bill was introduced to do this, but it was butchered by pro-life zealots who amended the bill so that it pertained only to people who rape their own children and are convicted of first-degree rape.

Alabama lawmakers prattled on about how the first-degree rape conviction is needed to prevent fraud and abuse.  Much like their “voting fraud” claims, it’s all fake. Yet lawmakers failed to explain why multiple lesser offenses can terminate parental rights in Alabama without a conviction. Drug use and neglect, for example, only require “clear and convincing evidence”; not so with rape. 

These lawmakers, obsessed with protecting the rapist, either didn’t know or didn’t care that their actions only encourage women to seek abortion, since they now know that their ordeal won’t end when the rape is over. These monsters, on the other hand, have it pretty good: They get to choose the mother of their children regardless of whether she consents or not; the woman will be forced to bear any children; and it will be entirely up to the rapist how involved he will be in his victim’s life.

Terminating parental rights for rapists is too cruel, according to the Alabama GOP. It only wants to terminate parental rights for truly terrible crimes—such as being a Guatemalan immigrant coming here with her toddler to escape violence.

This isn’t happening in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or another Middle Eastern country the GOP attacks for having Sharia courts. This is happening right here in the U.S. The Taliban has nothing on the GOP pro-lifers when it comes to subjugating women.

5. Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn. Four bodies—those of two infants, a toddler, and a woman estimated to be 20 years old—were found near the Rio Grande this month, and one of Texas’s Republican senators responded by blaming the dead woman and trying to score cheap political points. And it wasn’t even Ted Cruz. No, this piece of sneering contempt came from Texas Republican John Cornyn, too often an underrated player in the who’s-the-biggest-asshole-in-the-Senate competition, and one who is underrated exactly because his viciousness is just a slightly spicier version of the typical Senate Republican.

Cornyn’s response to the tragic deaths of a young woman and three small children presumably fleeing violence or poverty? “Sadly, this is what happens when infants are used as a ticket to enter the US due to arcane laws,” he tweeted:

We don’t know the facts behind these deaths—and neither does Cornyn. But we know general patterns of who’s coming to the U.S., and to say that someone who was obviously risking her life and the lives of her children was using those children as “a ticket” is grotesque.

Asylum-seekers coming here with children are trying to save their children’s lives and their own lives, calculating that the risk of the journey is less than the risk of staying in place. That calculation is in fact one of the reasons the Trump administration is keeping migrants in such dangerous, abusive conditions—to make parents think that maybe it’s safer to stay in their home countries despite gang violence or domestic violence, because the danger of the journey will be compounded by the abuse to be inflicted on them by Team Trump. And John Cornyn is only too eager to join in and paint a dead woman as some kind of cynical trickster.
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And the winner is …..

As someone who taught the history of the nuclear age for over three decades, a history laced with Strangelove-esk absurdities (“a nuclear war can be won”), I must confer this month’s IGGY on Ted Cruz and his fellow hawk dreamers and sycophants. A space force? This is even more absurd that Ronald Reagan’s Starwars fantasy, which was ridiculous beyond comprehension.



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