SEPTEMBER 2019 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. John Merrill, the current Secretary of State of Alabama. Merrill recently asserted, among other bizarre and archaic ideas, that people are “too interested in homosexual activities” and that’s why he can’t find any good television. As reported by Yellowhammer News, an Alabama-based publication, Merrill went on to clarify that by good TV, he has shows like The Virginian, Bonanza, and I Love Lucy in mind.

“That’s what we’ve allowed to happen,” he said on the loss of golden TV… and the rise of homosexuality.

Merrill, by the way, is running in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in 2020. Yup: Doug Jones’s seat. He’s actually one of five Republicans looking to oust Jones; a list that includes former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.

But back to today’s story.

The answer came about because Merrill was participating in a town hall in Dekalb County over the weekend. One audience member asked Merrill about cultural shifts, and how our country’s principles have “eroded.” While a question that’s probably clearly coded for this sort of response, Merrill’s doesn’t shy away from hate.

“We’re too interested in homosexual activities,” he replied. “We’re too interested in seeing how this family’s finding a way to mess on this family or to see how people are trying to date on TVor having wife-swapping on TV. That’s what we watch. When we push back against that, and we quit allowing it to be in our homes – that’s how those changes have occurred because we’ve allowed them to slowly but surely come into our lives.”

“I meant what I said,” Merrill said in response to AL.com, where he had the generous opportunity to clarify his obviously offensive words. “People are too interested in anything that is not uplifting, edifying. They’re too busy being preoccupied with homosexual activities and the wife swap shows.”

Merrill lamented he can no longer find shows “that are based on biblical foundations. … shows that promote family and culture with a father, a mother, and children based on biblical teachings and biblical principles on which our nation was founded." Yikes.

He also doubled down on his point in an interview with NBC News, when he criticized coverage of the U.S. Women’s soccer national Team. “The national narrative began to be one of divisiveness,” he claimed to NBC, “and if you can’t support these young ladies because they’re gay and because they want to wear the LGBT flag on their uniform, as opposed to just appreciating the great talent that they have, and the unbelievable athletic accomplishments that they produce, that's a problem.”

The problem is (actually) homophobia. Maybe for some wholesome TV, he can check out the gay rat wedding on Arthur that the public broadcast channel in his state refused to play? It’s a kid’s TV show, after all.


2. Congressional Republicans. In the wake of the most recent mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, congressional Republicans have been circulating a “memo,” on how to discuss gun violence. The Tampa Bay Times obtained this memo and report that while not shocking to most people here, the depth of cynicism and craven hypocrisy on the part of Republicans knows no bottom. According to the Times, the memo discusses the general rhetorical tricks of handling questions about closing existing gun law loopholes instead of creating more robust gun laws. But it also discusses how to very specifically move the conversations away from white supremacy and the role that right-wing propaganda seems to be playing in most domestic terrorist scenarios like the recent El Paso shootings, where the gunman told authorities that he wanted to kill Mexicans.

If asked, the memo suggests that the first thing to do is to “steer the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.” Subsequently, Republicans are directed to point out, falsely, that many of the mass shootings in recent years were carried out by “left-leaning” individuals. They specifically point to “El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa.” The El Paso mention is a classic right-wing typo, they meant the Dayton shooting—the right wing in our country does have a level of incompetence that one might call its brand.

Did you know that all of those shooters were “left leaning?” I bet you didn’t. Cause they weren’t. The man that shot Arizona’s Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen other people January of 2011, while registered as a Democrat, showed motives all over the map, referencing everyone from Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler, according to people around him, a general obsession with Giffords herself. The Colorado shooters seem to have been motivated, more than anything, by anger over bullying and a perverse sense of revenge.

The most recent Dayton, Ohio, shooting has been the big news story for the right wing of this country because Donald Trump tweeted and told reporters that the shooter was a “fan” of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

3. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Moscow Mitch loathes his new sobriquet, possibly because it's the one nickname that he's truly earned, that hits the closest to the truth. Every week there's a new revelation about something he's done to further Russian interests over the nation's, or even his own constituents'. Like the story in the Daily Beast detailing how this year McConnell has steered Treasury funds to that infamous Kremlin-connected aluminum mill being built in Kentucky while blocking Treasury funds from health care and pensions for coal miners there.

Before the August recess, McConnell blocked a measure sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin, West Virginia Democrat, to use fees the Treasury Department has collected from coal companies to secure coal miners' pensions and health care plans. These are fees collected to mitigate the environmental and social damage mining has created in communities. Manchin wanted the excess funds in the pot to go the coal miners’ health and financial security. McConnell blocked his amendment, saying he wanted a more permanent fix instead. In a statement after McConnell killed his plan, Manchin said, "There are amendments that benefit Americans and West Virginians that are being blocked by one person: Mitch McConnell. […] He is the sole person that is blocking a vote on my amendment to … secure coal miners' health care and pensions, even though it has bipartisan support and would better the lives of every West Virginian, Kentuckian and American." When Joe Manchin is calling McConnell out by name, you know things have gotten extreme.

In part that's because it's much worse than just this one amendment that he blocked. McConnell has paved the way for $4 million in very similar Treasury money to build that Russian-backed aluminum plant in Kentucky. That money was part of a $90 million allocation to the Department of the Interior "to help three Appalachian states cope with the impact of a declining coal industry." Pensions and health care for miners would qualify as something that kind of money should go to. Helping Russian oligarchs, not so much.

People often asked me about how come McConnell has so much power over virtually all legislation—a single person who can prevent even Senate discussions, let alone votes—unless it’s something that fits his right-wing agenda. Good question. Just one more mockery of the principle of majority rule.

4. Presidential Candidate Joe Biden. I’ve tried to keep an open mind about the candidacy of Joe Biden, mostly because some surveys suggest he has the best chance to defeat Donald Trump. I no longer buy into this assumption, first, because the surveys under-emphasize the importance of voter turnout, particularly the enthusiasm factor that promises to spur record turnout by people under 30-years old. Second, because Sleepy Joe continues to reveal himself as grossly out-of-touch with the increasingly progressive mood of a large segment of Democrat voters.

Nowhere was this more on display than in the last debate when Biden scoffed at the question and gave a word-salad answer to moderator Lindsay Davis’ very serious and reasonable question about reparation payments to African Americans.

Davis brought up an old Biden quote where he said, “’I’d be damned if I feel responsible to pay for something that happened 300 years ago,” and culminated with, “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

Biden’s clearly found the question ridiculous as he put on his exasperation face and responded:

“This again? Give me a break, am I right?

There’s no other way to interpret that scoff. He’s damn annoyed. But his answer? It spurs the most bizarre word-jumble of the night, one that hints at the nightmare a Trump-Biden debate might look like, with a bunch of arrogant-but-aged white men puffing their macho chests and hurling barely intelligible word salads at each other. Please god, no.

Well, Mr. Biden, what responsibility do Americans have to repair the legacy of slavery?

“Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.”

Every time Biden says “look,” it’s because he’s decided he has something else to say, no matter what was previously coming out of his mouth. And in this case, none of it has anything to do with the question. And from there, it degenerates further.

“Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.”

Say what? What has this to do with the question?

Biden went on to talk about how social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children":

“It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.”

Ah yes, the now-famous “record player” weirdness. It’s clear he’s running a campaign out of the 1990s, sometimes the 1980s, but what’s next, Betamax? 8-Tracks? He’s not just a laggard on policy and politics, but also on technology. Someone let him know about the internets and the Google Machine, STAT!

Biden then spit out more gobbledygook that had nothing to do with the reparations question, boasting about being responsible for giving Venezuela’s Maduro $740 million in aid.

This is the guy so many armchair pundits think is the “electable” one. Why, because his mental faculties appear to mimic those of Trump? Is this the choice that’s supposed to activate and motivate our base to work its ass off and turn out?

Joe Biden does not inspire confidence he will motivate young voters to work their assess off to beat Trump. If his stumbling, bumbling debate performances don’t tell us this, then his scoffing at the legitimate question of reparations certainly does. There should be no place for frank indifference in the Democrat Party for the debt white people owe to Black Americans for the legacies of slavery, discrimination, violence and political exclusion.

(Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a a powerful case for the need for reparations in an article that appeared in The Atlantic and was later included as Chapter 6, “The Case for Reparations,” in his book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.”  I highly recommend it.)

6. All-Around Sleazebag Geraldo Rivera. When Fox & Friends wants to ratchet up the rank stupidity a notch or two, they recall Geraldo Rivera from the Smithsonian’s Hall of Old-Timey Mustaches and put him on the air for a few minutes of fatuous, barking-mad pseudo-tough talk.

And he doesn’t disappoint. This morning, he claimed he wanted to beat up the mean whistleblower who ratted out Donald Trump, who’s simply trying to do his job, FFS

I mean, Trump is trying to run an international criminal organization here. You can’t have rats and snitches, man. That’s not how this works.

Rivera: “This is gonna be what the impeachment is all about, maybe one or two little other things fall in,” Rivera said. “So it’s going to be the president of the United States in a conversation that was intercepted by a rotten snitch, I’d love to wap him, but that’s another story.”

Rivera also lamented the treatment of Trump, complaining the “poor president” was beset by “snitches and rats.”

“Imagine this poor president, his whole tenure in office has been marked by snitches, and rats, and backstabbers, and it’s amazing how he functions at all,” he said.

Seriously? Imagine how many crimes he could get away with if it weren’t for all these rats and backstabbers! He’d be virtually scandal-free!

Also, “wap”? Who the hell says “wap”? Is he writing Bazooka Joe comics when he’s not on Fox?

Good to know, though, that Fox has gone full-on mafia family. At least they’re being a bit more honest about it now.
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And the IGGY winner is:

I’ve selected Geraldo Rivera as this month’s IGGY winner, a recognition that is long overdue. Wouldn’t you like to wap him?  No offence to John Merrill.  I'm sure we'll see his likes again.