A BRITISH WORD ON DONALD TRUMP

A Raging President

I’ve ranted a great deal over the last four years about Donald Trump’s disdain for democracy, his incompetence, racism, misogyny, crudeness, and fundamental indecency. He is the standard bearer for ignominious—a downright evil person. My biggest worry is that the legacy of his wholesale attack on our democracy will endure long past the orangutan’s ultimate departure from the political scene.

Trump epitomizes what our Founding Fathers feared most: an authoritarian figure who would violate the most sacred principles of democratic rule. Intolerant of anyone who opposed him, Trump intimidated and even called for the arrest of his political opponents (and even some allies who had the audacity to disagree with him). He has attacked the free press and threatened journalists. Disdainful of the rule of law, he has run a criminal fiefdom and obstructed justice when his actions came under scrutiny. He implemented nepotism and appointed people to key administrative posts whose only qualifications were to be loyal ass-kissers. The Donald claimed unbridled executive power and ran the White House as his own private duchy, making a mockery of the emolument clause. He has emboldened far right extremists to acts of violence and encouraged white supremacists to act out their hate. Abroad, he insulted some of out closest allies while embracing autocrats and despots, and, abandoned time-honored multilateral institutions the U.S. was instrumental in constructing.  His most dangerous anti-democratic legacy may be his attacks on the right to vote and the legitimacy of our elections.

Looking back on my years of venting on Trump, I realize I may have been guilty of overkill, much like the so-called liberal press which never missed an opportunity for an anti-Trump diatribe. What is left to say that hasn’t been said? What good is there is whipping a dead horse? Well, maybe one more time is permissible, not from me, but from Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England. White gives you a good feel for how Donald Trump is viewed from a European lens. I include his comments below:

NOVEMBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Elect Tommy Tuberville. Alabama has done one good thing in the past few decades: vote for Democratic candidate Doug Jones in 2017 over Roy Moore. Unfortunately, that respite from idiocy was not long-lived as Jones was defeated by a sizable majority by former Auburn University football coach, Republican Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville’s popularity in a state that worships football isn’t shocking. Alabama has been very conservative for some time and Tuberville did defeat former senator-turned Trump-footrest Jeff Sessions.

But being a good football coach doesn’t make you a good senator. In fact, it seems that not knowing virtually anything about laws or voting or the basic layout of our government is now the Republican brand. A few weeks before the election, a recording of Tuberville speaking with the Birmingham, Alabama, Sunrise Rotary Club was reported on. It showed that Tuberville’s grasp of what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was is tenuous at best. Now, in a new interview with the Alabama Daily News, whether or not Tuberville knows what the branches of our government are is in question.

Asked for his thoughts on whether Republicans and Democrats could work more harmoniously this coming 2021, Senator-elect Tuberville explained that government, voting, elections, and stuff is totally gonna happen.

TUBERVILLE: Yeah and that’s how our government was set up. You know, our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three of branches of government. It wasn’t set up that way, our three branches, the House, the Senate and executive.

I guess someone forgot to tell Tuberville about the judicial branch or that the House and Senate are not separate branches. My three-year-old grandson knows that.

Since winning the election, the “X”s and “O”s guy has repeatedly informed the public that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about outside of football. On Thursday, during an acceptance speech in Montgomery, he told that crowd that his father, a WW2 veteran, helped to liberate “Paris from socialism and communism.” 

Yup. Good job, Alabama. Let’s hope you can muster up the sensibility to liberate Alabama from Tuberville in 2026.

OCTOBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Fox News’ Erin Perrine. I thought I’d seen everything from this campaign, but “Donald Trump has firsthand experience with COVID-19 and Joe Biden doesn’t” has to be the wackiest political spin ever. Trump campaign aid Erin Perrine was on Fox News this month and, man, these are some mental gymnastics. We’re not talking Simone Biles here. More like the Dude’s landlord.

The real cray-cray starts at around 4:35:

PERRINE: “And listen, he has experience as commander in chief, he has experience as a businessman, he has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual. Those firsthand experiences — Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those. He doesn’t know what it’s like to create a job other than Hunter’s. Joe Biden doesn’t know what it’s like to have to stand up and serve as commander in chief of this country. Joe Biden’s been more worried about China than he has been about the United States. Those firsthand experiences are what are going to get President Trump four more years.”

To sum up: Joe Biden doesn’t have the experience of declaring bankruptcies, stiffing students a pay-for-degree private college, losing more money in a decade that probably anyone else in the U.S., illegally shaking down other countries to try to convince them to interfere in our election, paying women for silence, or stupidly contracting a virus because he refused to take even the simplest preventive measures.

So, because Donald Trump has been a fuckup his entire life, you have to VOTE TRUMP!

Makes total sense, right?

SEPTEMBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

With revelations about his disregarding the seriousness of the COVID-19 virus, pressuring the CDC to release updates that fit his administration’s “all-is-well” virus narrative, heavy indebtedness and failure to pay taxes, and his horrific behavior at the first presidential debate, among other things, the September news cycle was, not surprisingly, dominated by President Trump. This forces me to include some Trump selections among the September IGGY nominations.

1. Michael Caputo, Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Since he was installed at the 80,000-employee department last April by the White House, Mr. Caputo, a media-savvy former Trump campaign aide, has worked aggressively to control the media strategy on pandemic issues. But over the weekend, he was engulfed in two major controversies of his own making.

First Politico, then The New York Times and other media outlets, published accounts of how Mr. Caputo and a top aide, Paul Alexander, had routinely worked to revise, delay or even scuttle the core health bulletins of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an effort to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light. The C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports had previously been so thoroughly shielded from political interference that political appointees only saw them just before they were published.

Then on Monday, The Times reported that a Facebook presentation by Mr. Caputo the previous night was filled with bizarre and incendiary comments. He had attacked C.D.C. scientists as anti-Trumpers who had formed a “resistance unit,” engaged in “rotten science” and “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants” except for coffee shop meetings to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.” Mr. Caputo said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.” He urged his gun-owning followers to buy ammunition because “it’s going to be hard to get” and warned that left-wing hit squads across the nation were training for violent attacks. He also referred to physical health concerns and said his mental health “had definitely failed.”

To a certain extent, Mr. Caputo’s comments were simply an amplified version of remarks that the president himself has made. Both men have singled out government scientists and health officials as disloyal, suggested that the election will not be fairly decided, and insinuated that left-wing groups are secretly plotting to incite violence across the United States. But Mr. Caputo’s attacks were more direct, and they came from one of the officials most responsible for shaping communications around the coronavirus.

Caputo’s 26-minute broadside on Facebook against scientists, the news media and Democrats was also another example of a senior administration official stoking public anxiety about the election and conspiracy theories about the “deep state” — the label Mr. Trump often attaches to the federal Civil Service bureaucracy.

Caputo predicted that the president would win re-election in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

Why would Caputo make such outrageous claims? Not because he is a health expert, heaven forbid (he has no background in health care), or an astute visionary. No, it’s because he’d Trump’s kind of guy: a diehard loyalist equipped with a deep antipathy and suspicion of scientific expertise who knows how to toe a political line favorable to the Trumpster.

Will these inflammatory words get Caputo fired? Of course not; he’s a Trump man. Why would the president, who on his visit to the fire-ravaged West challenged the established science of climate change, declaring “It will start getting cooler…. Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually,” fire a chip off his ol’ bloc?

AUGUST 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham “Expert” Guest Rebecca Friedrich. Fox News’ push right now is to have schools reopen, children go to school, teachers return to classrooms, and the world to pretend that the COVID-19 pandemic is just a bad case of the flu. That’s the angle being taken (and proven wrong time and again over the past few months), but the propaganda wing of the Republican Party has its marching orders and those orders are to drive their viewers off a cliff.

Right-wing wraith Laura Ingraham used the first part of her show to attack “the media” for questioning the safety of the country’s top officials’ push to reopen schools. Ingraham, relying on her audience’s inability to connect basic math and logic together, pointed out that 166 children reportedly died in 2019-2020 due to the flu, but only 30 children have died so far from COVID-19. She forgot to mention that schools began closing across the country in March and if they had not, and had children not been by and large quarantined along with their families, maybe that number doesn’t match up—and maybe it’s only July.

From there Ingraham, in her “The War Against Kids” segment, explained that “leftist teachers unions” were punishing children in service of some commie political agenda. Ingraham connected the dots to Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, Medicare for All, stimulus checks for undocumented immigrants, a tax on the rich, and a ban on charter schools. But there was more to come as Ingraham had an expert who could dig even deeper to far more nefarious conspiracies.

Wearing a gold cross around her neck, Ingraham, probably imagining she is fighting off the never-ending stream of vampires she brings onto her show masquerading as “experts,” had former Los Angeles Unified school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs on. If Friedrichs’ name sounds familiar, it might be for her participation in a union-busting case that was brought to the Supreme Court in 2015. The case ended up in a split decision affirming the lower court after Judge Anton Scalia died and the Republican Party refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. This is the expert Ingraham brought on to explain why our children needed to go back to school amidst a pandemic.

After saying how warmed she was by Ingraham’s support of her anti-union verve, Friedrichs explained that the pushback by unions over reopening classrooms is a “smokescreen” for a far more wicked agenda: The unions, and specifically teachers’ unions, “are actually using our schools to sexualize our children and to train them in anti-American ideology.”

Did you read that right? Yes, you did. But how powerful are teachers’ unions? Super-duper powerful, it turns out. According to Friedrichs, this massive indoctrination plan is coordinated with “over 180 organizations” including “the CDC, Planned Parenthood, and Black Lives Matter incorporated.”

Yes. You heard that right. (As an aside, Friedrichs explained that she has been “shouting about this for decades.”) I’m excited to hear about how powerful the teachers’ unions are and hope that this will mean that starting salaries for schoolteachers will soon be six-figure affairs! Unfortunately, these teachers’ unions are less interested in lining their pockets like the Trump administration and more interested in sex! Sexy sexy sexy sex! Let’s not get so hot and bothered that we cannot hear how this conspiracy is connected to not reopening schools.

It turns out, the conspiracy is to force children to only learn online. Because learning online is how they do the sexualization-of-our-children thing.

REBECCA FRIEDRICHS: It is shocking what they're teaching our children online through virtual learning. They are teaching our children to sext, to view pornography. They are hooking them up with online sex experts. So, what they are doing is grooming our children for sexual predators to use them. This is child abuse.

Friedrichs explains that many of these teachers don’t even realize that this is what the unions are doing. Not sure how that works, but there you have it.

SCRUTINIZING THE HIROSHIMA MYTH (A REPOSTING)

Hiroshima After the Bomb 

August 6th marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima. As has been the case on every anniversary of the bombing, the event has been commemorated by politicians, media sorts, and most Americans as being responsible for ending the war and thus negating the need for an invasion of Japan’s home islands that would have caused enormous losses on both sides. This belief has achieved numinous status in the United States; most Americans accept it as an article of faith. It has become, as historian Christian Appy put it, the most successful legitimizing narrative in American history. There’s only one thing wrong with the Hiroshima narrative: it's not factual. There is perhaps no greater myth in U.S. history than the belief that the atomic bomb was the "winning weapon" that ended World War II. It’s what I call the Hiroshima Myth.

Despite doubts about the necessity to use the bomb expressed by a number of top military and political leaders at the time (and later in their personal reflections), challenges to the traditional Hiroshima narrative by several historians, and declining overall American attraction to nuclear weapons, the Hiroshima Myth remains deeply embedded in the consciousness of the overwhelming majority of Americans. How did it get so embedded? Why didn’t the highly authoritative 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which concluded that the Japanese would have surrendered "certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1 1945--even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, the Russians had not entered the war, and no invasion had been planned or contemplated," establish a different narrative?

Were the bombings instrumental in ending the war? Did they avert an invasion of the Japanese homeland and thus save lives? There’s much at stake in the answers to these questions, for if the bomb wasn't necessary to end the war, then its use on Hiroshima and, especially Nagasaki, was wrong, militarily, politically and morally, especially when one considers that these two cities were not vital military targets.

At the risk of being called unpatriotic, un-American, or worse, because the issue still touches raw emotions (Americans don't take kindly to questioning the morality of our country's purposes), I will attempt to refute the Hiroshima Myth. Fortunately I am able to draw upon information that wasn’t available when early histories of the bombings were written. This information includes a declassified paper written by a Joint Chiefs of Staff advisory group in June 1945, the personal accounts of a number of top Japanese leaders, and various bits of documentary evidence uncovered by enterprising historians. These discoveries enable a more accurate picture of bomb’s role in ending the war.

In a previous two-part essay, posted in August of 2015, I argued that Truman’s atomic bomb-use decision was not primarily motivated by a desire to end the war quickly in order to save American lives that would have been lost in a land invasion and that the use of the bomb was not the main factor inducing Japan to surrender.  I also argued in a Part III that our enduring belief in the bomb as “the winning weapon” has had a profound impact on American culture and on how we approach national security.  These essays challenged the prevailing beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Americans.  In the hope of stimulating an ongoing dialogue on the Hiroshima Myth and its implications, I’ve decided to re-post these essays as a single post on this, the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. I will re-post it every August 6.  Critical comments are encouraged.  

JULY 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tx). America’s dumbest congressman is back, and on cue. I nominated the moron last month for an IGGY, not just because he was a COVID-19 denier, has been contemptuous of the dangers of the virus, and has been, as usual, eagerly embracing crackpot theories about how to cure it (what if we, like, douse everything in a fine hydroxychloroquine), but because of his comment that he would not wear a mask unless he got the virus, then “you wouldn’t see me without a mask.” He has also, as usual, been eager to call Democratic measures to contain the virus "Marxism," possibly out of genuine ignorance as to what either Marxism or infectious disease safety measures entail.

Gohmert wasn't wearing a mask for most of the day Tuesday (28^th), when he huddled with other House Republicans to discuss how best to defend Trump Attorney General William Barr during Barr's House Judiciary Committee hearing. He wasn't wearing one when he spoke to Barr outside the hearing room from just a few feet away. Gohmert has now tested positive for COVID-19.

The proud Texan has steadfastly refused to wear a mask while at the Capitol during the pandemic. He has spent ample time on the House floor during votes speaking to aides and lawmakers — without a mask or social distancing.

The moronic one had been scheduled to fly aboard Air Force One with President Trump to Midland, Texas,  where he is fundraising and touring an oil rig. He tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday morning during a pre-flight screening at the White House, a person familiar with the situation told CNN. Because of the positive test, Gohmert is not traveling with the President.

Gohmert’s positive test sent shudders throughout the capitol. So far at least four colleagues and several aides who had contact with him announced they would quarantine. Dozens more aids, reporters, and the attorney general have scrambled to get tested. News that Gohmert had returned to the Capitol to tell his aides in person of his test results (can you expect anything different?) unleashed a firestorm of terror and indignation across the House as everyone from interns to lawmakers scurried to try to retrace Gohmert’s steps.

The partisan divide that has gripped our country has played out in the response of Members to the virus, with Republicans reluctant to wear masks, socially distance, or take other sensible precautions. Perhaps this will change. In light of Gohmert’s irresponsible idiocy, Speaker Pelosi announced that lawmakers and their staff members would be required to wear masks when on the House floor or moving through House office buildings. With Republican lawmakers banned from appearing on the floor, maybe the Congress can get some things done, like providing adequate assistance to small businesses and the unemployed.

How has the country’s dumbest congressman responded to the furor he caused?

Smiling in a video recorded in his Capitol Hill office, he declared he has probably gotten the “Wuhan virus” because he had started wearing a mask over the past week or two—not despite it. So, if you want to avoid getting COVID-19, get rid of your mask. Thanks, Louie.

If there is any justice in this sordid affair, perhaps Republican coronavirus deniers will come down with the disease. Wouldn’t it be something if the president got sick?

JUNE 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Rep. Nino Vitale (R-Ohio). Vitale doesn’t think Americans should be required to wear masks because it would be violation of their “freedom.” In his words:

“I will not wear a mask . . . quite frankly, everyone else’s freedom ends at the tip of my nose. You’re not going to tell me what to do.”

Rep. Vitale’s notion of freedom is not grounded in responsibility, reason, and virtue. What Vitale advocates is not a mature construct of freedom, but a raw manifestation of license. It is not traditional “rugged individualism,” but hyper-individualism—in my view, bordering on sociopathy.

Although I have seen no surveys, I strongly believe that the brand of hyper-individualism we find in the COVID-19 anti-restriction protests emerges from the “far right” of the political spectrum—specifically from the Trumpers. These people confuse freedom with license, the throwing off of all responsibility. It is a carte blanche to do as we feel. As such it is incompatible with the communitarian principle that has coexisted in dynamic tension with individualism in America since the very founding of our republic.

This tension which has been one of the great strengths of our culture and government, ensuring that a person does not have the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater or that people of ability are not forced to give to others according to their needs.

Donald Trump and his fellow GOP faithful have scant affinity with our communitarian traditions. Their callous lack of empathy for human suffering and their aversion to anything that promotes the general welfare have reached extremes not seen since the Gilded Age. What’s wrong with shouting fire in a theater? People should be smart enough to know when there’s real danger.

Hyper-individualism is incompatible with virtue and is destroying our community.

MAY 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Tom Cotton. The abject failure of Republicanism—you cannot call it conservatism at this point, whatever that term once meant is null and void now—can be seen in nearly every detail of this nation's failed pandemic response. Scientists and public health experts ignored, or demeaned; institutional planning efforts shunned in favor of the partisan instincts of a seemingly unending list of designated incompetents; everything from testing to messaging in absolute shambles.

And so, we get travel bans, long after the virus has already travelled. We get attempts to rebrand the virus the "China virus", to give the party's ignorant yahoos something to focus their ire on while Dear Leader upturns actual government response efforts to focus instead on supplying lupus medication somebody somewhere heard good things about or muse about how maybe we should try to get the healing power of sunlight involved here, but put it inside people somehow.

That brings us to Sen. Tom Cotton, one of innumerable poster children for Republican Party decay, a man who would have to go to college for the next ten years to elevate himself anywhere near dumb as a post territory. Posts are useful. You can hang a sign from a post. You can hang a sign warning, for example, to beware the raging idiot lurking just behind the post. You cannot hang a sign from Tom Cotton. He wouldn't stand for it. It's the one goddamn thing in life he might turn out to be good at, and yet he refuses.

On Fox News this morning, actual Republican Senator Tom Cotton was not able to provide many ideas on how to make the Donald Trump Memorial Coronavirus Pandemic Response suck ever so slightly less. He was, however, eager to froth that what we really need to do around here is ban Chinese students who come to America from learning about science.

Because, you see, the "Chinese Communist Party" wants to be "the country that claims credit" for finding an eventual vaccine for the virus, and so are looking to steal that vaccine from us, if we develop it first. That plot includes science-minded Chinese Communist students, who are coming to America to "steal our property" and "design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people."

"So, I think we need to take a very hard look at the visas we give Chinese nationals to come to the U.S. to study, especially at the postgraduate level, in advanced scientific and technological fields," says the still-unsigned Tom Cotton.

"You know, if Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America. They don't need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”

The Federalist Papers? I’ll bet 90% of Republicans don’t know what they are. Maybe the learning should start at home. Tom Cotton? He’s the front-runner to be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. Perfect!

APRIL 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Last prominently seen confessing to Donald Trump’s quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine on national television, with the now infamous "get over it," has done it again. This time he made his confession overseas in a U.K. visit, so maybe he thought nobody would notice. It didn't work. The Washington Post obtained a recording of Mulvaney at the Oxford Union, saying:

"My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House," he said. "The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we're a lot less interested as a party."

Until it comes time to wield the deficit as a weapon to cut the safety net, of course.

He left that part out but made another admission about why Republicans refuse to do anything about climate change, which he implicitly acknowledged as a real thing. "We take the position in my party that asking people to change their lifestyle dramatically, including by paying more taxes, is simply not something we are interested in doing." That answer got laughs in the student audience, The Post reports. One can only assume those laughs were derisive.

They never have a problem with asking poor people, senior citizens, communities of color or anyone who doesn't vote Republican to change their lifestyle dramatically by not having enough to eat, or a roof, or health care but they are absolutely not going to afflict the comfortable. Again, that's not news to anyone who has paid attention to the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, but the self-awareness from even a not-big-thinker like Mulvaney is a little surprising. Not that it will make any difference in the long run.

You know that in a second Trump term the deficit is going be used to cut Social Security and Medicare and deepen the cuts to Medicaid. It will be used to continue decimating food and housing assistance and every other program that helps everyone who doesn't count—a time-honored GOP formula.

TRUMP’S NARCISSISM AND THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS CHALLENGE

Trump’s dreadful handling of the coronavirus crisis cannot be explained as a product of his persistent attempts to shore up his cult-like base, the machinations of his peculiar conservative ideology, or even of his stupidity. It can only be understood as another example of Trump being Trump.  His behavior is a reflection of his personality. He simply cannot help himself.

We've seen it all before: Trump repeatedly lying, spitting out misinformation and disinformation, spouting contradictory messages and answers, attacking perceived enemies, demonstrating ignorance and a complete lack of empathy, and congratulating himself for alleged accomplishments. In the familiar Trump style, he has refused to accept any responsibility for missteps, falsely blaming Obama, Democrats, governors, impeachment, the “deep state,” New York, China, the WHO, and healthcare experts for his failure to ensure that the country was prepared for an infectious disease pandemic, then compounding the problem with inept leadership when faced with a real health emergency.  If there were any lingering doubts about Trump’s mental health, his handling of the Covid-19 crisis has put them to rest: the president is mentally unfit to lead this great nation.  

MARCH 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

Since most of the news this month focused on the coronavirus and its various manifestations, I decided to restrict March IGGY nominations to absurd comments made about the pandemic. There have been many. Because of an overloaded Phronesis switchboard, I have necessarily had to pare down the number of candidates to the following few.

1. Fox News’ Don Luskin and Jesse Watters. Fox News is up in arms over the coronavirus. Not because people are getting infected and some dying. Not because of the dangers it poses to humanity. And, of course, not because of the tepid Trump administration response to the crisis. No, the Fox team is pissed at China for causing the pandemic by eating bat soup and then not apologizing to the world.

Enlightened by internet rumors, Fox News resident “economist” Luskin claimed the pandemic stemmed from the Chinese “selling bats in open market-places and then have business travel and tourist travel between that country and the civilized world.”

China hater, Fox News’ Jesse Watters, went after his favorite target Monday night: Chinese people. As host of The Five, a show on which the cumulative intelligence of the panel adds up to the number 5, Watters used the coronavirus as a jumping-off point to demand an apology from China for causing the COVID-19 disease.

Watters is probably best known for his “Watters World” segments, during which he walks around making fun of people, and more specifically for the wildly racist episode in which he made fun of Chinese people in Chinatown, in a man-on-the-street sort of performance. On Monday night’s show, after the panel brought up Trump’s handling of public health concerns stemming from COVID19, Watters showed off some of his trademark scientific brilliance:

“I’ll tell you why it started in China. Because they have these markets where they eat raw bats and snakes.” He then went on to observe: “They are a very hungry people,” he says. “Their communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate, this food is uncooked, it’s unsafe, and that’s why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.”

As with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, the right wing sphere is full of fact-free stories that can be summed up as someone else doing something in some other country to cause the badness, and if we were all white and living right, none of this would be happening.

TRUMP AND THE CORONAVIRUS: CAN THE PRESIDENT GUIDE US THROUGH THE PANDEMIC?

By Ronald T. Fox

Will the coronavirus bring an end to the Trump presidency? Has the man who somehow survived the Russian and Ukrainian scandals, the inhumanity of separated families at the border, payed out hush money, launched disruptive trade wars, responded belatedly and inadequately to mega weather events, pulled out of the Paris Climate agreement dismantled important environmental protections, and suffered the indignity of impeachment finally met a match he can’t scam?

FEBRUARY 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Joni Ernst. One of the problems with electing brick-stupid people as senators, as Republican voters have taken to doing in droves since the election of the first non-white American president broke what was left of their brains, is that those senators tend forever to be saying the quiet parts out loud.

Sen. Joni Ernst, inflicted on us by Iowa for some reason, has been (1) frothingly angry at the impeachment of Donald Trump for merely doing crimes, (2) eagerly leaping to television cameras to (for free) further the very same conspiracy Donald Trump was attempting to get out of the Ukrainian government for a few hundred million dollars, and (3) is now insisting that since Democrats meanly impeached Trump for crime-doing well maybe Republicans will impeach a theoretical President Biden too because screw you, that's why.

“Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him,’” Ernst told Bloomberg News.

For what reason?

“For being assigned to take on Ukrainian corruption yet turning a blind eye to Burisma because his son was on the board making over a million dollars a year.”

Bloomberg News notes, to their small credit, that this is not true. This is a conspiracy theory. In the real world as inhabited by those of us not raised by paint fumes, Biden demanded the removal of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for not prosecuting alleged corruption in companies like Burisma. Biden was acting on behalf of the United States government and State Department to further an official United States policy, one shared by the European Union and by Senate Republicans themselves. Because Shokin, now Rudy Giuliani's best friend after he came up with a host of theories on why everyone in Ukraine but him were the crooked ones, was corrupt.

What Bloomberg News does not point out, however, is that this makes Joni Ernst a liar. Not just a liar, but either a willful propagandist or an unwilling idiot, someone who allegedly is responsible for help writing our laws but who has not, at any point, been able to grasp even the most fundamental of information about the trial that she just fidgeted her way through. She is furthering a lie, and using it as reason why Dear Leader's new enemy must be retaliated against, and justifying both the lie and the retaliation on the indignity of Dear Leader being asked to answer for doing what even her fellow Republican senators agree was a crooked act.

Sen. Ernst may be taking the fascist path on these things, but she is, thank God, not a bright fascist. A smarter Republican would have shut their pie-hole long ago, but she just keeps going, apparently on a mission to show that her home state of Iowa will put literally anyone in a position of Republican power. Liars, white supremacists, you name it.

JANUARY 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. President Donald Trump. I know, I’ve vowed to not include Trump absurdities, but sometimes it can’t be helped. In just his latest ignominious tweet, Trump stated that his list of targets in Iran would include sites of “very high level & importance to Iran & the Iranian culture.”

One would think that the resulting international and domestic uproar to the threat would move a normal person to “qualify” the statement, or at least say he was misunderstood, but Donald Trump is not a normal person. Just hours later, he made it very clear that he thought cultural sites were in fact legitimate targets.

“They’re allowed to kill our people,” he told the reporters on Air Force One as he flew back to Washington from his winter holiday in Florida. “They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”

The furor was a classic controversy of the narcissistic Mr. Trump’s creation, the apparent result of an impulsive threat and his habit of refusing to back down in the face of criticism. On the contrary, his impulse is to double down.

Administration and Pentagon officials moved quickly to walk back Trump’s assertion, which if carried out would amount to a war crime. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper sought to douse the international outcry by ruling out attacks on cultural sites in Iran if the conflict with Tehran escalates further.

Mr. Esper acknowledged that striking cultural sites with no military value would be a war crime, putting him at odds with the president, who insisted such places would be legitimate targets. Mr. Trump’s threat generated condemnation at home and abroad while deeply discomfiting American military leaders who understand the importance of complying with the rules of war (at least professing to).

“We will follow the laws of armed conflict,” Mr. Esper said at a news briefing at the Pentagon when asked if cultural sites would be targeted as the president had suggested over the weekend. When asked if that meant “no” because the laws of war prohibit targeting cultural sites, Mr. Esper agreed. “That’s the laws of armed conflict.”

Trump’s threat was not just a slip of the tongue spewing from a man who is grossly ignorant of history and propriety. It comes from a man who has no respect for laws, particularly those codified internationally. He truly believes he is above the law. He is not only oblivious to the consequences of his assertions and actions; he doesn’t seem to care what happens. After all, his enablers will cover for him.

DECEMBER 2019 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Minnesota Republican Candidate Danielle Stella. Stella, a congressional candidate for vying for Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 5^th congressional seat, seems to think the route to victory requires triggering language and death suggestions. In two vile tweets, Stella referenced an unfounded rumor that Qatari officials had recruited Omar, the first Somali American elected to Congress and the first to wear a hijab, the Post reported.
“If it is proven [that Omar] passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for treason and hanged.,” Stella tweeted. She followed with a tweet sharing a blog post link about her thoughtless statement and a photo of a stick-figure being hanged.

In an even classier move, Stella went on to defend the tweets Friday on Facebook.

”There are MANY hypocrites rage posting here. Breathe, think this through, logically,” Stella said in the post. “To clarify, I said, ‘If it is proven ____ passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged.’” Because this is logical to someone actually entrusted with teaching students, the special education teacher went on to explain the statement. “Treason is the only thing mentioned in the constitution for the death penalty, punishable by hanging or firing squad. I believe all involved should be thoroughly investigated,” Stella said. “I did not threaten anyone. If you are calling it a threat- you believe that individual is guilty, and therefore it is not a threat, it's treason. You and the fake news #MSM are lying by calling it lynching or terroristic threats.”

It’s like there is an outline these Donald Trump aficionados refer back to in crafting these statements: First, spew dog-whistle racism. Then, blame the media. Next, falsely accuse any dissenters. Deny, deny, deny, and cry victim.

Stella didn’t vary from the script in the least bit.

“I believe all traitors to our Country need to be tried for their many crimes,” she said. “I've been outspoken about HRC crime family, BH0, S0R0S and others as well. You are making this into something it's not.” “You are making it about race, about religion, about anything but the truth,” the educator added. “While doing so, you are sending heinous comments, actual death threats, threats of bodily harm, threats to my friends, supporters, threats to post private photos, insulting/attacking my religion, intelligence, race, gender, mental health, physical health, appearance, labeling me with many disorders and diagnoses, and using very non-PC language to do so.”

Insert more tears.

“What you're doing is reprehensible and speaks to your flawed souls and damaged psyches,” Stella said. “The only death threats I'm seeing is from the angry liberal mob where facts don't matter, only emotion, and you're somehow thinking you're righteous by threatening my life, my supporters' lives, my loved ones lives?  No, this is wrong. You are hypocrites. The angry liberal mob does this frequently to our President Donald J. Trump and his family, and never are held accountable for your hatred, your violence, your many threats, or heinous posts like Kathy Griffin.”

Stella ended her rant with “#UnitedWeStand #ForGodAndCountry #FightForUS.”

Her inflammatory remarks got Stella’s accounts banned from Twitter. Let’s hope voters scuttle her quest for public office and return her to a private life where she must deal with a felony shoplifting charge for allegedly taking 279 items worth more than $2,300 from a Target Store.

As is her above-the-fray style, Omar kept her response brief and on-message, tweeting: “This is the natural result of a political environment where anti-Muslim dogwhistles and dehumanization are normalized by an entire political party and its media outlets,” Omar said, “Violent rhetoric inevitably leads to violent threats, and ultimately, violent acts.”

Let's see, President Trump damaged American national interests when he held up military assistance to Ukraine, abandoned our Kurdish allies in Syria, cancelled the nuclear agreement with Iran, pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement. and has acted as a Putin stooge.  Talk about treason; hang him!