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!

2. Eric Trump. The moronic Eric Trump, the president’s son, spewed his usual nonsense on Fox News this month, this time to advocate for the senior Trump’s all-so-important right to campaign during the coronavirus pandemic. During the interview, Eric, executive vice president of The Trump Organization, accused Democrats of trying to “milk” needed coronavirus lockdowns for “everything they can.”

“They think they’re taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fil it with 50,000 people every single time, he said on Fox News. “You watch—they’ll milk it every single day between now until Nov. 3, and guess what—after Nov. 3 coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear.”

Donald Jr. took his brother’s insinuation further specifically claiming that the Democrats effort was a cognizant, well organized, strategy.

“Make no mistake . . . this is a very well-organized strategy that they’re trying to employ.”

Prepare yourself for a MACA campaign slogan: “Make America Cognizant Again.”

Apparently not recognizing the difference between the about five people that might gather at a time at a liquor store and the hundreds churches can attract, Eric Trump goes on to criticize Democrats advocating for continued lockdowns as politically motivated. “You can go buy a bottle of vodka at a liquor store, but you can’t go to church,” he said. “You can go to Planned Parenthood and get an abortion, but you can’t go to the public library to vote.” Eric Trump also took aim at the $3 trillion relief package the House passed.  It’s called the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act.

“It sounds beautiful until you start discovering some of the garbage that they put in it like every state in the country has mail-in voting,” he said. “I mean it’s really, really disingenuous.”

He then alleged that his father has “one of the hardest decisions” any president in history has had, which is to “weigh the safety of the public” against the economy. The Trump administration, apparently considering American lives the best sacrifice of the two, has been pushing state government officials to roll back stay-at-home orders.

“You just can’t have the big businesses, the Fortune 500 companies survive while all the mom and pops go out of business because of the dichotomy of the two,” Eric Trump said. It’s an interesting point of view from the son of a man that has prioritized a $500 billion corporate bailout and overlooked the smallest American businesses in the federal low-interest loan program.

Research CBS obtained from the Brookings Institution shows that the Paycheck Protection Program, which the U.S. Small Business Administration backed, tended to support larger, white-owned small businesses because of how to program is structured. "In order to achieve scale and rapidity, they did it through lenders, and lenders rationally said, 'We'll start with our existing customers first because we have all of their info,' and those tended to be larger small businesses," Brookings fellow Joseph Parilla told CBS News.

Still, Eric Trump pretended to be an advocate for small business owners on Fox, predictably laying the blame at the feet of Democrats. “It’s ridiculous what they’re trying to do, and it’s going to be stopped,” he said.

3. More Trump Family Ignominiousness. Not wanting to be upstaged by his dimwit brother, Don Jr. went public to suggest Joe Biden was a child molester. All in fun, of course.

“See you later alligator,” Junior said in an Instagram post next to Biden’s picture. “In a while, pedophile.”

Passing the comment off as a joke, he posted pictures of Biden affectionately greeting children at public events.

Ignominiousness runs in the family. Daughter Ivanka firmly established her IGGY-credentials by bringing the bumbling idiot Jared Kushner, now, it’s hard to believe, the national coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, into the national power circle.

Kushner has showed time and time again that there was no limit to his ignominious nature. Most recently when asked by Time if America could be confident the election could still take place in November, he responded:

“I’m not sure I can commit one way or another, but right now that’s the plan.” Right now?

The president and his three oldest offspring also shared some quality time in the headlines this month when a fraud suit against the four of them moved ahead one step in the courts. Aggrieved investors claim they were lured into what turned out to be a pyramid scheme that did little but pile up cash and pay Donald $450,000 speaking fees. In the vast universe of litigation against various Trumps, this is pretty much par for the course.

It’s terrifying to think that if the Trumpster gets reelected, this ignominious trio will be back to haunt us for four more years.

4. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE). An unshaven and slovenly-looking Ben Sasse (R-NE) left his former high school’s graduating student body an indelible impression of what growing up Republican can lead to if they’re not careful.

From the Associated Press via Yahoo News:

FREMONT, Neb. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse's attempt at humor during a speech at a Nebraska high school's online commencement — which included jokes about students' fitness and psychologists, and also blamed China for the coronavirus outbreak — drew strong criticism.

In a pre-recorded, eight-minute online commencement speech to Fremont High School, Sasse, who is facing re-election this fall against Omaha Democrat challenger, Chris Janicek, vividly displayed the time-tested principle that conservatives and humor don’t mix. Ever.

Sasse said during the speech "95% of all gainfully employed psychologists — and I'm serious there are dozens of them that are gainfully employed —- their job is really just to help people forget high school ... If you’re headed to college, do not — do not — major in psychology. That part’s not a joke.”

The only known person to date stupid enough to criticize the profession of psychology during a global public health crisis, Sasse looked and sounded suspiciously like a person who desperately needed one. Unshaven and wearing a loosened red tie and white dress shirt, Sasse also said that in life, the graduates would at times be asked to climb giant ropes. “If you don’t get that joke, talk to your mom and dad. Back in the day when we were a lot fitter than you people are, we used to have to climb ropes all the way up to the ceiling of the gym all the time.”

After being essentially characterized as lazy and out-of-shape by Sasse, the students (who are all, for the most part, stuck at home and limited in their physical activities), were then subjected not once, but twice, to the GOP’s talking points placing blame for the pandemic on China.

Sasse suggested that the graduates would remember their senior years at their future reunions as “that time when China started a big global pandemic that created the worst public health crisis in over a century and brought the economy to its knees and we had to stay home and everybody was hoarding toilet paper.” …We are going to beat the virus ... We're going to have to have a serious reckoning with the thugs in China who let this mess spiral out of control by lying about it." he said.

The Nebraska senator thus completed his lesson on Republican behavior: insult people you feel may be more intelligent than yourself, mock the physical characteristics of others (while holding yourself out as superior), and blame someone else for problems you caused.

It’s not clear that the school appreciated Sasse’s lesson. One school board member posted an angry retort on his public Facebook page: “You deserved better than the graduation remarks from Senator Ben Sasse. The racism, implying that our graduates are fat and lazy, disparaging teachers, and attacking the mental health profession are despicable.”

Amen.

5.  Trump Voters and GOP Faithful Fox Watchers.  A new poll from Yahoo News/YouGov shows that right-wing media outlets have been successful in convincing an uncomfortably large percentage of their viewership into believing some truly stupid shit. According to Yahoo, the polling shows that “44 percent of Republicans believe that Bill Gates is plotting to use a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements.”

On top of that, only 26% of Republicans were able to “correctly identify” a false and “widely debunked” conspiracy theory, while more than 80 percent of Democrats do realize that Bill Gates isn’t microchipping people. I wonder how many of these vaccine conspiracy theorists own a smartphone with GPS, or a car made in the past 10 years with GPS, or have the internet and an easily trackable home IP address? No one needs to microchip you. We are all walking microchips.

A breakdown of the poll showed that one-half of people who got most of their information from Fox News believed in the Gates microchipping-through-vaccination theory. What’s important about these thoughts on vaccination is that they will likely adversely affect us when and if we are able to create and produce a successful COVID-19 vaccine. While 72% of Hillary Clinton voters say they will get a COVID-19 vaccination when available and safe, only 44% of Trump voters say they plan on getting vaccinated.

Most infectious disease experts believe that to establish “herd immunity,” at least 70% of the world’s population will need to have immunity from COVID-19. That includes people who have contracted the virus, survived, and produced the needed antibodies, as well as most of the rest of the planet’s occupants who have hopefully not contracted the virus by the time a vaccination is available. According to Yahoo, factoring in the right wing’s low numbers, only 50% of all Americans currently polled say they will get vaccinated. This is a 5% decline from a previous week’s polling. In all cases, about one-quarter of the people polled are unsure how they feel about a vaccination. And, to be honest, I cannot begrudge them that. When you consider what a disaster Trump and his administration are, it’s hard to have faith that any vaccine program he or Mike Pence or Jared Kushner are managing will be trustworthy, if released too early.

It is important to note that this is not a defense of Bill Gates and some of the terrible uses of his money and influence. In fact, what conspiracy theories like the impossibly idiotic ones being promoted against vaccinations and COVID-19 pandemic realities do is cloud up those very real—and very actionable—problems with billionaire leadership and influence on public policy. Instead, people create these intricate and convoluted conspiracy theories to explain away things that are happening in front of their eyes. While conspiracy theorists worry about the ‘New World Order’ and corrupt billionaires taking away our liberties, the Trump administration and his billionaire friends are literally working to undermine and dismantle the checks and balances system that actually ensures our liberties.
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And the May IGGY goes to:

For May, I’m splitting the award. The individual IGGY goes to the moronic Tom Cotton. I am also awarding a collective IGGY to the 44% of Republicans who believe Bill Gates is implanting microchips in billions of people to monitor their movements and the 56% who say they won’t get vaccinated if a vaccine becomes available.  These GOP faithful edged out the Trump family.