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?

2. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). Collins is 0-3 with her guy Brett Kavanaugh's votes on the Supreme Court so far this session. Kavanaugh, who is on the Supreme Court because of Collins, has voted to kick Dreamers out of the country, let employers fire LGBTQ people solely on the basis of their sexual orientation, and now to take abortion rights away from Louisiana women.

It's that last one that must really sting for Collins, since she premised her entire support for the guy on the fact that he would respect precedent, especially when it came to abortion. Kavanaugh told her, she said, that he believed "decisions become part of our legal framework with the passage of time, and that honoring precedent is essential to maintaining public confidence." She also said he was the first nominee she had spoken with "to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself." Boy, does she look absurd now.

Because respecting precedent is precisely what he did not do in the minority in the Louisiana abortion case decided this month. Just four years ago, the Supreme Court struck down an identical abortion law from Texas. The law required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, against all medical necessity, and the Supreme Court struck it down. The court shouldn't have even heard the Louisiana case, since this issue had already been decided, but there was a difference this time around: the absence of Justice Anthony Kennedy, replaced by Kavanaugh.

The floor speech Collins made justifying her vote is chock full of these kinds of empty promises from Kavanaugh, who she claimed told her that the court needed to uphold past decisions to create "stability, predictability, reliance, and fairness." In Collins’ words:

"When I asked him, would it be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed that it was wrongly decided, he emphatically said no." He must have had his fingers crossed behind his back.

Collins went on CNN and reiterated that Kavanaugh told her, "for a precedent, among established precedents like Roe, to be overturned, it would have to have been grievously wrong and deeply inconsistent. He noted that Roe had been reaffirmed 19 years later by Planned Parenthood vs. Casey and that it was precedent on precedent." So much for abortion ruling precedents.

Collins is either devoid of a spine or a complete hypocrite—or, probably both. Let’s hope she has a nice retirement party in November.

3. Vice President Mike Pence. One month ago, Vice President Pence wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "There Isn't a Coronavirus 'Second Wave,'" opining:

"The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different. The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success."

Amidst endless false Trump administration claims understating the severity of the COVID pandemic and boasting about mass testing and the President’s quick and decisive response to the danger, we have the jackass Pence contradicting health experts telling us things are getting better.

"Cases have stabilized over the past two weeks, with the daily average case rate across the U.S. dropping to 20,000—down from 30,000 in April and 25,000 in May."

There are now over 70,000 new cases per day, which Pence claims is because "We’ve expanded testing across the board."

Pence went on to boast that "[A]ll 50 states have begun to reopen in a safe and responsible manner."

And now they're closing down again, as predicted by the experts who warned them not to.

Let's go back to where we began, with Pence's ultimate conclusion after dispensing all this other wisdom in our general directions: "The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different. The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success."

Mike Pence is, ostensibly, the person most "in charge" of this nation's pandemic response efforts. Donald Trump told us to wish him "luck," upon ordering him to take over the pandemic task force. How’s he done? Perhaps he should turn the effort over to someone who is not primarily focused on kissing Donald Trump's behind and lying to the American people in whatever way best inoculates Dear Leader from the consequences of his sociopathic indifference. Perhaps he needs, at the least, some explanation for the new crisis upon us that is not malevolent and incompetent blubbering about "the media" inventing a wave of infections and deaths that every expert saw coming, at every point along the way, after White House demands that pandemic lockdowns be lifted in an attempt to ignore the virus into submission.

4. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. With daily Coronavirus cases reaching new highs, one would expect the nation’s governors to tougher up on preventive measures. And most have, including previous head-in-the-sand governors of Texas, Arizona and Florida. These governors have at least allowed local authorities to choose their own response to the virus spike. This, sadly, does not include Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Kemp’s latest salvo is to issue an explicit state order to block its cities from requiring face masks.

Masks have become a political point, with right-wing media and Republican politicians doing everything they can to send not just mixed messages but spread the idea that wearing a mask is somehow, in an undefined way, a threat to “freedom.”

Kemp’s previous executive order allowed local governments to issue any sort of mask mandate. Cities and counties were free to do anything they wanted as long as what they wanted was exactly what Kemp had already ordered. In other words, no one could make any efforts to fight COVID-19 on a local level unless they were in Kemp’s statewide order. Because the previous order left enough confusion for some locality to just issue a mask mandate anyway,  Kemp’s new mask order makes it absolutely explicit by adding a whole paragraph dedicated to masks and how no one, at any level, can require a Georgian to cover his or her face until Brian Kemp says so. So there.

Why would he do this? Not really because of his love for “freedom,” and not because of improvement in the local situation. By the end of the month, Georgia had made its way to the #4 slot on the chart of states with the most, new cases. What changed was that Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms—who has herself tested positive for COVID-19—issued a mask mandate for her city.

That’s why Kemp issued his new order. It’s not about blindly continuing to push for reopening despite the certain knowledge that this will result in misery for, at a minimum, thousands of people. It’s about deliberately putting those thousands on the line so that Kemp can put his finger in the eye of a mayor widely known to be on the short list for Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

As the Atlantic Journal Constitution makes clear, Gov. Kemp and Mayor Lance Bottoms have been sparring in recent weeks over that other topic that’s eating up the Fox airwaves: the need for restoring “law and order” to American cities. Trump may be threatening to soon show America how it’s done, but Kemp has already sent 1,000 National Guardsmen, complete with armored vehicles, into Atlanta after a state building was damaged.  Lance Bottoms has made it clear that the troops are not there at her request.

Keisha Lance Bottoms has refused to rescind the mask order for Atlanta or to back away from restrictions she’s put in place on restaurants and other businesses. Kemp’s reaction is not to either back her play in the face of skyrocketing cases and a desperate need for action, or even to ignore the move as he had ignored similar actions taken in other localities. Instead Kemp has pounded the table to declare Atlanta’s rules “unenforceable” and issued demands that Lance Bottoms respect his authority.

So … to sum up, it’s not that Brian Kemp is doing the worst damn thing possible out of ignorance, he’s doing it knowingly because some uppity Black woman is trying to protect people without his permission. Meanwhile, another 3,800 Georgians were confirmed to have COVID-19 on June 15, but they’re sure to admire Kemp’s principled” stand.

5. Ivanka Trump. In last month’s IGGY competition, I opined that if not for her father Ivanka Trump would probably be a sous chef at Olive Garden. That was too flattering. Let me amend that to a fry cook at the Golden Coral.

What a month it’s been fore the president’s daughter. The month has seen her hawk beans on her social media account and unveil a jobs assistance program in the midst of a global pandemic with the awkward moniker of “Find Something New.” Ivanka Trump once again finds herself in the middle of a heap of shit.

The country has been wracked by a seemingly never-ending fight against the coronavirus pandemic: more than 150,000 dead, more than 3 million US cases and on the horizon, parents grapple with whether to trust federal advice on sending children back to school.

Yet, it can sometimes seem that Ivanka Trump is living in an alternate universe. She kicked off July with a string of images on her social media accounts featuring a luxe family trip to Wyoming, all horseback rides and sunny, stream-side picnics dressed in Ralph Lauren-esque ensembles.

Since the onset of her time in the White House, where Trump is a senior adviser to her father, Ivanka Trump has faced myriad questions about her judgment stemming from the blithe manner in which she appears to operate.

This month she may have violated a government ethics rule by posting the photograph of herself, holding a can of beans, close to her face as one might in a commercial or advertisement, with the caption: "If it's Goya, it has to be good," and translating the same phrase to Spanish.

Goya's CEO, Robert Unanue, is an outspoken fan of the President, and his public comments of support have led to boycotts of the brand. Not so the Trump family, however, who have made the beans biz a robust talking point likely not seen since, well, ever.

The United States Office of Government Ethics, which is aimed at "preventing conflicts of interest in the executive branch," has guidelines on endorsing products, something Trump was clearly doing in her post.

The timing of Ivanka Trump's Goya plug came on a day she had already been roundly lambasted on social media and by news outlets for the "Find Something New" ad campaign, launched that month in conjunction with the AdCouncil and several private corporations.

While Trump touted the ads and the website as a resource for people unemployed, or unhappy with their current jobs, to find a fresh career, critics shot back in disbelief at the tag line of the program. "Find Something New" -- as though doing so for the 18 million unemployed Americans could be easily accomplished with a few clicks on their computer.

The roll out also felt to many as though there was little to no regard for the loss of jobs loved and struggled to achieve, gone in an instant at the hands of a shutdown forced by a gnarly pandemic. Trump, dressed in a white, $2,000 outfit by London-based designer Emilia Wickstead, (and toting a $4,700 purse by French fashion house Chanel), addressed a virtual roundtable by calling the need to possibly seek new work a "pivot."

It's a disconnect Trump has been accused of perpetrating before. In March, as most Americans adapted to working from home, their lives turned upside down by the unexpected mash up of homeschooling their children at the same time, under the same roof, balancing career and family in ways more stressful than ever before, Trump posted a suggestion.

"Staying home w/kids? Plan a living room camp out!" she tweeted, along with a photo of herself and her children beneath a makeshift sheet tent, as though fun and games were possible for the average person.

In April, after posting videos encouraging "those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please do so," Trump and her family traveled to her vacation home in Bedminster, New Jersey. Her decision to leave Washington disregarded the federal coronavirus guidelines advising against discretionary travel that she urged other Americans to follow.

In May, as tens of thousands of people marched in protest of the killing of George Floyd and the scourge of systemic racism, Ivanka posted a Bible verse: "This is what the Lord said: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. I will heal you."

Say what?
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And the winner is…..

It’s hard to imagine anything more ignominiously absurd that Louie Gohmert’s COVID-19 act, but it just represents Louie being Louie, like the Trumpster simply being who he is. So, I’ll look elsewhere. After years of hearing her cowardly backtracking from principles she claims to believe in, misleading voters, bending to Trump’s many assaults on the American people, and, worst of all, foisting Brett Cavanaugh on us, I am awarding this month’s IGGY to Senator Susan Collins. Brett Kavanaugh will help us never forget her.