MAY 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Arizona House Rep. Joseph Chaplik. From the Church of the Perpetual Face Palm (aka the modern-day Republican Party) comes another wee dollop of “what the fuck?” So how do you even begin to respond to this?

The Republican-controlled Arizona House voted along party lines last week to allow state businesses to ignore any and all city, town, or county measures requiring their customers to wear masks. In other words, the state that flipped blue last year for the first time since 1996 has decided to flip the fuck out. Why? Well, as the sponsor of this anti-mask bill, Rep. Joseph Chaplik, would have you believe, it’s because we didn’t all die of AIDS back in the ‘80s.

In the House debate, Rep. Randall Friese, a Tucson Democrat who is a physician, said masks are part of the “very basic, important tools,” along with hand-washing and social distancing, to curb the spread.

Chaplik, however, argued that the mandates are an overreaction and that society has managed to survive other viral outbreaks without masks.

For example, he cited HIV “that was going to wipe our global destruction of human bodies with AIDS.”

“We heard about that in the ’80s,” Chaplik said. “Yet no masks were required.”

Uh … who wants to tell him?

People are fond of saying Republicans these days are virulently anti-science. But that suggests they actually know what science is. This feels more like a bunch of little kids who’ve never tried a vegetable saying they hate broccoli. I don’t know that they’re anti-science so much as they’re anti-scientist—because scientists keep telling them they can’t just eat Pixie Stix all day and expect to stay healthy.

They’ll do what they want, dammit, because FREEDOM!

Another GOP representative, Bret Roberts, questioned the overall effectiveness of masks, asking, “If they work, how are people still catching COVID?”

Uh, okay, now who wants to tell him?

Thank God we now have a president who takes COVID seriously. Unfortunately, we can’t just throw fools like this in the gulag because, you know, freedom.

But that doesn’t mean we have to keep reelecting them.

2. Republicans in Trump G.O.P. States. While Democrats seized on George Floyd’s death to highlight racism in policing and other forms of social injustice, Republicans responded to a summer of protests by proposing a raft of punitive new measures governing the right to assemble. G.O.P lawmakers in 34 states have introduced 91 anti-protest bills during the 2021 legislative session.

Republican legislators in Oklahoma have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets. They also sent legislation to Governor Kevin Stitt that would criminalize the unlawful blocking of a public street. Similar moves are afoot in Iowa.

An Indiana GOP legislative proposal would bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment. A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance. Kentucky state legislators passed a bill that would make it a crime to insult or taunt a police officer with “offensive or derisive” words or gestures that would have “a direct tendency to provoke a violent response.” Those arrested on such a charge would be jailed and not allowed bail for at least 48 hours—a provision that does not automatically apply to those arrested on murder, rape, or arson charges.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed what he called “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country,” conflating the right to peaceful protest with the rioting and looting that sometimes resulted from such protests. The Florida law imposes harsher penalties for existing public disorder crimes, turning misdemeanor offenses into felonies, creating new felony offenses and preventing defendants from being released on bail until they have appeared before a judge. The law also increases penalties for taking down monuments, including Confederate ones, making the offense a second-degree felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. It makes it easier for anyone who injures a protester, such as by driving into a crowd, to escape civil liability

These measures follow from the typical GOP inclination to disregard facts, overreact, and manipulate fear among their base. More than 96 percent of last summer’s protests were peaceful, involving no property damage or police injuries, according to the Washington Post, which also found that police officers or counter-protesters often instigated violence.

These draconian anti-protest laws offer an added bonus for Republicans: increasing felony convictions would allow them to disenfranchise likely Democrat voters. There’s always a method to their madness.

3. Rep. Matt Gaetz. At this point, the perpetually odious Rep. Matt Gaetz has been confirmed by numerous press-discovered witnesses to, at the very least, have engaged in a pattern of attending illegal drug-fueled sex parties, regularly paid women for sex, paid at least one underage child for sex, and potentially involved himself in other alleged crimes. The most astonishing thing is that as of June 1Gaetz has not been charged with federal crimes, especially now that wingman Jeff Greenberg himself has agreed to an ungenerous plea deal that will see him exchange testimony for slightly fewer years in prison than he might otherwise be serving. He is apparently cooperating with prosecutors.

Gaetz, meanwhile, has settled on the Trumpian approach of simply mocking the allegations against him, inviting his audiences to do the same. During a recent appearance at The Villages, Florida, Gaetz joked to his retirement community audience that CNN would report his rally as “Matt Gaetz has wild party surrounded by beautiful women.”

He was joined there by QAnon conspiracy promoter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of course he was: This is the current state of the party. Both Gaetz's base and his most resilient House allies may have once dabbled in QAnon conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking and other supposed crimes by their enemies, but present them with an actual sex trafficker or other party-loyal criminals and they'll flock to town halls and conventions to give Team Sex Trafficking a standing ovation.

On Saturday, the alleged sex-addicted child-trafficking illegal drug user Gaetz again brushed aside his probable indictment, and his hard-right Republican audience was again eager to hear it. In a keynote speech to the "Ohio Political Summit," a Republican Party shindig, NBC News reported that Gaetz sniffed he was "being falsely accused of exchanging money for naughty favors."

"Yet, Congress has re-instituted a process that legalizes the corrupt act of exchanging money for favors, through earmarks, and everybody knows that that's the corruption," he continued.

Yes, in Republican Gaetz's measured estimation of these things, stocking your political speech after party with cocaine and sex workers or repeatedly paying a minor to perform sex acts is certainly less of a scandal than pressuring for a new highway to be built in your district. The man may have stumbled on the most condensed essence of new Republicanism, in fact. Crimes are good; governing is bad; let us all band together and protect the extortionists, the seditionists and the child rapists rather than let our enemies allow new bridges to be built.

Gaetz received a "standing ovation" from the roughly 400-person Republican crowd. The party base continues to elevate, rather than shun, those that commit crooked or violent acts. From assaulting reporters to international extortion to shows of solidarity with those attempting actual insurrection, the party's fascist instincts have coalesced into a blanket defense of corruption and scandal paired with nonsensical rantings about the supposed crimes of outsiders. Rep. Jim Jordan not only survived after multiple accusers identified him as turning a blind eye to the molestation of athletes under his care, as college wrestling coach, but attacked his accusers so sneeringly and aggressively that his colleagues rewarded him with a new congressional omnipresence in any hearing or probe in which any other Republican was being accused of grotesque or criminal behavior.

Gaetz himself made a nod in that direction Saturday, lavishing praise on Jordan and telling the audience that he aspired to becoming "the Robin" to Jordan's "Batman."

Lest you think Gaetz's sick behavior would bring rebuke from his GOP colleagues, think again.  Family values is no longer their thing.  To his GOP pals, Gaetz is THE MAN.  A chip off the Trump bloc-- surely presidential timber. And he knows it.  As May closed, the Gaetzster announced he will run for presidency in 2024 if Trump does not. Why not?

4. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy via Representative Marjorie Taylor Green. You probably already heard about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest adventure in trolling, wherein she equated mask requirements during the middle of a deadly pandemic with the systematic oppression of Jews during the Holocaust.

That should earn her a strong rebuke from her party, if not an ejection from Congress. But House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s tardy statement hardly met the moment:

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.

“At a time when the Jewish people face increased violence and threats, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“Americans must stand together to defeat anti-Semitism and any attempt to diminish the history of the Holocaust.

“Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”

Well, at least he managed to call MTG’s statement “appalling” … before quickly turning his attacks on Democrats, none of whom has ever, as far as I know, compared mask requirements to concentration camps and ghettos. But I really don’t think this is a both-sides issue. And maybe he should condemn Marjorie herself instead of her “decision” and her “language.”

Former Republican and current Lincoln Project honcho Rick Wilson appeared today on LPTV to dunk on not just MTG but McCarthy as well.

WILSON: “This woman is not an outlier. She is the core of the Republican Party. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party. She is more important in the Republican Party ecosystem than Kevin McCarthy. He issued a pusillanimous, limp-dicked statement today about her finally after getting beat up for hours and hours on end, and I gotta tell you something: He does that because he wants to stay [minority leader]. And he knows that she is the future of the GOP. She is the core, the heart, the soul of what the Republican Party now stands for. It is idiotic, it is violently stupid. It hates experts, it hates authority, it hates science, it hates culture. It hates everything except their reflexive trolling of the rest of the country. She is a monstrous person. She is a person who I would not piss on her if she was on fire. She is a person who deserves all the public ... shame you could possibly imagine. But here’s the thing: Kevin McCarthy will not take a single step to expel her from Congress. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party today. She is exactly the center of it, she is what they have become, and everybody in the Republican Party who goes, ‘Oh, no, that’s not me,’ they only do it quietly. They won’t go out in her face and say, ‘Shut the hell up.’ They won’t go in her face and say, ‘You are a crude, anti-Semite clown.’ They won't do that because they understand she is their future. She is the party as it is written today, she is the party as it is comprised today. I find her so repulsive and so disgusting that it is all I can do not to get myself thrown off social media by saying what I really feel about her. But that is a woman who has officially fucked around and will find out.”

Are most Republicans as loony as Marjorie Taylor Greene? Well, that would be impossible. But, importantly, the vast majority are nevertheless all aboard the Wacky Wagon. So, from a practical standpoint anyway, there’s really not that much daylight between them and her.

Wilson is right. This is what the Republican Party is now. The only question is, can it adapt and survive in its new skin, or will evolutionary pressures finally cull it from the herd?

We’ll see. But they’ve hitched their carriage to these horses now, and they better hope the view of those hateful beasts’ backsides is something they want to enjoy for the duration of their political careers. _________________________

And the May IGGY winner is:

With Matt Gaetz having already won an IGGY, I’m giving the May award to Kevin McCarthy, a distinction long overdue.