JUNE 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Pardoned Dirtbag Michael Flynn. Over the weekend, the now-pardoned traitor Michael Flynn appeared at a QAnon-themed event in Dallas, Texas, where he once again seemed to support the notion of a violent pro-Trump rebellion to topple the government. This was met with approval by the Trump-supporting crowd. The movement of oft-delusional conspiracy theory promoters is well represented among the seditionists who staged the Jan. 6 insurrection.  Those still demanding that individual state electoral totals be nullified because of unspecified frauds, believe that the entire election was a scam or undercover front and actually Trump is still the legitimate president. They point to an August date when Trump will drive his gilded golf cart back onto the White House grounds, arrest Joe Biden, and begins mass executions of all those who doubted him. Or something to that effect.

Yes, Michael Flynn may have been caught dead to rights in acting as influence-peddler for foreign government while moonlighting as Trump adviser—which, among Trump's many advisers, now seems to have been the most common single occupation—but now that Trump's freed him from his criminal past he appears to believe it is time for a good, old-fashioned coup. That's what he told the Q crowd, anyway.

A self-identified "Marine" in the audience posed the question, "I want to know why what happened in Minamar[sic] can't happen here?", a reference to the recent military coup in Myanmar that has been promoted in Trump-supporting circles as a playbook for reinstalling Trump as president in this country.

"No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No Reason. That's right," Flynn replied.

After video of these remarks exploded through the internet, the ex-national security adviser once again bizarrely attempted to claim that he specifically did not say the specific thing he was filmed saying. "There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not called for any action of that sort," he bellowed.

As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out, this has become a routine for Flynn. He says something clearly supportive of martial law, an overthrow of government, or the QAnon movement itself, it gains national attention, and he or an ally responds by claiming he never meant the thing and you're all fake news for thinking he did. Flynn, however, is a liar through-and-through. He was ostensibly fired from his White House position in the first place for lying to federal investigators and to American Jesus Mike Pence. He's not good at it.  Like Trump, he simply gaslights his audiences with toddleresque claims that whatever you saw happening didn't. If you're a believer you'll go along with it, and if you're not then he doesn't care.

Flynn appears to be fully off the rails. It's not clear that he himself knows what he believes and what he doesn't, but he seems utterly unconcerned with the violence that he and his allies have already unleashed. Instead, those in Trump's orbit seem intent on pushing for more. You probably won't see Michael Flynn on the front lines of whatever new violence comes after the Jan. 6 insurrection, but at the conferences and meet-ups that validate those violent views, he continues to poke and prod for it.

2. West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin is an ostrich with his head in the sand and a “KICK ME” sign slapped across his behind. Even worse, I think he likes it that way.

As Republicans continue to enact extreme voter suppression laws and begin fraudulent, Big Lie-driven “audits” to de-legitimize the 2020 election, Democrats have become seemingly powerless to stop them. Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema disgraced herself with ridiculous, ahistorical comments in defense of the filibuster last week and now Sen. Joe Manchin has just stomped on the skull of the For the People Act, which as it stands is the one law introduced in Congress that could fix the increasingly, outrageously rigged American election system.

In an op-ed in his home state Charleston Gazette-Mail today, Manchin declared that he won’t back S1 or even make an exception to the filibuster for crucial voting rights legislation. Here are two brain-dead excerpts:

“The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen. Our founders were wise to see the temptation of absolute power and built in specific checks and balances to force compromise that serves to preserve our fragile democracy. The Senate, its processes and rules, have evolved over time to make absolute power difficult while still delivering solutions to the issues facing our country and I believe that’s the Senate’s best quality. I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act. Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster. For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”

It needs not be said just how absurdly incorrect Manchin is about literally everything he’s saying: The filibuster was not created by the Founding Fathers and it was never used to create bipartisan comity or deliver solutions. This country is already being torn apart by partisan voting laws that are sweeping the nation. Stopping legislation that has vast popular support and delivering nothing to Americans is certainly not the Senate’s best quality

In fact, allowing Republicans to gerrymander and suppress voters so that they keep control of state legislatures and take back Congress does the opposite of “developing the political bonds that end divisions.” We’re seeing what all-powerful parties do in these states.

As Manchin himself said, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that’s why Republicans in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Arkansas, Nebraska, Montana, Arizona, and other states have passed laws to restrict voting rights.

Voter restriction provisions in Florida offer an overview of the kinds of restrictive actions taken in GOP-controlled states. They include:

Requiring strict voter ID requirements for mail-in ballots; severely restricting the number of ballot drop boxes and who can access them; criminalizing ballot delivery by volunteers and friends; banning counties from accepting help in administering elections; giving the state legislature and attorney general more control over county legal matters related to elections, and, the latest, purging state election boards of wider voter access advocates.

Manchin and fellow democrat leaders who think the party can mobilize grassroots activists to boost turnout are living in a partisan fantasyland. Why would people go out of their way to donate or bust their asses as volunteers for a party that makes big promises and then fails to deliver? This is the last chance for the Democratic Party to show it is on the side of the people who work so hard to put them in power. People of color make up the bulk of Democrats’ base. Not passing simple legislation that allows them to exercise their right to vote is the biggest slap in the face that Democrats could possibly deliver.

3. Former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Haley took a cheap shot at Kamala Harris over a tweet that offended Fox News’ tender sensibilities. The Vice-President had urged Americans to "enjoy the long weekend" over Memorial Day without mentioning the sacrifices made by American troops. Fox went nuts. And Haley piled on with her retweet of Harris’ tweet with the comment “Unprofessional and unfit”.

Haley was making the usual ‘lowest common denominator’ play to the base that conservatives reflexively trot out. And any vestigial hope that Haley was a thoughtful conservative went out the window.

Anyone following her political arc could not be surprised. Like many other Republicans, she traded in an early antipathy for Trump for slavish devotion to his cause and a robust defense of his dismal record. She took a job in his administration as US Ambassador to the UN. Not an unreasonable career move, but since then she has been as dedicated an orange ass-kisser as the rest of them.

Haley is considered intelligent. And as a woman of color, her election to the governorship of South Carolina speaks to political skills. So, it is hard to believe that it didn’t occur to her that her beating up Kamala Harris for lack of respect for the military wouldn’t remind people of her old boss’s notorious remarks about America’s service members.

In 2018, the man who had run once away from a fight canceled a memorial visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris. He blames rain, saying “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true. Reportedly he was worried about his hair. And four people in the party heard him ask, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” And on the same trip, he referred to the 1,800 marines killed at Belleau Wood in 1918 as “suckers”.

Trump denied it. But he’s a confirmed liar. And his loathing for the military is on the record — infamously he dismissed John McCain's heroism. “He’s not a war hero. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Now Haley has chained herself to that legacy. But that’s not the worst of it.

As bad as Haley’s tweet was, she unbelievably topped it. She tweeted a picture of herself, arm-in-arm with her newly grown son, at the beach, with the comment, “Thankful on this Memorial Day for the blessings of family and spending time with my little one.”

Where the hell is the appreciation for the military she demands? How can you be so stupid as to excoriate a political opponent for an ill-considered tweet — and less than 24 hours later do the same?

And hers is so much worse. At least Harris wished others well. Haley made what is nominally a solemn holiday, commemorating war heroes, all about her and her family.

The hypocrisy is stunning.

Haley has no political position at the moment. No one expected her to post pictures of her paying respects. And no one begrudges her a long weekend off. It's the nature of American holidays. They start with some noble purpose and end up being an occasion to eat, drink, and shop. But for a politician, who still thinks she has a political career, the stupidity is stunning. However, as right-wing commentator Rick Wilson pithily observed, “Everything Trump Touches Dies”. And in this case, what’s dead is Haley's political future. Especially as the object of her political infatuation rejected her request for a pilgrimage to Mar a Lago and has shown no interest in promoting her future.

4. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. The New York Times’ 1619 Project was created in order to refocus American history on its story of race and economics. The 1619 date is a reminder of the first enslaved Africans brought by ship to the early European settlements in North and South America. This is history that has long been available to people to discover but has also been ignored and frequently hidden or suppressed in our country’s official retellings of our collective story. Conservatives across the country, bereft of any ideas since feudalism, are recasting the 1619 Project and other critical race theory educational initiatives as an attack on our country. In their estimation, only white males like themselves are allowed to feel persecuted, and any discussion of race and the moral anchor that systemic racism has moored our country’s progress forward is an assault on their monopoly on power. They are right about the latter.

On Wednesday, Sen. McConnell took time away from never passing any legislation that wasn’t voter suppression-related or a tax break for the richest among us, to speak at a press conference in the Citizens Union Bank in Shelbyville, Kentucky. McConnell’s fellow Kentuckian Republican Rep. Joseph Fischer recently filed Bill Request 60, for the upcoming 2022 state legislature session that would limit how race and the history of racism in our country is taught.

On Wednesday, McConnell told the press that the fact the world participated in slavery and the slave trade during the 17th century means that in America historians marking the first enslaved Africans brought to the Americas isn’t important history. That’s what he argued.

McConnell’s answer came out of a question from The Courier Journal concerning his support or opposition to the kinds of constraints his fellow Republicans are trying to place on public school teachers and educators. He went on to say that the federal government shouldn’t tell schools what to teach, and he also didn’t seem to knock the fact that Republicans across the country are the only political groups telling schools what they should teach.

Mitch McConnell has previously described the focus on the 1619 date in American history as an “exotic notion.” He has also categorized any push for education curricula to include more comprehensive teaching on systemic racism, “activist indoctrination.” McConnell’s intellectually dishonest angle on the 1619 date is that by calling attention to our country’s founding dependence on cheap labor and the evolution of our nation’s racism, we “denigrate and downgrade” other, more positive and less uncomfortable, achievements that our country has made.

It’s a garbage argument as pointing out our country’s systemic racism, and very specifically highlighting 1619 as a date, is clearly an important part of our nation’s story. Millions of Americans of all races, cultures, and creeds have been directly affected, and continue to be affected, by those decisions. The Civil War that McConnell says put this sin “behind us,” is only fought because of that date, and to deny it and the existence of its reach is incongruous with even the words coming out of the Kentucky senator’s disingenuous yap.

5. Maine Senator Susan Collins. New idea for a drinking game: Every time Susan Collins says she’s concerned about something, drink an 18-gallon Rubbermaid tub full of baboon phlegm and battery acid. The latest thing she’s concerned about? Paying for Joe Biden’s ambitious infrastructure plans. And, no, she’s not thinking about a moderate rollback of Donald Trump’s plutocrat-friendly tax scam, which led corporations across the country to engage in stock buybacks and other economic wheel-spinning ventures. Oh, no. She wants to … um … tax people who are going out of their way to help save the planet.

On the June 13 installment of Face the Nation, hosted by John Dickerson, Collins regaled us all with her hoary reasonable-Republican shtick—and yet there was scant reason to be found anywhere in her comments. Discussing various ways to pay for crucial investments in a 21st century clean-energy economy, Collins waved away the obvious solution—making corporations and the already wealthy pay a little more for the infrastructure they rely on to build their silly dragon hoards—in favor of a remarkably stupid alternative.

ICKERSON: “And what about the sticky question about how to pay for all of this? I’ve heard there’s reports that it might include a gas tax increase?”

COLLINS: “There won’t be a gas tax increase, and we won’t be undoing the 2017 tax reform bill,” but “there would be a provision for electric vehicles to pay their fair share of using our roads and bridges. Right now, they are literally free riders because they’re not paying any gas tax.”

This is an incredibly stupid idea. Yes, people who drive EVs obviously don’t pay gas taxes, which help pay for a lot of roads and bridges. But most people agree that electric cars are the wave of the future, and if we’re going to successfully transition to a clean-energy economy, we need to encourage as many people as possible to use them. That means making electric vehicles more appealing, not less. We’re in a climate emergency, and what Collins is proposing would be a little like taxing people’s COVID shots and face masks while charging them a nominal fee to wash their hands.

But, hey, we need a “reasonable” way out of this impasse—which naturally can’t include slightly increasing the tax rates of the ultra-wealthy, even though that’s exactly what most Americans want.

Mainers, what on Terra Firma were you thinking when you returned this double-talking phony to the Senate? One more Democratic senator sure would have been nice, huh? In fact, it would have gone a long way toward saving this planet.

But hey, you can rest assured that when Kennebunkport is under water, Collins’ “concern” will be off the charts—as will a not-insignificant number of Maine’s coastal communities.

______________________________

And the winner is:

With Flynn a previous winner, I must go with the double-talking hypocrite, Susan Collins. Her selection has been long overdue.