AUGUST 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Rep. Dan Crenshaw Rr-Tx) and Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark). Republican lawmakers spent the entirety of the Donald Trump administration hunting for and condemning government whistleblowers. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Rand Paul, Reps. Nunes and Takeyourpick—they all sternly warned of the threat posed by anonymous government figures coming forward with a new possible crime Trump or his team seemed to be committing. But that was then, and this is now, and if you're talking about whistleblowers willing to squeal about Secret Scary Wokeness hopping through government hallways or putting up sinister new motivational posters, that's different. That's the sort of stuff Fox News lives for.

Continuing the Republican tradition of pretending at maximum manly toughness while thumping through life with shows of weaponized gutlessness, it's Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw and Arkansas's Sen. Tom Cotton leading a new charge against Rampant Theoretical Wokeness in our nation's tough manly military. Crenshaw announced it on Twitter with suitable turgidity: "We won't let our military fall to woke ideology," he puffed. The Crenshaw-Cotton response is a new "whistleblower webpage" where you can "submit your story" of being, um, exposed to Wokeness. He promises to expose the "spineless military commanders" who have failed to oppose "progressive Pentagon staffers" who "have been calling the shots."

This feels a tiny bit like Biff and Taller Biff demanding the military oppose civilian control and "call the shots" themselves, but we're probably imagining that. Both Republicans have shown a truly stellar understanding of our military's structure and enforced limitations in the past, which is why most of America knows their names despite neither Biff showing much success in any government sphere that does not involve self-promotional shitposting.

Crenshaw and Cotton's push here is part of a larger Republican attack on the military for perceived anti-conservatism, and immediately follows a Sen. Ted Cruz bit of buffoonery in which he compared the turgid manliness of Russia’s military recruitment posters, under Vlad Putin, to the "woke, emasculated military" of the United States.

It's an organized Republican campaign to portray the military as "weak" so that conservative-minded changes can be made. Crenshaw and Cotton's quasi-populist, more-quasi-fascist goal is to ignite partisan battles within the military command itself—the promise to "expose" commanders that do not oppose Crenshaw-identified "woke" policies makes that clear enough—so that the military can be purged of conservatism's enemies in the same manner that Trump's allies purged whistleblowers, watchdogs, and perceived critics from civilian government agencies.

With Crenshaw's crude attempt, however, it was evident what was going to happen next. First, Crenshaw was going to start collecting some painfully butthurt stories from conservative soldiers upset that their new commander is a womanfolk or whatever, and after months of sorting through all the ones too obviously racist or sexist or ridiculous to put his name to will come up with some that Tucker Carlson can print out and roll around in on live television.

Second, it was a certainty that Crenshaw’s little form was going to be absolutely overrun by Americans trolling Crenshaw with frightening incidents of "wokeness" that may or may not have been culled from movies, television shows, or their own imaginations.

2. Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks. Brooks has made a name for himself in several ways—it’s just not a name that people generally say in public. Brooks was the guy who tried to explain away rising sea levels by saying that rocks are falling into the ocean. Brooks was also the guy who called on Congress to impeach President Hillary Clinton, without bothering to wait for the election. Brooks explained this last position eloquently by saying, “She probably has committed an impeachable offense, therefore, she probably should be impeached.”

Naturally, Brooks was one of the first to flock to Trump’s banner, and consistently outdid even himself when searching for ways to be ever more … Brooksy. That included on Jan. 6, when Brooks took the rally stage in a yellow and black windbreaker that he later explained was being worn to cover up the fact that he was also wearing tactical armor.

No one who spoke on Jan. 6 did a better job than Brooks in directly telling the insurrectionist mob to get down to the Capitol and start insurrecting. “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” said Brooks. “Our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives ... So, I have a question for you. Are you willing to do the same?” Brooks then repeatedly shouted at the crowd, “Will you fight for America?” before saying, “We, American patriots are going to come right at them!”

That speech earned Brooks a lawsuit from Rep. Eric Swalwell in which the Jan. 6 attack was described as “a direct and foreseeable consequence” of Brook’s lies about the election and his “express calls for violence at the rally.” Following that lawsuit, Brooks then spent weeks dodging process servers while trying to get the Department of Justice to stop the suit. (They didn’t.)

But today Brooks surfaced back home in Alabama where he took the time to express his agreement with another person who had acted just as responsibly as the representative: would-be truck bomber Floyd Ray Roseberry.

In a statement issued shortly after Roseberry’s surrender, Brooks claimed that he was “monitoring the situation,” then went on to claim that the would-be bomber’s “motivation is not yet publicly known.” Other than the fact that Roseberry had spent hours explaining every facet of his motivation to the public. So maybe Brooks wasn’t so much monitoring, as just seeing a guy in a pickup threatening Washington and deciding that he liked that action.

In any case, just because he claimed not to know why some white guy named Floyd was in D.C. threatening to blow up the city with a whole mess of bombs, that didn’t mean Brooks wasn’t ready to jump on board and toss some support to his cause. Of course not. If anyone has a plan to wreck the American government, Mo Brooks is there.

“Generally speaking,” wrote Brooks, “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom, and the very fabric of American society.”

With that typically moderate opening, Brooks followed up by saying that “the way to stop Socialism’s march is for patriotic Americans to fight back in the 2022 and 2024 election” before ending with “Bluntly stated, America’s future is at risk.”

So, according to Brooks, the terrorist bomber was trying to take down American democracy using the wrong tools … but he completely sympathizes with the bomber’s motives.

And, if you’re wondering, the process servers did eventually track down Mo’s wife.

3. Senator Lindsay Graham. In an interview with Fox and Friends, Graham had this to say about the unfolding withdrawal crisis in Afghanistan:

“If we leave one American behind, if we don’t get out those who stepped up to the plate and helped us out, then Joe Biden has committed a high crime and misdemeanor and should be impeached.”

Impeached? This coming from the sycophant who voted twice against impeaching Donald Trump for crimes more serious than any presidential impeachable offense in American history. Graham has to be the greatest hypocrite in at least the last decade, if not ever.

A fierce vocal critic of Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, Graham went on to become the president’s biggest ass-kissing cheerleaders. After announcing he had broken with Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection—the “final straw”—he quickly backtracked and made a pilgrimage to Mira Lago for a mandatory suck-up session with the ex-president.

Low bars for removing a Democrat official elected in a landslide appears to be the GOP’s latest MO: if you can’t beat them, find a way to force them out of office (witness Gavin Newsome in California).

Republicans have distinguished themselves for knowing absolutely no shame, but Lindsay Graham has taken shameful hypocrisy to a new level. Slicker than snot on a doorknob, he’s well-placed for a presidential run in 2024.

4. The Republican Party. As expected, Republicans have seized the opportunity to criticize President Biden for virtually everything related to the troop withdrawal and evacuation of Americans and allies in Afghanistan. Are they really concerned about human life? The future of Afghanistan? American credibility? Of course not. Their sole purpose is politicize the issue for partisan gain.

Republicans have made their strategy clear. It won’t get one more person out of Afghanistan. It won’t save the lives of a single service member. It’s not concerned with finding the ISIS-K terrorists behind the explosion. It isn’t concerned with taking any responsibility. It most certainly doesn’t want the war to end. Nope. The Republican plan for Afghanistan is blindingly simple: With the help of the media, use it to damage Joe Biden.

As CNN reports, the only thing bothering Republicans about Afghanistan is a divide over just how they can leverage the death of American service members as political fodder.

Currently, there’s a civil war in the Republican Party between those who want to impeach Joe Biden (or call on him to resign right now ) and those who are willing to wait until Republicans gain an expected House majority in the 2022 election.

Few things could illustrate the total lack of concern that Republicans hold for the actual situation in Afghanistan better than a press briefing Kevin McCarthy held on Friday morning. As NBC News reporter Jake Sherman reported, McCarthy didn’t bother with checking to see if he had a coherent statement concerning what was actually happening. Instead, the Republican leader called for every troop to come out of Afghanistan while simultaneously insisting that Bagram Airbase be reoccupied. Then he said that America should keep some troops in Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t be negotiating with the Taliban. And when it was pointed out that Trump negotiated with the Taliban, McCarthy just moved on to debate the best time to impeach Biden. McCarthy doesn’t have a position on that, either, because McCarthy’s position is never more than what the crowd is calling for at that exact second.

When it comes to developing an actual proposal on what to do in Afghanistan, Republicans don’t believe they need to articulate a strategy. Why should they? Why bother when, as Huff Post pointed out on Thursday, Republicans can simultaneously make calls for actions that would require Biden to reinvade the entire country, and at the same time, criticize him for not getting every single person out of the nation without a scratch. The media won’t challenge the lack of reason or consistency. Why do anything more? As long as Republicans can see that networks will gladly put them on the air and echo their statements about “chaos” and “failure,” having an actual strategy on Afghanistan would only be a liability.

That frees Republicans to concentrate on the one thing that genuinely concerns them: 2022. Untethered from either the necessity of governing or the need to have a coherent platform, Republicans can be all-attack all the time.  That allows statements like this from Republican Rep. Mark Green, “I’d put more military in there, I’d get every single American out, and I’d start killing bad guys.” Or Sen. Ben Sasse writing a note in which he declares that America needs to “reverse course” and occupy most of Afghanistan because ending the war shows “weakness.”

None of it makes sense. It doesn’t have to make sense. Because Republicans don’t consider their enemy to be either the Taliban or ISIS-K, they don’t consider their goal to be getting Americans out safely. They certainly aren’t interested in ending the war.

They’re only interested in evacuating Democrats from the House, Senate, and White House. And in that scheme, they seem to have plenty of allies.

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And the winner is . . .

I’ve decided to add Graham and Mo Brooks to my list of finalists for the IGGY Hall-of-Shame, so I won’t be conferring yet another IGGY on them this month. Totally repulsed by the Republican Party’s habit of blaming anyone but itself for anything bad that occurs, I’m giving the August IGGY to the GOP for yet another groundless buck passing; this time on Afghanistan.

To be sure, there’s much blame to go around for the unmitigated 20-year debacle of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. If I were assigning blame, I’d point to the administrations of Carter, Reagan, and GHW Bush, who backed the Mujahideen in the war against the Red Army, Cheney, Rumsfeld, GW Bush and their fellow dogmatic neocons who launched their deceitful, ill-conceived, disastrous war on terror, Obama for surging our military presence and sustaining the war effort, Trump whose negotiated withdrawal set Biden up for the ultimate chaos, and, though I don't know all the facts, Biden for underestimating the strength of the Afghani government and army to hold on against the Taliban and apparent inadequate preparation for the evacuation. In short, there's much blame to go around. Unfortunately, the Republican Party’s historical amnesia is a terminal affliction.