OCTOBER 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

ANNOUNCEMENT: Ted Cruz, Rudy Giuliani, Tucker Carlson AND Louis Gohmert are four irredeemable evildoers who have appeared repeatedly as monthly IGGY candidates and winners (Carlson and Gohmert appear again this month). In a quiet ceremony after picking up dog shit in my backyard, I inducted the four of them in the Phronesis Hall-of-Shame. This means that their ignominious actions and utterances will not appear in any future IGGY listing. Their membership is well-earned—and long overdue.

Near misses for induction included Senators Mitch McConnell and Ron Johnson, Representatives Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks, and Marjorie Taylor Green, and Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott. Strong future contenders include Senators Mike Lee, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. Feel free to recommend additional worthy candidates.

1. Representative Elise Stefanik. House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik wouldn’t dare call out Jan. 6 insurrectionists and their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. After all, that’s how she got her current gig. So, she’s instead stooping to calling undocumented immigrants the actual insurrectionists—and echoing a white supremacist conspiracy theory in the process.

“Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” Elise for Congress claimed in one Facebook ad last week, according to Zachary Mueller of America’s Voice. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Just days later, Stefanik doubled down.

“After national press attention condemning Stefanik's use of the white nationalist 'replacement theory' in her Facebook ads warning of an ‘election insurrection’ ... she has doubled down and is STILL running these ads,” Mueller tweeted. “In total, Stefanik paid Facebook to show these xenophobic dog-whistle ads to over a million Facebook users, all but 5% of whom lived outside New York with the majority being over the age of 55,” he wrote last week. “Stefanik is not using these ads to communicate a message to voters in her district,” he notes. “Instead, she is targeting older Americans across the country who react positively to online racialized fear-mongering.” Replacement theory seems to resonate.

This white supremacist belief has more recently found a home on Fox News via Tucker Carlson. It also found a home among the House Republican caucus way before Stefanik’s disgusting ads, echoed by Pennsylvania’s Scott Perry in April.

“For many Americans,” The Washington Post reports Perry said during a hearing on Central American migration, “what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening is, what appears to them is we’re replacing national-born American—native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation.” Like the Post noted, never mind that it was Perry, like Stefanik, who sought to “transform the landscape of this very nation” by supporting overturning the election. Facts, smacts.

Among the national press attention that slammed Stefanik’s ads came from her hometown newspaper, which “offered a scathing response” to her rhetoric, HuffPost reported. “Quite a choice of words, of course, considering that the country is still suffering the aftershocks of the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington by supporters of Mr. Trump who tried to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election,” The Times Union Editorial Board said. “The Harvard-educated Ms. Stefanik surely knows the sordid history and context of this.”

That suggests that Stefanik should know better, and indeed, Stefanik is on the record criticizing Trump in the past. “In fact, at times Stefanik sounded practically like a Never Trumper, as she called on Trump to recognize that Russia had attacked the 2016 election to help him, urged him to release his tax returns, and assailed him for his comments about women,” Mother Jones reported in May. Some might argue that Stefanik is a weathervane adjusting to whatever winds are necessary to hold onto power. Or maybe, just maybe, Stefanik’s now finally showing us exactly who she is.

2. Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson continues to lose it.  I've watched him losing it for a while. His white nationalism is on display nightly. But he ratchets it up when he pushes his “Great Replacement theory,” which holds that white Americans are being “replaced” by nonwhite immigrants, and Democrats are pushing open immigration policies to accelerate the process—because they expect these nonwhites to vote for them, giving them an eternal lock on political power.

On Tuesday night’s show, he went one step wackier, terming the Democrats’ alleged plans “electorate packing.”

“The Democratic Party’s immigration policy is to change the population of the United States in a way that guarantees they win every election going forward,” he told his Fox News audience. “It’s an assault on democracy. Devalues your vote.”

Carlson has previously depicted his paranoid vision of voter-replacement as part of Joe Biden’s grand plan, but in his telling it’s because the “replacements” are “more obedient:”

“His policy is called the Great Replacement, the replacement of the legacy of Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries. They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it’s happening, they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.”

“More obedient”? At other times, Carlson depicts immigrants as criminals. Get it straight, Tucker.

Tough Tucker has beaten back criticism of his replacement nonsense repeatedly. When the ADL called for him to be fired over it last month, he fired back, “Fuck them!” in an interview with Megyn Kelly. On Tuesday night, he called his critics “liars and dummies.” He’s undaunted.

Carlson and his fellow Republican claims about Democrat power grabs would be laughable if they weren’t so sick. The GOP will do anything--lie, cheat, subvert, bully, or whatever—to gain and hold power. Holding on to power is their end game; they stand for absolutely nothing else

3. Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Four days after testing positive for COVID-19, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott reported testing negative over the weekend. As he did so, he credited his own vaccination for keeping the disease in check and plugged getting inoculated.

“I am told that my infection was brief and mild because of the vaccination I received,” Abbott said in a video he tweeted out. “So, I encourage others who have not yet received the vaccination to consider getting one.”

He was "told" the vaccine worked—whoa, new information, the coronavirus vaccines are effective! "So" now, with the benefit of this exclusive knowledge, Abbott bravely stepped forward to share the good news with others. What a guy!

In actuality, from a public health perspective, Abbott has done everything within his power to kill the efficacy of the vaccines that provide mass protection. In April, he signed an executive order banning state agencies and state-funded organizations from requiring any proof of vaccination status. In July, he signed a bill that would punish businesses for requiring proof of vaccination, threatening that they wouldn't be able to contract with the state and could otherwise lose their state licenses or operating permits.

It's little wonder that the state over which Abbott presides has lagged behind the national vaccination rate, with fewer than 50% of its residents fully vaccinated. In April, Abbott claimed his new ban on “vaccine passports” would allow the state to protect the health of its residents "without treading on Texans' personal freedoms."

Instead, four months later, a public health nightmare of Abbott’s creation is playing out in the Lone Star State. The state's medical community is scrambling to handle an influx of COVID-19 patients that threatens to exceed the state's worst pre-vaccination surge. As of last week, at least 29 Texas hospitals were entirely out of ICU beds. Hospitals in North Texas are trying to fill the gap in staffing with an influx of hundreds of traveling nurses. This week, some 5000 reinforcement-staff are expected to be deployed across the state, according to Fox 4-KDFW.

In other words, under Abbott's stewardship, Texans' public health is no better off—and may in fact be worse off—than it was before the availability of the vaccines. That's a stunning indictment of a public servant who was given the tools to heal his state and instead turned it into a horror show. Abbott must be thanking his lucky stars for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose cascading pandemic failures have already made his state the first in the nation to have surpassed its highest daily death toll from pre-vaccination waves.

Sickest of all is the fact that one group of constituents the likes of Abbott and DeSantis have left defenseless during their individual liberty pandering is children under 12, who have been ineligible for the vaccine. Until fully vaccinated, the most mitigating anti-virus strategy for children returning to school is to wear a mask. Tragically Abbott, DeSantis and several other GOP governors have gone to war with schools seeking to implement mask mandates to protect their students and staff.

As disastrous as discouraging inoculation among adults was, working to prohibit mask requirements in schools is unconscionably craven. Republican governors simply don’t have the guts to stand up to the “violent minority” of GOP voters who think their personal freedom trumps the health of every other U.S. citizen, including your child if you have one.

If and when Abbott and DeSantis make their GOP presidential bids, they will try to have it both ways—saying they supported vaccines because one time they said a nice thing about them (DeSantis once admitted they were "saving lives”) while also unfailingly standing up for personal freedom at any and all costs. One of those costs is the lives of kids under 12, who desperately need to be at school learning in person and have no choice about whether to take the vaccine.

Abbott, DeSantis, and other Republican governors could have provided the safest environment possible for those kids and their families by encouraging universal in-school masking. Instead, they chose to play Russian roulette with their health and their lives under the guise of freedom. The American public knows better.

4. Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Tx). If we ranked the many Republicans who supported, and still support, Donald Trump’s attempted coup d’etat by their level of enthusiasm for sedition, Rep. Louis Gohmert is probably at the top of the list. In the days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Gohmert was openly suing then-Vice President Mike Pence in a bizarre attempt to say that, legally, Pence could ignore every single state in the Union’s votes and choose whichever person he wanted to become the next president. 

Just a couple of days before a slew of delusional fascists would crash through the Capitol grounds, attack anyone in their way, vandalize the Capitol grounds, and threaten the safety of the entire legislative branch of the government (including Mike Pence), Gohmert was on Newsmax telling audiences not to wait for the series of frivolous Big Lie lawsuits to be thrown out of court, saying: “You gotta go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.”

And so it is no surprise that one of the most embarrassing humans to ever hold elected office, Louie Gohmert, equates the late civil rights leader and Georgia Rep. John Lewis’s peaceful, nonviolent sit-in protest on the House floor to demand action on gun safety legislation, with…the January 6 insurrection.

Wait, what?

I said: Louie Gohmert is comparing Rep. John Lewis’ historic ‘good trouble’ to the January 6 insurrection.

On Thursday, during a Congressional committee hearing with Attorney General Merrick Garland, Rep. Gohmert took a break from smelling his own farts to imply that Attorney General Garland was an accomplice in a “two-tiered system of justice.” Before you could even come up with a plausible bogus example for Gohmert to vomit into the public sphere, Louie came forward belching this heinous idea:

“On June 22 of 2016, judge, most of the Democrat members of Congress took over the House floor, and, for the first time in American history, members of Congress obstructed official proceedings. Not for four to six hours, but for virtually 26 hours. Not just violating over a dozen House rules, but actually committing the felony that some of the Jan. 6 people are charged with.”

“That was during the Obama administration, nobody’s been charged, and those kinda things—where you let Democrat members of Congress off for the very thing that you’re viciously going after people that were protesting on Jan. 6—gives people the indication that there is a two-tiered justice system here in America.”

The reality that then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is the one who didn’t censure Rep. Lewis or any Democrat representative for the sit-in wouldn’t ever factor into a GOP lie like this. But more grotesquely, the idea that the two events could be possibly similar in anything other than their location, is offensive.

The current, democratically elected government has not let go of the fact that our democracy was very close to being overthrown with the help of people like Louis Gohmert. The nation’s dumbest congressman continues his full-throated support of saying just about anything that might mitigate the hammer of cosmic justice he so clearly deserves from falling squarely on his soggy sponge-filled head. In the past couple of months, Gohmert has continued his white supremacist-based delusion tour, questioning whether or not the FBI planned the January 6 insurrection in some kind of deep state conspiracy to keep Donald Trump from once again being the most unpopular president of the modern era.

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And the winner is:

It is fitting that the November IGGY should be shared by Tucker Carlson and Louis Gohmert, who, as current Hall-of-Shame inductees, will never appear as monthly IGGY candidates again. Their evilness oozes our of every pore like the green slime in the 1968 movie.