FEBRUARY 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

NOTE: I know, I declared that because Donald Trump is a member of the Ignominious Hall-of-Shame his evil absurdities would no longer be noted in monthly postings. Though he's ineligible for a monthly IGGY, I can't resist including his latest.  

After Russian military forces began moving into Ukraine, while claiming that nothing like this would have happened under his administration (of course), Trump told a Tennessee talk radio audience that after watching the news after Putin declared the Donbas region of Ukraine to be independent and ordered Russian troops to storm the region for alleged “peacekeeping” purposes, Putin should be praised.

“This is genius,’” Trump recalled. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine ― Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.” “So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent.’ A large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force.”

“We could use that on our southern border,” he added, before continuing with his praise. “That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re going to keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”

“I know him very well. Very, very well,” Trump said. The fondness that Trump displayed for the Russian strongman over the course of his presidency and beyond has continues to baffle even some in his own party. Along with his general affinity with autocrats, and Putin in particular, didn’t you expect such a comment? I’ll lay you ten to one that the only thing Trump knows about Ukraine, let alone the Donbas region, is that it’s a place where Hunter Biden was doing “bad things, very bad things.”

1. Texas Senator John Cornyn. It doesn't get any more dimwitted than this. Last week, Cornyn claimed that Democrats' focus on protecting the right to vote was in response to a “manufactured crisis.”

To support that claim, he pointed to a Pew Research Center poll conducted just after the November 2020 presidential election that found more than nine in 10 voters said it was easy to vote in the election.

"More than nine-in-ten voters (94%) say that voting in the election this November was either very easy (77%) or somewhat easy (17%), while just 6% say that voting was very or somewhat difficult," Cornyn tweeted, quoting an excerpt from the Pew report.

Several hours later, Cornyn managed to finish his thought.

"Democrats claim there's a nationwide assault on the right to vote, but 94% of voters said voting was easy in 2020. This is a manufactured crisis designed to achieve political gain," he tweeted.

Seriously, how stupid does this guy think voters are? Sure, the GOP base is living in an alternate universe, but there's no need to convince them using a Pew poll. They'll soak up any old slop they're served.

Instead, the tweet seemed aimed at slightly swingier voters—an attempt to sell them on the idea that Democrats are making stuff up. Only Pew was talking about 2020, and the GOP's nationwide assault on voting rights began in the wake of 2020, precisely because Joe Biden flipped states that hadn't gone for a Democrat in decades.

So the Pew poll of 2020 holds no relevance whatsoever to the fact that GOP-led states have since passed a title wave of bills that seek to subvert the will of the voters.

That means Cornyn is either daft, or he's grown accustomed to the idea that voters are stupid and will believe anything you tell them. That may be true of the GOP base and Trump cultists, but it isn't true for some 60% of the country.

2. The Usual Conservative Republican Suspects. Columnist Scott Morefield offered this brilliant observation: “I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that if Donald Trump hadn’t won in 2016 and appointed three SCOTUS justices, the U.S. would literally be Australia right now.”

Coming just after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority blocked President Biden’s vaccine mandate for large businesses, the first half of Morefield’s tweet speaks for itself. But the second half, the context-free swipe at Australia, requires some explaining.

Over the past few months, Australia — Western-allied, democratic Australia — has become a byword among conservatives for an over-the-top approach to combating the coronavirus pandemic. The government there has used aggressive vaccine mandates, quarantines, border restrictions and lockdowns to keep Covid-19 deaths below 3000 people in a country of 25 million, with some trade-offs in personal freedoms.

But the commentary on the American right has made Australia out to be some kind of authoritarian state:

In National Review, the flagship magazine of mainstream conservative thought, various headlines have read “When Will Some Hold Human Rights Hearings on Australia? Australians Are Suffering from Excessive COVID Lockdowns,” and “When a Western Society Goes Insane.” A Sept. 9 article in the Federalist declared: “The once free and open Australian continent has effectively become a giant prison for its 26 million residents.” That same month, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mused aloud: “Is Australia freer than China, communist China, right now? I don’t know. The fact that that’s even a question tells you something has gone dramatically off the rails with some of this stuff.”

The comparisons died down for a while, but the recent standoff between Novak Djokovic and Australian authorities over the Serbian star’s refusal to vaccinate has brought the topic raging back. Trump and DeSantis are also shadow boxing their respective records on COVID, ahead of a possible clash in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, so the fact that both have mentioned Australia is especially interesting. But Australians are also extremely proud of how they’ve handled the pandemic. The country has had fewer deaths per capita than just about anywhere. And while the lockdowns were hard, there was a lot of government aid to help workers and businesses. Most Australians, in polls and in interviews will tell you that, despite the problems, it’s been worth it. Australians, including many conservatives, find right-wing American comments both odd and insulting. They tend to think it’s absurd for conservatives to be attacking Australia’s policies from a country where over 800,000 people have dies of Covid, thanks in part, Australians argue, to America’s obsession with individualism and “freedom” rather than a respect for collective sacrifice.

3. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley. I keep hearing about bipartisanship. Oh, what is this fey, bashful woodland creature of which you speak, Republicans? It sounds simply enchanting—and, yes, I would love to believe it exists. But it just doesn’t. I’m quite certain I saw Mitch McConnell beating it to death with a shovel in a roadside ditch after he hit it with his car.

Honestly, the only whiff of bipartisanship I ever detect from Republicans these days is when they take credit for popular spending bills Democrats passed by themselves. Grassley knows this as well as anyone. But, hey, he has a grossly unrepresentative and antiquated system to protect. And the filibuster is the key to preserving white minority rule. Early this month Grassley joined the perpetually wrong Larry Kudlow on Fox Business to chew the latest Republican talking points into a mealy paste, before regurgitating them into GOP mouths.

GRASSLEY: “The most important thing about not changing the rules of the Senate—in fact, you know, it takes two-thirds vote to change the rules of the Senate, but they’ll break the rules to change the Senate to change the rules because they’ve got a way of doing it with 51 votes instead of two-thirds vote, and if that happens, then every senator in the minority is not going to be protected and we’re not going to have the bipartisanship that when you have to have 60 votes, and Iowans want more bipartisanship. In fact, they’re disgusted that we don’t have enough of it already. And the 60 votes prompts bipartisanship. And the function of the Senate was to be a deliberative body, not just let the majority run over the minority.”

Iowans are disgusted we don’t have more bipartisanship? Will they give back those three Supreme Court seats they rammed through on a partisan basis after blatantly stealing a seat from President Obama?

Oh, and maybe bipartisanship took a bit of a hit when a cabal of Republicans got together on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration to vow to oppose everything he did—even as the economy hemorrhaged jobs in the wake of George W. Bush’s brilliant economic stewardship. In fact, Republicans vehemently opposed President Obama’s roughly $800 billion stimulus bill, even though the economy had cratered and started to show signs of slouching toward depression. In the final analysis, Obama’s stimulus bill likely helped the country avoid another Great Depression, and Republicans didn’t lift a single crooked finger to help get it passed.

Why were Republicans so recalcitrant? Because Mitch McConnell told them that getting rid of Obama was more important than saving the economy and creating jobs. How’s that for bipartisanship? Trying to strangle a new administration in its crib during one of the worst financial crises in our country’s history—a crisis that started, mind you, under the diligent watch of a Republican president.

No, for Republicans, “bipartisanship” is just a warm-and-fuzzy buzzword they use to pull the wool over the eyes of their sheep. This is what they need to do given that they have an equal number of seats in the Senate to Democrats with 41 million fewer voters.

Surely Chuck Grassley knows better. But getting the truth out of a Republican these days is like trying to find Louie Gohmert’s brain on an MRI scan. You really have to squint to see it, and even then, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at.

4. Republican Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. The modern ReTrumplican bristles at the notion that racism, at least systemic racism, exists. They seek to “cancel” such notions by banning teaching our children Critical Race Theory (which they were never taught anyway) or anything remotely suggesting that America has race issues.  In so doing they have sought to de-emphasize the parts of American history that might make whites “uncomfortable.”

This cleansing has included everything from the documented history of black lynchings to the stories of Rosa Parks and Edmund Pettus Bridge. It has evolved to include justifying slavery as a “necessary evil.”  In the nation Republicans wish to create, the stories discussed above could not be taught to children for fear of making some “uncomfortable.” However, the claim that black slavery was a “necessary evil” to build our country could be taught. 

Senator Cotton said exactly this in an attack on the “1619 Project” (named after the year the first slave ships arrived) and in support of a bill that would effectively ban any teaching related to the 1619 Project. You see, according to Senator Cotton even slavery was not about race and did not actually evidence white supremacism.  In the words of Cotton:

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.” We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.”

Yep, that really happened in America, in a Federal court even.  But in a nation run by the new Republicans, the words of Black slaves would be whitewashed out of history.  All in the name of not making whites uncomfortable with the undeniable truth of American history.  

The truth is, we should be uncomfortable with that history, we must be uncomfortable with it.  For if we are comfortable with that history, we may repeat it in many ways.  The German people are quite uncomfortable with their history of the holocaust, which is healthy. So should Americans be with our undeniable history of slavery and white supremacy.  Those not discomforted by history are doomed to repeat it. 

Perhaps if we were more uncomfortable, we would be less comfortable with politicians today challenging election results in areas with large numbers of Black voters.

That’s not history, it’s today.

5. Florida Senator Marco Rubio. The most shocking part about this story isn’t Marco Rubio’s hypocrisy. That’s a given, like Donald Trump’s slovenly ineptitude or early summer squalls that drop hailstones the size of Louie Gohmert’s head. No, the truly surprising part is that his hypocrisy was so incandescent it actually drew flak from Fox News.

Donald Trump has apparently run afoul of the law—again. This time he’s been accused of physically removing top secret materials from the White House and shoving then in some random Mar-a-Lago linen hamper that’s likely the closest we’ll ever get to a Donald Trump Presidential Library.

Unless you were in a coma during the 2016 election cycle, as many of us no doubt wish we had been, you’ll recall something about Hillary Clinton’s emails and a private server. The world-ending scandal that supposedly proved then-Secretary Clinton was unfit for office involved her sending and forwarding emails from an unsecured account. Oh, and a vanishingly small percentage of these emails may have been classified—in most cases retroactively. Doesn’t sound like much, but the media, led by the venerable New York Times, acted like they’d found a neck-tatted, JonBenét Ramsey playing Russian roulette with the Lindbergh baby in a crawlspace under Hillary’s guesthouse.

Importantly, however, investigators concluded that Clinton’s handling of her emails was in no way criminal. As observed by Vox, even Jack Goldsmith, an attorney in the GW Bush administration, noted that prosecuting Clinton “would be entirely novel, and would turn in part on very tricky questions about how email exchanges fit into language written with physical removal of classified information in mind.”

Physical removal of classified information? Intentionally mishandling classified material? You mean, what Donald Trump just did?
This, of course brings us to the senior Sunshine State senator.

While speaking with host Bret Baier on Fox News's "Special Report," Rubio was asked why Republicans were not expressing the same degree of outrage they displayed when it was disclosed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had used a private email server while working for the White House.

"Well, first of all, I don't know what's true and what's not because they've made up so many stories about Donald Trump over the years that, I mean, things that I just knew were flat out untrue," Rubio said.

Did they, Marco? You mean, like all those kinky Russian connections or Ukraine blackmail or January 6 peaceful protests by tourists, all of which were extensively documented. Right-wing media never made stuff up about Hillary Clinton? Right!

Of course, Rubio is still appalled over the media’s shabby treatment of the “embarrassing” man whom the Florida senator once claimed was “trying to prey upon people’s fears.”

“Nowadays, in the mainstream media, you just need one source to smear Donald Trump, and maybe you don't even need that. So, it's hard to tell anymore what really happened and what didn't. The documents that were in Mar-a-Lago by all accounts were turned over,” Rubio said. “Look, if the process wasn't followed there, then that there needs to be something that happens about that. It's not a crime, I don't believe, but the stuff about flushing paper down the toilet—who knows if that's even true?”

Breaking news! Marco Rubio doesn’t think Trump committed a crime by intentionally removing top secret materials from the White House in clear violation of federal law. And yet he thought Clinton’s supposed carelessness was “disgraceful.”

And we already know Trump ripped documents to shreds after “reading” them. Why is it such a stretch to think he’d try to flush them down the toilet? If you try to tell me Trump does anything like a normal human, that’s when I get suspicious.

It’s not a crime, huh? We’ll see, Marco. We’ll see.

___________________________

And the February winner is:

Ignorance dominates this month’s selections, but for pure evilness, I have to go with the ultimate apologist and hypocrite, Senator Marco Rubio. This award is long overdue. I’m sure Tom Cotton will grace these pages again.