MARCH 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Lindsey Graham. The hypocritical, deceitful Graham called for a “Brutus” or Stauffenberg” to rid the world of Vladimir Putin. I find this ignominious worthy for a couple reasons.

First, to the age-old debate of whether history makes the man, or the man makes history, let me say I lean to the side of history. Did Rome become better off without Ceaser? Had Hitler been assassinated, would the world be better off with Hess, Goring, or Bormann in charge? With Putin gone, would a successor be more reasonable? You get my point.

Second, official talk about killing Putin implies US support for regime change in Moscow. If you make a nuclear-armed enemy believe your strategy requires the end of their regime (or life), you are pushing them to nervous finger on their nuclear trigger. I’m reminded of Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet military who in 1983 was assigned to the command center that monitored Soviet early warning satellites over the US. During one of his shifts when Cold War tensions were running high (downed Korean airliner, revelations about nuclear winter) an alarm went off signaling that the Americans had seemingly launched five Minuteman ICBMs. Petrov had just a few minutes to decide whether to report the attack to the chain of command, which, under the tense circumstances, could have triggered a swift retaliatory strike. Fortunately for the US, Soviet Union, and the world, he decided to report the alert as a malfunction-a false alarm. Which it was: the satellite had misread sunlight reflecting off clouds as a missile attack.

Think about what would happen today with Russian nuclear forces on alert if a similar false warning were to occur. Would we be so lucky?

Lindsey Graham is one of the lowest of” humans”: a seemingly intelligent man who should know right from wrong, but time and time again defers to political expediency. His latest low life display was to announce he would vote against the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson after voting to confirm her when she was appointed to an appellate court. It doesn’t matter if he contradicts himself, speaks with forked tongue, or tells an outright lie, if it benefits him politically. He’s the epitome of what it means to be ignominious.

2. Michigan Republican State Representative Robert “R.J.” Regan. Regan, who just won a special election to fill the Michigan House seat in District 74, is an election denier. To make a point about decertifying the 2020 Presidential election in Michigan, he offered some ‘wisdom’ he had shared with his daughters.

"Having three daughters, I tell my daughters, 'if rape is inevitable, you should just lay back and enjoy it’.

The remark was so unempathetic — and creepy — that even the other panelists on the ultra-conservative FB group he belongs to, the ‘Michigan Rescue Coalition’, were gobsmacked. Amber Harris was open-mouthed in astonishment. And expressed dismay at Regan’s remark, saying, "That was a shameful comment," 

The group's host, Adam de Angeli, pointed out that the show is "streaming on YouTube, probably not for much longer after what Robert said." Not enough. The group needs to oust Regan and call child protective services to ensure his daughters are not the victims of something.

De Angeli attempted to excuse Regan’s social media throw up by saying,

"Maybe not the best analogy, but he was speaking extemporaneously,"

That is as bad as the “it was the alcohol talking.” When we speak off the cuff, we will not be as polished as if we had practiced. But we will be more honest, as our brain has not analyzed the sentiment in the cold light of day and realized it is reprehensible. Every successful trial attorney knows that the truth is revealed in chance remarks we do not think through. It is the sober person's version of “in vino veritas.”

No one knows a parent as well as a child. And one of his daughters, Stephanie, was clear in her thinking about her Dad when in June 2020, she tweeted:

"if you’re in michigan and 18+ pls for the love of god do not vote for my dad for state rep. tell everyone."

Regan admitted, at the time, there was friction with his daughters when in a reply, posted to FB, he wrote,

"I am happy that she feels confident enough in our relationship to express her opposing thoughts so publicly," adding that he loves his children, and "we may not always agree on 'what is best,' but, their best, is my goal."

I do not know how enjoying rape is ‘what is best’ for his children. But the conservative mind is a mystery to me. Regan further explained the roots of his daughter’s ‘misguided’ thinking,

“A lot of students when they go off to these liberal university campuses, like the University of Colorado, the University of Texas and Austin — and she went to the University of Colorado in Boulder — and you know, they just kind of get sucked into this Marxist, communist ideology and she and I just don’t see eye to eye when it comes to the whole socialism, communism, Marxist philosophy,”

He was not done,

“Her big thing has to do with the systemic racism that’s going on in the country. She’s a big believer in that. The only place where I really see systemic racism would be the abortion clinic cause they seem to target the African American community. I don’t buy into this whole systemic racism thing at all.”

Spoken like a true white person. “I haven't suffered racism, so there isn’t any racism.” However, in his mind, he is a victim,

“I’m not saying there’s not hurdles to overcome. We all have hurdles to overcome. You know, as a quote-unquote rich, white, Christian male, people look at me a certain way. And it’s not always good. So, everybody has obstacles to overcome.”

And then he iced his racist cake with a tip of the hat to the most overtly racist man to be President since Woodrow Wilson, when he said that Trump had,

"done more for the black community than any president we’ve had in the last 20 years."

It will not surprise you to know that after his “enjoy your rape” rant, Regan expressed support for Putin and his war in Ukraine. Because he thought it was the only way Putin could defend Russia against the genocidal Ukrainians, who were threatening to unleash biological weapons, cooked up in secret labs, to wipe out the Russian population.

How do people get like this, and how do they get elected? 

3. Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn. Any story written about Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina must begin with the continent-sized caveat that Cawthorn is a liar. He’s a pathological liar. He has lied about getting accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy; he's lied about his own friend's responses to the car accident that left him without use of his legs; he's lied about training for the Paralympics; he's lied about running a racist website—there are only so many semicolons one can use before running out of runway with  Madison Cawthorn's lies.  

Or, maybe he’s just a complete idiot.

This month Cawthorn continued his swirling descent into the hearts and minds of MAGA world. In recent weeks, he has been on a dunderheaded tear. First, there was the video of him projecting all of his and the GOP’s corruptions onto the country that Donald Trump attempted to extort for domestic political gain by blasting Ukrainian President Zalenskyy as a “thug,” and attacking the Ukraine government as “evil.” Then, there was a clip of him repeating the oft-GOP reference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a representative of the “deep state” fake news fraternity.

In a video of his diatribe, Cawthorn makes the partisan hack joke that Nancy Pelosi only has rules for others, and not for herself. He then jokes, “I’ll tell you, I have to work with her every day so please do pray for me.” He gets a light spatter of laughter as the audience realizes this is the high level of humor they’re going to get during today’s speech from this racist asshole. Then he goes on to insinuate that Palosi was an alcoholic.

“The theories of alcoholism are very true and it’s very sad.” Cawthorn seems to be referencing “theories” that were not simply debunked but proven impossible. The Theories date back to the summer of 2020 when a doctored video of Pelosi, which slowed down her speech to make her sound drunk and slurred, was posted on Facebook and went viral among the kind of people Madison Cawthorn likes to call on for campaign funds. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Speaker Pelosi doesn’t drink, but conservatives have spread the rumor that she was into drinking—not unlike a former Republican speaker of the house, I might add.

Bad as these stains on American discourse are, they pale in comparison to the most recent revelation of his genuine ignominious character: the question over whether the North Carolina Republican should be facing a very real investigation into his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the days after the insurrection at the Capitol building on Jan. 6, Cawthorn came under scrutiny for a few reasons. He was one of the speakers at the rally held shortly before the attempted coup d’etat, where he told the crowd assembled:  "My friends, the Democrats, with all the fraud they have done in this election, the Republicans hiding and not fighting, they are  trying to silence your voice.  

He also spoke with Smoky Mountain News shortly after the events of the day, where he explained how he and a few others were separated from the main evacuation from the House Chambers that day because he needed to take a different route on account of his wheelchair. “Fortunately, I was armed, so we would have been able to protect ourselves.”

It is against the law for representatives to carry firearms onto the House floor. And while it is legal for Cawthorn and others to have firearms in their offices, how exactly Cawthorn was able to be evacuated from the House chambers and then get possession of his firearm remained a mystery. Perhaps no more.

On Monday, a clip of Madison Cawthorn calling into Charlie Kirk’s web-broadcasted show on Jan. 6, 2021, has resurfaced. Kirk is best known as the aging “young conservative” who made Trumpian waves with his Turning Point USA organization. In the clip, Cawthorn says he is safe and armed. Later in the interview, Kirk, giddy in the way people like Charlie Kirk are giddy for guns, remarks that because of Cawthorn and Boebert, there are more Congress members walking around with murder machines. Cawthorn then says this strange thing:

“So, you know, obviously having the wheelchair, I’m able to carry many [sic] multiple weapons at one time. So, you know, everyone around me is armed and, you know, I think an armed society is a polite society. So, I feel very safe.”

More importantly, why would he be carrying “multiple guns,” and is he carrying “multiple guns” in order to arm people around him? If so, are they legally allowed to have guns? This is the kind of thing that someone who plans on shooting a lot of people does.

Politics is one of the many professions that attracts pathological narcissists. Recent years have shown that some of those narcissists have a tendency to not simply be liars but to project their deepest anxieties and personality disorders upon others. Cawthorn’s relentless statements about Democratic officials and Democrats in general, and his frequent displays of fascist sympathies, do make one wonder: how can people vote for this sick individual?

4. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green and Fellow GOP Hypocrites. Vladimir Putin has been a favorite of the American far-right for his nationalist policies, his contempt for human rights, and of course, his ability to govern as a "strong" autocrat who dispenses with his own political opposition using whichever tools of the state are most convenient. The admiration turned mainstream once Donald Trump started praising him, and sucking up to him, for the same reasons.

Putin is the autocrat of the exact sort that the Republican right have demanded this country also install. We have all seen Sen. Ted Cruz's mocking of the "woke" American military compared to the testosterone-heavy recruiting ads of the (now proven incompetent) Russian army. We have years of history of the most highly connected Republicans working directly with pro-Russian oligarchs to destabilize Ukrainian democracy in exchange for either cash or "favors"—in the form of fraudulent claims and documents that can be used against Republican enemies here at home. Fox News' Tucker Carlson went from cheering for Putin to vaguely condemning him to speedily shifting into a top international promoter of Kremlin "biolab" propaganda intended to retroactively justify the invasion.

And, then there’s Marjorie Taylor Green.

Shortly after Ukrainian President Zelenskyy delivered his virtual address to Congress, Green gave a speech in which she repeated claims that Ukraine is certain to lose to the great Putin—a claim that, at this point, few outside the Kremlin are still claiming. On the contrary, the Russian advance has stalled, and each day brings new revelations of disarray and discord withing the Russian ranks. If the great Putin wanted to showcase Russia’s military prowess, he’s having a rude awakening.

There surely cannot be anyone left in America who believes that Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, has put even ten minutes of serious thought into what should or should not happen in Ukraine. But the more central point is that she is not an outlier on this.

Which Republican lawmakers have been eager to adopt Rudy Giuliani-pushed hoaxes claiming that their Democratic enemies-of-the-moment were responsible for all sorts of subterfuge in Ukraine and that the Ukrainian government was in cahoots with those efforts? Nearly all of them! And not just a little, but to the point that Republican lawmakers were willing to repeat those claims as part of their justifications for nullifying a U.S. constitutional election on behalf of the liars who invented the theories.

Which Republican lawmakers stubbornly insisted that there was no foul done when Donald Trump held up weapons shipments to an at-war Ukraine in a flagrantly crooked attempt to extort the Zelenskyy government into publicly endorsing a hoax aimed at Trump's election opponent? All of them, save one Republican senator.

Many of those same Republicans are now on television feigning great outrage over President Biden's unwillingness to directly engage Russian aircraft in combat. The very same Republicans were using Greene's arguments during Trump's first impeachment trial to argue that Trump's one-person blockade of military aid to Ukraine during a time of war was of no great consequence.

The Greene position is the basest form of the Republican position, in that she is not clever enough to couch her demands in the doublespeak most politicians use to pretend at nuance. The Republican position on Ukraine is that whatever is happening is the fault of Democrats, the answer is to do the opposite of whatever Democrats want to do, and the actual outcome—whether a European democracy lives or dies—is irrelevant. The war only exists as attack line. It is important only to the extent that it can be used to pin Bad Things on the movement's domestic enemies.

There is no unified Republican Party "position" on the Russia-Ukraine war. There are only attacks. A few senators are using the war to demand that the supposedly cowardly Biden administration do more. House Republicans who have long expressed at least subtle admiration for Putin (aka, the Trump wing of the party) is demanding their Democratic enemies do less. And all of it is a complete afterthought, as the dominant Republican theme of the war centers itself around rising gas prices, and why those rising gas prices are not Vladimir Putin's fault but the fault of Joe Biden because ... something.

There's no unified Republican Party position on what ought to happen in Europe because Republicanism no longer has any measurable, identifiable ideology that would guide such a thing. It's chaos. Tucker is promoting top Kremlin conspiracies, Greene is demanding the United States cut off supplies and let Putin win, Sen. Lindsey Graham is daring the administration to get into a shooting war, Donald Trump is still praising Putin's supposed genius even as his military gets bogged down, literally, in soggy Ukrainian fields.

Republicanism is now obsessively a movement devoted to attacking the movement's own domestic enemies, and there is no ideology or policy that takes precedent over that. Greene is acting on reflex, but it is the reflex that the party base now demands of every one of its politicians.

It no longer really matters whether Green herself believes what she says. Whether she’s a willing or unwilling purveyor of hoaxes doesn’t really matter; either should be sufficient grounds to remove her from office outright.

____________________________

And the March IGGY winner is:

Worthy candidates this month, but I have to go with Representative Madison Cawthorn. No one in government better represents fascism. Hitler would have been proud.