JULY 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate Nominee in Georgia. When Walker began his campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Walker campaign's main task was to play down Walker's history of domestic violence. As the campaign progresses, his handlers have a lot more cleaning up to do, which is not something Republicans are very good at—or, interested in.

Take the following: Walker’s involvement with a company that scammed American veterans (he falsely claimed he founded Patriot Support), his promotion of a scammy-sounding anti-coronavirus spray, his public lies about graduating from the University of Georgia (he even claimed he was in the top 1% of his class), his lying about working in law enforcement (he was an honorary Cobb County deputy, which is like being a junior ranger), his false claim about owning a lucrative chicken processing business, and, after “family man” Walker repeatedly criticized absent fathers in black households, his forced public acknowledged of having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact. Add to this his suspiciously opaque supposed financial disclosures and his recent denial that former President Trump ever said the 2020 election was stolen, one can only conclude that Walker doesn't know anything about anything.

All right, so Herschel Walker is a liar and a hypocrite, a possible scammer, a political buffoon with a history of domestic abuse and a string of children he has so little involvement with that even his own campaign didn't know they existed. Fine. I think we could have all left it with "if you put a gun to your wife's head, you probably should forever be excluded from the United States Senate" but we're dealing with Republicans who don't blink at plots by a sitting Republican president to get his own vice president assassinated, they're not going to blink at any of this.

The depth of Walker’s ignorance never ceases to amaze. On Sunday, Walker spoke in front of the Hall County Republican Party. The group was small, and the speech revolved mainly around the enemy: China. That’s the country he claims created the COVID-19 virus and is to blame for climate change and a tax increase used to clean up the air.

Straying from his usual stump script, Walker started talking about the environment and climate change and how “[President Joe] Biden” began “getting rid of pipelines,” and “getting rid of our energy.” Then Walker explained climate change and the “Green New Deal” by saying that “We, in America, have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world.” He then pivoted to describe how the U.S. is going to “pull from the ‘Green New Deal’… millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up,” and added that, “China and India aren’t putting anything into cleaning that situation up.”

“So all that bad air is still there. But, since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China bad air. So when China get our good air, their bad air gotta move. So, it moves over to our good air space. And now, we gotta clean that back up. While they’re messing ours up. So, what we’re doing is just spending money. But we’re not just spending money, we’re spending your money,” Walker says. And that is why Biden is raising taxes, he reasons.”

Enlightening!

Earlier in a monthly IGGY, I mentioned that Walker, if elected (the race against Warnock is virtually a dead heat), would be a shoe-in to join Louie Gohmert and Tommy Tuberville as one of the Three Stooge dumbest Congressmen. I’ll bet you could probably get Walker to play quietly in his office for at least an hour by giving him a copy of The Last Supper and telling him to find Waldo.

And now, he may be trying to earn the distinction of not only being a moron, but the Congress’ biggest fabricator, perhaps one of the greatest of all time, only one step behind the Trumpster..

2. Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers. Remember a couple months ago Senator Rogers received something no other Arizona legislator had earned in 30 years): a formal censure from the Legislature for praising Putin, damning Zelenskyy, and threatening her opponents.

You may have heard, Arizona’s has a Republican, quite conservative, Legislature—you know, the bozos behind the “audit” boondoggle—and they’re running a close 2nd or 3rd to Florida and Texas when it comes to hating on women, education, immigrants, LGBTQ, voting, and a fair economy. My point is this is a conservative place, so to be censured by these knuckleheads, members of your own party, probably means you’ve done some pretty nasty shit. Sen. Rogers did, but while Republicans voted overwhelmingly to censure her on March 1, the actual document doesn’t say what she did. The censure does not even mention Rogers by name.

Spineless, frightened jackasses! WTF are they afraid of? Oh, that’s right, Trump. He adores Wendy Rogers, who’s got just the right amount of racism, theocratic nutballery, conspiracy madness, and crackpot DNA, along with her steamy embrace of the big lie, that she’s earned that draft-dodging predator’s endorsement. Congratulations.

So, Arizona’s pucker-up Republicans won’t call out Rogers by name, nor mention what she said or did. For instance, they didn’t censure her for speaking at Holocaust-denying, Nick Fuentes' Putin-love fest in February, where she called the assembled white supremacists “patriots,” advocated hanging her political opponents, threatened fellow Republicans, and branded Zelenskyy a globalist puppet for Soros. Nor did the GOP censure her for tweeting that the social democracies of Europe that are aiding Ukraine are building a new Third Reich.

Is she complementing the European nations by comparing them to Nazis, because at the white nationalist rally she had just attended they cheered Hitler (and Putin). The Legislature’s censure doesn’t mention these tweets and comments; instead they rebuked Rogers for some namby-pamby bullshit like “conduct unbecoming of a senator” and “encouraging violence,” and “damag[ing] the reputation of the Arizona state Senate,” without saying who or what.

But now Rogers, a member of the Oath Keepers, is out with another garbage dump that Arizona officials can’t ignore, because the content is too recent and too raw—the Buffalo massacre. It’s one thing to tweet conspiracies about voting machines or distant wars, but to go all Alex Jones and claim Buffalo’s tragedies are part of a Federal plot to murder people.

As news of the mass shooting by a white suspect who had posted a racist screed on the internet and driven about 200 miles to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, Rogers [posted on Telegram] "Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo."

The Arizona Mirror notes that her “use of the phrase ‘fed boy summer’ appears to be a nod to ‘white boy summer,’ a viral meme used by Neo-Nazis and white nationalists in 2021.” It also implicates the Federal government in a mass shooting.

Arizona Democrats immediately called for Rogers’ removal. For years they’ve put up with her bigotry, homophobia, religious vomit, antisemitism, and Trump talking points, but the vote to expel Rogers failed. The Republican Legislature released a statement condemning the “heinous” crimes in Buffalo, without mentioning Rogers’ post or the significant media attention it has received, even in Buffalo.  

Her ugly words and QAnon conspiracies are more and more unavoidable: In the wake of fluffing Putin and cheering on insurrectionists she actually suggests Buffalo is part of a federal conspiracy, not the work of a young, impressionable, Tucker-loving, gun-hugging white nationalist, i.e., Rogers’ base, Trump’s people. So instead of removing her from office and risk offending the orange shit stain in Mar-a-Lago they’re going to investigate her remarks "relating to the Buffalo shooting as inappropriate of an elected official with this body."

3. Rep. Matt Gaetz. Gaetz is misogyny personified and he proved as much on Saturday at the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit. “Have you watched these pro-abortion, pro-murder rallies,” the Florida Congressman asked at the convention held at the Tampa Convention Center in Florida. “The people are just disgusting.

“Like, why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb."

When a reporter gave Gaetz an opportunity to apologize for his statements, he instead doubled down, calling women at abortion rallies “ugly and overweight.”

“What do you say to people who think that those comments are offensive,” the reporter asked.

Gaetz responded: “Be offended.”

Gaetz went on to describe those protesting in support of abortion rights as “disgusting” and "odious on the inside and out."

”They’re like 5’2, 350 pounds, and they’re like ‘give me my abortions or I’ll get up and march and protest,’” Gaetz said. “I’m thinking, march? You look like you have ankles weaker than the legal reasoning behind Roe versus Wade. A few of them need to get up and march.”

Gaetz continued: "They need to get up and march for like an hour a day, swing those arms, get the blood pumping, maybe mix in a salad."

Need more to be convinced of Gaetz’ total lack of humanity, how about this clip of accused sex trafficker speaking with carpetbagger Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. In it, Gaetz said that Rep. Jamie Raskin was “unable” to do his job as a Jan. 6, committee member. Why? Because Rep. Raskin’s son died by suicide.

“What I worry about with Raskin, in all seriousness—when people encounter trauma, they often associate a lot of the other things around that trauma with it, even if they don’t naturally or even rationally associate.”

That’s the low point Gaetz, along with Marjorie Taylor Green, dug to in their attempts to discredit what will likely be a barrage of revelations about how involved they both were in the failed coup d’etat on Jan. 6. Rep. Raskin, for all of the tragedy he has endured, has more integrity in a clipped fingernail than Reps. Gaetz and Greene have in their entire family tree.

4. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Calling Green ignorant is like calling Trump a liar. Her life has been one silver-spooned race to outpace the demons she perceives are chasing her. Those demons are likely a mixture of anger and self-hatred, but it is what it is. When the Georgia carpetbagger isn’t harassing teen gun violence survivors, she’s promoting bigotry.

Frequently, Greene uses what has become pretty standard GOP practice: Spew some vague and easily debunked conspiracy theories that include Jewish space lasers, but make sure you say you are just asking questions or something to that effect. That way you can sort of deny you are promoting some next-level bullshit because you don’t have the intellectual facilities to do the hard thinking it takes to solve real problems.

Mass shootings in New York and Texas were followed up with two shootings during July 4 festivities. Greene went to her Facebook account to do a live show about it all on Tuesday. Greene’s a real messed up person, as people used to say.

First Greene proposed that Highland Park, Illinois, mass shooter Robert E. Crimo III was a “leftist” (even though there is video and photographic evidence he was a Trump supporter). Her reasoning was that he followed the World Health Organization on his social media accounts and seemed to have “liked” a story about Greene being fined for refusing to wear a mask in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, after settling on the “fact” that Greene deemed Crimo a “leftist” and a “run-of-the-mill Democrat,” she wondered how and why he wore an FBI hat, saying she only knew FBI people who wore FBI hats. Of course, this will be news to the manufacturers of one of the over 1,000 FBI hats you can buy on Amazon. But Greene is working towards something here. She offered up this theory on gun violence:

“Two shootings on July 4, one in a rich, white neighborhood and another at a fireworks display. It almost sounds like it’s designed to persuade Republicans to go along with more gun control. We didn’t see this happen at the Pride parades in June, but as soon as we hit MAGA month, the month we all celebrate loving our country, we have shooting on July 4.”

She also scattershot “questions” about pharmaceutical drugs, gun laws, mental health issues while importantly not offering up a single whiff of an idea of what she would do to fix these conspiracy theory issues. She alternately asks why law enforcement didn’t stop this shooting and why red-flag laws didn’t work, but not because she thinks they are incompetent or that red flags don’t work, but because they clearly purposefully let it happen. At least that is the implication she is hammering with her lowest common denominator ideas.

This live broadcast of bullshit comes hours after Greene posted a very fake image of Crimo in what looks like a jail cell. Her post at the time promoted the image as real and tried to drive home the narrative that mental health issues were the single determining factor in the Highland Park shooting. Not the guns and the ammo and the easy loophole in the law that got those weapons into Crimo’s hands in the first place.

Considering she has voted against regulating the pharmaceutical industry and has voted against increasing funding and access to mental health, it makes it pretty clear what she thinks of her own ideas.

5. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Former Trump Press Secretary and now GOP Nominee for the Governor of Arkansas. Sanders was trending on Sunday for continuing a tradition of hypocrisy that I would’ve hoped peaked when she was White House Press Secretary for former President Donald Trump. It didn’t.

Footage of promises the Arkansas Republican made just one month ago began to circulate on social media in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade, in essence delivering the kind of blow to reproductive rights that will likely criminalize healthcare and devastate those seeking to terminate their pregnancies for years to come.

”We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom (...),” Sanders said.

Say what?

Someone should send Sanders a list of cities that experienced mass shootings in schools: Uvalde, Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Columbine families might like a word.

6. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ). Lesko caused a stir when she took the floor of the House to oppose a gun safety bill and in the process seemed to vow to shoot her own grandchildren.

“I have five grandchildren,” the congresswoman began in last month’s speech. “I would do anything—anything—to protect my five grandchildren. Including, as a last resort, shooting them, if I had to, to protect the lives of my grandchildren.” Growing angrier, Lesko then accused Democrats of trying to “take away my right to protect my grandchildren” and “the rights of law-abiding citizens to protect their own children.”

After Lesko’s remarks started to pick up steam on social media Wednesday, with gun safety activists including Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts expressing concern over her apparent priorities, the congresswoman issued a statement that did not seek to clarify her comments but rather attack her critics.

“It never ceases to amaze me the lengths gun control zealots will go!” Lesko wrote on Twitter. “They turned my speech about protecting Second Amendment rights and my right to protect my grandchildren from violent criminals into a claim I would harm my own grandchildren. Absolutely ridiculous!”

Lesko, who won her Arizona district’s special election by a slim margin in 2018, does have a history of inflammatory statements, including anti-vaccine rhetoric that preceded the COVID-19 pandemic. She recently received Donald Trump’s endorsement for her 2022 re-election campaign.

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And the July winner is:

I’ve refrained from awarding Herschel Walker a monthly IGGY in the past because I assumed he was more moronic than evil, but learning about the previously unmentioned three children, with whom he has little or no contact, I now see there is an evilness to his character. Thus, I am conferring the July IGGY on the master prevaricator. Matt Gaetz and Taylor Green are worthy, but they will have to wait their December induction into the IGGY Hall-of-Shame for due recognition.