DECEMBER 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Kanye West. Professional conspiracy promoter Alex Jones invited Kanye West onto his show today, one week after the rapper and anti-Semite, West arranged a Mir-a-Lago dinner meeting with Donald Trump that included notorious white nationalist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes. That meeting roiled the Republican Party, as there are few names more synonymous with America's antisemitic far right than Fuentes. Meanwhile. Fuentes and others on the far right were giddy with their propaganda victory.

Jones presumably invited West and Fuentes onto his show as a bit of self-promotion. It immediately collapsed into antisemitic rants, praise for Adolf Hitler, and praise for Hitler's Nazi Party.

West claimed at one point that "300 Zionists" are in control of the media and the government, speculated on pedophilia and the Talmud, and ranted bafflingly about Israeli political figure Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was his repeated and explicit praise for Hitler and Hitler's Nazi movement that gained the most attention. "I see good things about Hitler also," West said, … We have to stop dissing the Nazis all the time." …"The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world."

West has also said:

"I don't like the word evil next to Nazis. [...] I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis."

"Woke culture is controlled by the Zionist media."

The sickest thing about West’s comments is that they accurately represent prevailing sentiment in the far right.

2. Arizona Governor Candidate Kari Lake. Although Arizona judge Peter Thompson ruled against Senate elect Katie Hobbs’ lawsuit calling for a stiff fine and sanctions against Lake’s attorneys who challenged election results, he did rule that Katie Hobbs’ Office should be compensated for hiring expert witnesses to defend the sham lawsuit filed on behalf of Lake. The total compensation is just over $33,000. That’s something, but it doesn’t send the message many wanted.

Leading up to the election, Lake certainly didn’t win over many Republicans by pissing all over the McCain family in Arizona. Then the day before Judge Thompson ruled on the County’s motion, she tweeted that he was being coached by “top left-wing attorneys.” For someone who had a career in communications, she sure didn't know her audience.

This was Kari Lake’s second appeal after she lost the election, so that’s three losses in a row. Even so, Lake said she will appeal the Judge’s ruling that her lawyers did not prove election tampering. Last week Lake asked a right wing audience to pray for her because she was having a difficult time hiring top-notch lawyers, who rightfully fear sanctions and fines because they know the case has no merit.

It remains to be seen whether Lake will appeal Judge Thompson’s ruling to the Arizona Supreme Court, with the same unsuccessful attorneys, the same empty “evidence,” and the same witnesses spouting nonsense conspiracies but who, when pressed, did not admit to seeing or knowing of any intentional misconduct.

Mike Lindell the pillow jerk and Patrick Byrne the Overstocked jerk have funded a lot of Arizona’s legal shenanigans, including the stupid “audit,” the resulting “mules” movie fiasco, and Kari Lake’s lawsuits. Given today’s relatively light fine and lack of sanctions, I’m inclined to think Lake will keep her grift going.

In the meantime, the Judge ordered, as his “final judgment,” that Katie Hobbs is Governor-Elect. Pound sand, Lake.

3. Republican Rep.-elect George Santos. Santos admitted on Monday to many of the lies he got caught in only after being elected to Congress but denied the broader implications of his pattern of lying and dodged some of the bigger issues raised by reports. In a series of interviews, Santos admitted to “résumé embellishment” but shrugged it off saying that “a lot of people overstate in their résumés.”

While the list of lies Santos admitted to or downplayed is long, one huge question remains both important and completely unanswered: How did he lend his campaign $700,000? In 2020, when he ran for Congress and lost, his financial disclosure said he had little income. Just two years later, he supposedly had his own business that was paying him enough to cough up high six figures, though financial disclosure forms didn’t list any clients. Santos’ campaign website no longer claims his business, the Devolder Organization, manages $80 million in assets, but in his Monday interviews, he basically waved off questions about where that $700,000 came from.

“I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth, and I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress,” Santos told City & State, adding: “There’s nothing wrong with that—no criminal conduct. No anything of the sort.”

Oh, well, if George Santos says there was no criminal conduct, we should definitely believe him. That guy is so trustworthy!

Santos is claiming, to be clear, that he moved from a job at a place called LinkBridge Investors, from which he declared a total of $55,000 in income, to a job at an investment company that the S.E.C. accused of being a Ponzi scheme, then parlayed those connections and experiences into starting a self-owned company that was founded in May 2021 and somehow by November 2022 had paid him enough to lend his campaign $700,000. Suffice it to say there are still a lot of questions to be answered, and considering Santos’ record on telling the truth, he’s going to need to provide a lot of documentation to be believable.

In his interviews, Santos admitted to not having graduated from college. He had previously claimed he had degrees from Baruch College and New York University. He also admitted to not having worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs as he had claimed, now saying that it was a “poor choice of words” to have said that when what really happened (he now claims) is that LinkBridge Investors had connections with those firms and he had done work for them through that.

But even as he owns up to lying, Santos is still lying. It was not a “poor choice of words” to have wrongly implied that he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs—he was extremely specific, with his campaign website claiming that he “began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced to become an associate asset manager in the real asset division of the firm.”

Santos also admitted, in the Trumpian third person, “George Santos does not own any properties” after having campaigned as a landlord who owned 13 properties.

That’s not all: Santos tried and failed to explain away his very specific previous claims that his Jewish grandparents fled the Holocaust. “I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos told the New York Post. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”

One thing Santos flatly rejected rather than semi-admitting but not coming fully clean on was The New York Times report that he had confessed to and been charged with check fraud in Brazil more than a decade ago, with the case remaining unresolved. In his WABC interview Santos insisted, “I am not a criminal. Not here, not abroad, in any jurisdiction in the world have I ever committed any crimes.”

He added, “To get down to the nit and gritty, I’m not a fraud. I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress. I’ve been around a long time. I mean, a lot of people know me. They know who I am. They’ve done business dealings with me.”

Do they, though? That part is not very clear at all.

Of all of Santos’ lies and omissions, though, the money part remains by far the most important. How did he suddenly come up with hundreds of thousands of spare dollars to lend his campaign when nothing in his background or financial disclosures indicates he had a legitimate source for that kind of money? And, if Santos drew or borrowed the money from his corporation, he violated a campaign finance law prohibiting direct corporate contributions. There are a lot of possible answers, and few of them are as simple as a “poor choice of words.” Some of them are crimes that could potentially lead to prison time.

The Republican response to Santos’ duplicity? Silence—of course. By the way, where were the Democrats and media during the Santos campaign? How did a Democrat lose this seat?

4. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green. Two selections from the loudmouth:

First, here’s what Green’s told a New York Republican Club gala earlier this month about the Jan. 6 insurrection: Bottom of Form

“…. I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she said, adding, “See that’s the whole joke, isn’t it? They say that whole thing was planned and I’m like, are you kidding me? A bunch of conservatives, Second Amendment supporters, went in the Capitol without guns, and they think that we organized that? I don’t think so.”

If “New York Young Republicans” makes you think of a bunch of preppy Wall Street guys who just want lower taxes, think again. Greene said this at an event also attended by the white nationalist founder of the racist VDARE site, an event at which guests “applauded members of an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era German Nazi party members,” Hatewatch reported. That is the context in which Greene says she was just joking about how if she and Steve Bannon had organized Jan. 6, attendees would have been armed.

Was Greene joking? Kind of, but this is what happens when extremist Republicans try to do humor. They inadvertently show that they’ve spent way too much time thinking about how they would have done an attack on the U.S. Capitol differently and better.

The recent Oath Keepers trial revealed that people planning for violence on January 6 spent a lot of time thinking about weaponry, and how to work around the Washington, D.C., gun laws that could have caused them to be arrested and detained without ever making it to the Capitol. The Oath Keepers had a large weapons stash in a Virginia hotel room to be within reach if they needed them. But Greene has the unthinking bravado to just say that the insurrectionists should have gone charging in carrying weapons that would have gotten them arrested on their way to the pre-insurrection rally. She’s really not a great strategic thinker.

Second, While Georgia suffered under its coldest snap in decades, MTG road out the freeze in balmy Costa Rica. The story hit headlines that she called in physically unable to attend congress, meaning she was vacant when Congress voted on the government spending bill and hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She did vote by proxy.

It was a busy week for Snotgreen.

On Monday, she got into a Twitter spat with fellow far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert over the Colorado congresswoman's criticism of Greene's past belief in "Jewish space lasers."

On Tuesday, she penned a lengthy Twitter thread on her support for Kevin McCarthy to be Speaker of the House, which found her at odds with Boebert.

On Wednesday, she accused President Zelenskyy of being the US's "shadow president" and skipped his historic address at the Capitol. Later she posted an image of a capitol rioter edited to look like the Ukrainian leader carrying a stack of dollars.

On Thursday, she finalized her divorce with her now ex-husband, Perry Greene. (So, I guess we should now refer to her as MT.)

And on Friday, she cast a vote against a $1.7 trillion government spending bill she dubbed the "omni monster," that funds the government through most of 2023, provides billions in new aid to Ukraine, and includes reforms to the Electoral Count Act.

All this while basking in the Costa Rica sun. What a woman!

5. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott. Republican elected officials continue to compete with one another with stunts of premeditated evil. On Christmas Eve, three busloads of asylum-seeking adult and child refugees were unloaded on the street outside the Naval Observatory, the vice-presidential residence in Washington, D.C.

It was 18 degrees, on Christmas Eve, and many of the migrants were not dressed for winter weather. After the migrants boarded the buses two days ago in Texas, they were abandoned on a D.C. street as a Republican political stunt. Volunteers from the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network had received word the buses would be arriving, and was there to provide blankets, an unnamed D.C. church stepped in to provide temporary shelter, and another mutual aid group provided meals.

All of this was due to the basic decency of normal people who are not monsters. In both the Post account and in others, the mutual aid volunteers say that this stunt risking the welfare of actual human beings was orchestrated by the (again) performatively cruel Texas Gov. Abbott.

There are few if any decent human beings who would gather up asylum-seeking families and dump them on a Washington, D.C., street during sub-freezing temperatures on Christmas Eve, but nobody involved with this stunt has ever been decent in their lives. Hopefully they are all sued, including Abbott; hopefully a few of them end up in prison for a plan that would foreseeably endanger human lives for their little political game.

Abbott, the morning of the bus arrival tweeted from the New Testament: "For today in the city of David a Savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord."

This Christmas Day know that whatever your faults may be you are almost certainly a better person than Any Texas Republican, and that Washington, D.C. remains both a more moral and a more "Christian" place than Texas can claim to be. Happy holidays to you, and to the many volunteers who came from their own holiday gatherings to instead give three busloads of refugees blankets, food, and shelter so that they would not have to spend the night on the street as Gov. Greg Abbott intended.

5. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). Kennedy was a part of Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s final campaign push, two days before the runoff vote between him and sitting Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock (D). While Walker himself had a number of odd things to say over the weekend, it looks like fake folksy Kennedy was intent on adding his voice to the bizarre chorus.

Kennedy, while wearing a sticker reading “RUN HERSCHEL RUN,” railed against “these high IQ stupid people” running around Congress at a campaign stop in Loganville, Georgia, on Sunday afternoon. “These high IQ stupid people have an answer for everything. You know why? Because they think they’re smarter and more virtuous than the American people,” he said.

Did that make no sense to you? Never fear, Kennedy gave rallygoers a list of how to identify this population: “These woke high IQ stupid people are easy to recognize. They hate George Washington. They hate Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “They hate Dr. Seuss, and they hate Mr. Potato Head.”

Ah, yes, the Mount Rushmore of liberal bêtes noires: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Seuss, and Mr. Potato Head. Of course, I don’t want a U.S. senator who hates Mr. Potato Head, but I’d still prefer that to one who thinks he’s a real person. And when it comes to Walker, you just never know.

There’s something especially off-putting about smart Republicans who know better when it comes to pressing issues like Donald Trump’s unprecedented villainy, but who go along with the prevailing GOP narratives, nonetheless. For instance, contrast Oxford-educated Kennedy with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose diploma is suspiciously redolent of Cracker Jack, or Eric Trump, aka  The Third Darryl. Those latter two were born to be Republicans; Kennedy and Cruz willingly chose their path.

Of course, they’ll claim that liberals look down on regular people. At the same time, these phony populists do everything in their power to make those people’s lives harder. Ah, but at least they haven’t brutally defamed Mr. Potato Head!

Kennedy also waxed rhapsodic on the relative merits of cruciferous vegetables: “These high IQ stupid people walk around with Ziploc bags of kale that they can eat to give them energy,” he said. “If you want to eat kale, that’s up to you. I don’t eat kale. You know why? Kale tastes to me like I’d rather be fat.”

Yeah, no liberals are walking around all day with Ziploc bags full of kale. That’s weed, dude. Most of us eat our kale from plates or bowls—when we eat it at all.

Of course, if you’re tired of being reduced to a cultural stereotype—and you live in Georgia—you can send Kennedy and others of his ilk a message: Your IQ is high enough to understand who would make a better U.S. senator—Raphael Warnock or Herschel Walker.

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And he December winner is:

It’s an ill wind that brings forth holiday absurdities. Tough choice this month, but for pure evilness, apart from idiocy, I must give the December IGGY to total shithead George Santos. How could such a dirtbag get elected?