FEBRUARY 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

My mind set doesn't relate to short months, so, I apologize for the tardiness of the February IGGY.

1. Alaska Republican Rep. David Eastman. Republicans are always happy to reach a new low. In this case, as reported by the BBC, Eastman has been censured for asking if child abuse and neglect that result in literal death could be a “benefit to society.”

During a Monday, Feb. 20, Alaska House Judiciary Committee hearing on the long-term effects of child abuse, Eastman framed his little question by pontificating as follows:

“In the case where child abuse is fatal, obviously it’s not good for the child. But it’s actually a benefit to society because there aren’t needs for government services and whatnot over the whole course of that child’s life?”

Ghoulish! On Wednesday, his peers in the Alaska House of Representatives voted 35-1 to censure him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eastman—who, if you were wondering, is quite the Trump fan—was the dissenter.

“Can you say that again,” someone said after his initial question. “Did you say a benefit for society?”

“Um, talking dollars,” Eastman said. “You’ve got a 1.5 million-dollar price tag here for victims of fatal child abuse. It gets argued periodically that it’s actually a cost savings, because that child is not going to need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive, and need based on growing up in this type of environment.”

Trevor Storrs, who serves as the president and CEO of the Alaska Children’s Trust, stressed that the loss of a child is an “unmeasurable” loss to both the family and society as a whole, “hugely tragic,” and that they weren’t otherwise sure “how to answer that” question.

When it came to introducing the measure to censure Eastman, Democratic Rep. Andrew Gray got emotional, and said his child is the “greatest joy” he’s ever had, and that there’s “no price tag on that.” Gray shared that he adopted his child out of the foster system.

Eastman, on his end, doesn’t seem to understand—or doesn’t seem to want to understand—just how badly he messed up.

"The outrageous accusation that somehow I and members of my district support the extermination of people or support child abuse when I've staked my entire political career arguing for the opposite is not acceptable in this body," Eastman said during the hearing on his censure.

This is not the first time Eastman has been censured. Back in 2017, he was censured for suggesting people in Alaska intentionally try to become pregnant in order to get a “free trip to the city” for abortions, as reported by the Associated Press.

2. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon). The price of gas has long been a major factor in assessing the approval of the President and other government officials. Prior to last year's midterm election Republicans attempted to use high gas prices to drag down President Biden and the electoral prospects of congressional Democrats. It didn’t work.

Now gas prices have fallen considerably. Toward the end of February, they averaged about $3.44 per gallon nationwide, which is equal to where they were two years ago. That's down from a high of $5.02 in June of 2022. And even though prices fell each month for the remainder of last year, the GOP furiously condemned Biden as being responsible for the high prices and criticized him for not bringing them down.

On the floor of the House of Representatives, MTG sought to make gas prices an issue again. But this time she was appalled that Biden had taken measures to lower gas prices. How dare Biden make the cost of living more affordable for the American people? This debate was centered around her amendment (which later lost by a landslide 14 to 418 vote) to place restrictions on when and how a president can utilize the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. She fumed that...

"President Biden abused his power to sell our oil, reduce gas prices, so that the midterm elections would swing Democrats' way. It's a shame to trick the American people just to win an election. No president should be able to use their emergency powers for politics."

Green is defining anything that benefits people as a “political” stunt, at least if a Democrat does it. So, no Democratic president should be able to use their powers to benefit the American people.

Green’s Olympic-grade hypocrisy was not lost on Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu who responded to Greene's griping saying that...

"I can summarize this debate of the last two days into one sentence: Joe Biden lowered your gas prices and Republicans are upset about it. That's what this is about. Joe Biden lowered your gas prices and that makes Republicans mad. And how do we know? They said it out loud. The gentlewoman from Georgia earlier this morning just said that Joe Biden lowered your gas prices for political reasons. You know, I don't care why a president lowers your gas prices. If any president can lower your gas prices, we should support that president's action."

The problem for Republicans is that they are openly displaying that they couldn't care less about helping the people of this country, especially if there's a chance that Biden or the Democrats might get credit for it. And they remain pitifully out of touch with the issues that matter most to the nation.

3. More MTG. Fresh off from attacking President Biden’s trip to Ukraine, Greene continued with her brilliant plans to undermine democracy. In an interview with ultra-rightist podcaster and over-age student activist, Charlie Kirk, Greene expressed her outrage that Democrats are actually allowed to vote in America. No, really...

Kirk: I don’t think the left would ever stop. I don’t think they’ll ever stop trying to invade our states or our county. So how do we stop them?
Greene: “Well, I think that, you know, red states could choose in how they allow people to vote in their states. For example, over the past couple of years we've seen a mass exodus from California and New York where we've seen people fleeing those leftist policies and moving to states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas. [...]
What I think would be something that some red states could propose is, well, okay, if Democrat voters choose to flee these blue states ... and they really change their mind on the types of policies that they support, well, once they move to a red state, guess what? Maybe you don’t get to vote for five years. You can live there, you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values ... so that their red states don't get changed.”

First there has been no mass exodus as Greene describes. People are always moving around in the U.S. for many reasons, and many are moving from red states to blue. There's a reason that blue states are more popular and more populous than red.

More to the point, the only reason that Greene is offering as justification for denying American citizens their right to vote is that she disagrees with their political views. Vladimir Putin will be impressed with how far she has come toward the model of "democracy" that he employs. For that matter, so would Putin's American media assets, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. As a matter of fact, Hannity has already told
Greene that "I actually favor that idea."

There is also a glaring logical breakdown in Greene's proposal. She argues that Democrats are fleeing blue states because "they really change their mind on the types of policies that they support." So, if these alleged Democrats now support the policies of red Republican states, why would she want to prohibit them from voting? Is it just punishment for their past voting record?

Greene also said that she is "a big believer in defending our ability to pursue life and liberty and happiness [but that] the left is completely destroying that for those of us on the right." In other words, democracy, wherein people vote for the principles they favor, is destroying the right's pursuit of happiness. So, her solution is to revoke the voting rights of everyone she disagrees with?

You have to wonder how she would respond to a reciprocal policy to deny Republicans the right to vote for five years after they move to a blue state like New York or California - or her own blue-trending state of Georgia? Of course, no Democrat would ever propose anything so oppressive, so anti-democratic, and so downright stupid. For Greene, on the other hand, it's painfully typical...

4. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. After a series of teasers, Gov. DeSantis released his detailed legislation to turn Florida’s public colleges and universities into right-wing indoctrination factories., and it’s as bad as he promised it would be. DeSantis is, on the one hand, moving to ban virtually any viewpoint he doesn’t like and, on the other hand, setting up a core curriculum that reflects his specific political agenda.

On the banned list: Not only whatever the people DeSantis puts in charge decide are “Critical Race Theory,” but literally all diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Majors or minors in gender studies. Any general education course that “defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

Yes, DeSantis is attempting to write into law that any history that suggests the United States did not always fully live up to the “universal principles” of the Declaration of Independence is not fit for inclusion as a general education course—the ones that students will be required to take. Those general education courses will be five courses designated within each of five areas (communication, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, natural sciences) from which students must choose. The direct requirement of the bill would be history courses that didn’t admit to the existence in U.S. history of slavery or the internment of Japanese people during World War II.

“General education core courses may not suppress or distort significant historical events,” according to the bill, and yet they are also required to comply with the ban on anything that “defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” The whole thing is about suppressing and distorting significant historical events.

All of the general education core courses are intended to provide “the education for citizenship of the constitutional republic”—constitutional republic being a big Republican buzzword to assert that the United States is not a democracy. Meanwhile, the core courses in communications “must afford students the ability to communicate effectively, including the ability to write clearly and engage in public speaking, through engagement with the Western literary tradition.” Heaven forbid students learn to communicate effectively, write clearly, and engage in public speaking through engagement with a non-Western literary tradition. We can’t have that!

This will be strictly enforced from above, by people DeSantis appoints for that purpose. Faculty—experts in their fields—will be radically disempowered, forced to teach within the limits DeSantis lays out, or else. The bill talks about “the cultivation of the intellectual autonomy of its undergraduate students,” but its meaning is clear: Faculty are defined as the enemies of intellectual autonomy, which properly belongs only to conservative students who don’t want to learn all that unpleasant stuff about race and gender.

The legislation would weaken faculty tenure, but what’s much worse is what it would do to faculty hiring:

Each state university board of trustees is responsible for hiring faculty for the university. The president of the university may provide hiring recommendations to the board. The president and the board are not required to consider recommendations or opinions of faculty of the university or other individuals or groups.

These trustees will effectively be DeSantis political appointees—for instance, when he put six new people on the board of trustees at the New College of Florida, they included Christopher Rufo, the right-wing think-tanker whose attacks on public education have included being the architect of the campaign against “critical race theory” in schools; the superintendent of a religious charter school; a dean from Hillsdale College, a private Christian school; and the viciously transphobic president of a conservative think tank. That’s the type of people DeSantis is putting in charge of all faculty hiring in Florida’s public colleges and universities.

And no, this isn’t just a formality where the board won’t really exert control:

The board of trustees may delegate its hiring authority to the president; however, the president may not delegate such hiring authority and the board must approve or deny any selection by the president.

Even if the board doesn’t want to go through all the applications, it will have the final word on each and every person hired to teach Florida’s college students.

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And the February winner is:

MTG could win every month, and Eastman’s idiocy, while noteworthy, doesn’t automatically certify him as purely evil (yet), Florida Governor DeSantis’ continuous fascistic utterances and actions confirm him as ignominious to his core (possibly with consequences far worse than Trump). I have thus selected him (noting his assistance from his enabling Republican brethren) as the February IGGY award winner. And to think, this disgraceful phony could become President.