JULY 2024 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

Because I am recovering from full knee replacement surgery, I did not post a July IGGY.  I will roll over July candidates in my file to August.  I will admit that J.D. Vance is a clear front runner.

JUNE 2024 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Tom Cotton. A new name has popped up in the chatter about Donald Trump’s potential pick for vice president: Sen. Tom Cotton. He’s reportedly high on the list because of his “experience and the ability to run a disciplined campaign.” As a running mate, the Arkansas senator “would carry relatively little risk of creating unwanted distractions for a presidential campaign already facing multiple legal threats,” according to The New York Times.

But it sure seems risky to put a no-holds barred racist, sexist creep on a debate stage with Vice President Kamala Harris. Cotton traded in his dog whistle for a racist bullhorn years ago, and has made headlines with his outrageous statements and behavior.

Here is a mere sampling of Cotton’s low lights:

Attacking Ketanji Brown Jackson:

During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Cotton teamed up with other deplorables on the Senate Judiciary Committee to harangue the nominee about everything from QAnon theories to her history as a public defender, attempting to paint her as an adherent of “critical race theory,” as if that’s a bad thing.

Cotton really sunk to the bottom, however, when he all but called Jackson a Nazi sympathizer during a floor speech. “You know, the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis,” he said. “This Judge Jackson might’ve gone there to defend them.”

“Judge Jackson voluntarily represented three terrorists in three cases,” Cotton complained to CNN. “And she called American soldiers war criminals. I have no patience for it.” Jackson, of course, did not call U.S. troops war criminals.

Those were the accusations that prompted Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison to call Cotton the “lowest of the low” and a “little maggot-infested man.”

Attacking the first Muslim American appeals court nominee:

Cotton’s recent bigoted attacks on Adeel A. Mangi, the first-ever Muslim American federal appeals court nominee, also made headlines when he subjected the Pakistani-born attorney to a barrage of Islamophobic questions about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, al-Qaida’s 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, policy issues regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and antisemitism in general.

Cotton bragged about his harassment of Mangi on X (formerly Twitter), crowing about his “gotcha” question trying to paint Mangi as antisemitic. Which is ironic, given Cotton’s previous antisemitic tweet history. .

Blocking nominees of color:

Cotton has a history of opposing Democratic presidents’ Black and brown nominees. From 2014 through 2016, Cotton blocked President Barack Obama’s friend and nominee Cassandra Butts—a Black woman—from an ambassador job. Why? When Butts met with him about his block, she told The New York Times’ Frank Bruni, Cotton admitted it was because “he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s … and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president.” Butts died of cancer more than 800 days after her nomination.

Defending slavery:

Of course, Cotton’s racist theatrics haven’t been confined to Senate hearings. He authorized legislation in 2020 to ban public schools from using a curriculum based on The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which dissected slavery’s impact on our country’s founding. He justified his bill by calling The1619 Project “left-wing propaganda” and revisionist history at its worst.”

Cotton added that children should instead be taught that slavery “was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.”

That infamous New York Times op-ed:

And don’t forget Cotton’s gross New York times op-ed titled “Send In The Troops,” which called for Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and use “an overwhelming show of force” against protesters who took to the streets nationwide in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police. The column incited fierce backlash, which led to backpedaling from The New York Times and the opinion page editor’s resignation.

None of this will diminish Cotton’s prospects with Trump, who likes him because he’s a smart guy with an elite education. Also, he’s a reliable sycophant.

Cotton has refused to condemn Trump’s love of Vladimir Putin and has bragged about how he ignored the evidence and arguments in Trump’s first impeachment.

“My aides delivered a steady flow of papers and photocopied books, hidden underneath a fancy cover sheet labeled ‘Supplementary Impeachment Materials’, so nosy reporters sitting above us in the Senate gallery couldn’t see what I was reading,” Cotton wrote in his 2022 memoir.

Everything about Cotton appeals to Trump—and everything about him is revolting.

MAY 2024 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH:THE IGGY

1. Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy is a stale meme that’s yet to go viral, unlike the more than 100 US children who’ve contacted measles so far this year because some silver spoon loaf-brain told their parents vaccinations were for losers/.

But while Kennedy is likely to become president right around the time Donald Trump scrawls a working unified field theory into his mashed potatoes, that doesn’t mean that he isn’t still dangerous. It’s unclear whether Kennedy will draw more votes from Biden or Trump, but this “Democrat” turned independent has a lot more in common with Trump than any Democrat.

The latest evidence that Kennedy is more dog-whistling, conspiracy reactionary than True Blue Democrat comes in the form of a podcast interview he did with right-winger Tim Pool.

His answer on Confederate statues—and the appropriateness of “honoring” a seditious, virulently racist government that barely lasted four years—could have come from any Southern Republican. Or, if you sprinkled in a few non sequiturs about the apocalyptic repercussions of low-flow shower heads, from Trump himself.

Asked if he condemned the melting down of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kennedy “responded that he didn’t like it at all. Nope, not one bit.

“I have a visceral reaction against the attacks on those statues. I grew up in Virginia. I know that there were heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves. I just have a visceral reaction to destroying history. I don’t like it. I think we should celebrate who we are, and that, you know, we should celebrate the good qualities of everybody. If we want to find people who were completely virtuous on every issue throughout history we would erase all of history. And, you know, values change throughout history and we need to be able to be sophisticated enough to live with, you know, our ancestors who didn’t agree with us on everything and who did things that are now regarded as immoral or wrong. Because maybe they had other qualities that we want to celebrate, and clearly Robert E. Lee had extraordinary qualities of leadership and, you know ... I wouldn’t have done that.

Of course, there are several ways to debunk Kennedy’s horribly shopworn “argument.” First of all, as University of Chicago history professor Jane Daily told NPR in 2017—while Confederate iconography was being dismantled across the country and Trump was vigorously defending it—Confederate statues were never really about honoring anyone’s heritage.

“Most of the people who were involved in erecting the monuments were not necessarily erecting a monument to the past," said Dailey, “but were rather erecting them toward a white supremacist future.”

Indeed, most of the statues went up well after the end of the Civil War—during periods of notable progress for Black Americans.

Meanwhile, the good citizens of Germany—who clearly have no intention of erasing the history of World War II, lest its grave sins be forgotten—nevertheless manage to get through each new day without engaging in knock-down, drag-out fights over Nazi flags and Hitler statues.

Kennedy is smart enough to know this, of course, so it’s worth asking whether his answer is just right-wing agitprop meant to signal to MAGA voters that he’s a viable option for them. After all, he’s running against a guy who reportedly said “Hitler did a lot of good things.” (If Germany is determined to bury its short-lived Nazi “heritage,” Trump appears equally as determined to resurrect it.)

If we’re lucky, Trump’s and Kennedy’s race to the bottom will end in tears for both of them as they split the bonkers vote, and Joe Biden, this cycle’s only reasonable presidential hopeful, will easily prevail. And if not—well, hope you really dig polio, man.

April 2024 Ignominious Absurdity of the Month: the IGGY

1. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga). A mild earthquake struck New York and parts of the Northeast this month. The most notable thing about the tremor was the rarity of any sort of perceivable seismic activity in the tri-state area. Marjorie Taylor Greene had an explanation, writing on X that the quake was evidence of God's displeasure with America.

"God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens," the Republican from Georgia warned.

Greene also referenced the total solar eclipse that will be visible in some parts of the United States on Monday. While eclipses are natural phenomena that scientists can predict with precision, certain far-right figures have pushing bazaar conspiracies around the event. Masonic rituals, satanic rights, and even the arrival of the New World Order have all been floated as possible happenings during the brief darkening of the sky. Greene seems to at least agree that the moon blocking the sun is more than just another machination of the cosmos.

Earthquakes are also well-documented natural phenomena, of course, explained not by a deity's feelings about the people in a certain area but by the shifting of the tectonic plates that comprise Earth's crust. While we're sure Greene, like most Americans, learned this in an elementary school science class, her read on the earthquake that hit New York City on Friday seems to be informed more by her long history of conspiratorial thinking.

Who could forget when the congresswoman blamed 2018's California wildfires on Jewish space lasers? Or when she suggested that Democrats were intentionally setting fires to food processing plants? Or the various times she's suggested mass shootings were intentionally orchestrated false flags? Or when she said flooding at the 2023 Burning Man festival was God's "way of making sure everyone knows who God is."

MARCH 2024 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Alabama Supreme Court. The Alabama Supreme Court, in its ultimate wisdom, ruled this month that frozen embryos are the legal equivalent of children. This has caused Alabama’s largest hospital to pause in vitro fertilization treatments for fear of criminal prosecution. Other fertility treatment providers in the state were continuing to provide IVF as lawyers explored the impact of the ruling.

“Unborn children are ‘children’ ... without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics,” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in Friday’s majority ruling by the all-Republican court.

The ruling prompted a wave of concern about the future of IVF treatments in the state and the potential unintended consequences of extreme anti-abortion laws in Republican-controlled states. Patients called clinics to see if scheduled IVF treatments would continue. And providers consulted with attorneys.

Justices — citing language in the Alabama Constitution that the state recognizes the “rights of the unborn child” — said couples could sue for wrongful death when their frozen embryos were destroyed in a accident at a storage facility.

Mitchell said the court had previously ruled that a fetus killed when a woman is pregnant is covered under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act and nothing excludes “extrauterine children from the Act’s coverage.”

The ruling brought a rush of warnings about the potential impact on fertility treatments and the freezing of embryos, which had previously been considered property by the courts. Groups representing both IVF treatment providers and patients seeking fertility treatments raises questions for providers and patients, including if they can freeze future embryos created during fertility treatment or if patients could ever donate or destroy unused embryos.

The Alabama Supreme Court decision partly hinged on anti-abortion language added to the Alabama Constitution in 2018, stating it is the “policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child,” an amendment that its opponents warned was essentially a personhood measure that could give rights to fertilized eggs. Well, that time has come.

FEBRUARY 2024 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Marjorie Taylor Green R-Georgia). Green gave a doozy of an interview with right-wing podcast host Charlie Kirk to commiserate about House Republicans’ failed initial attempt vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Greene has been big mad about the failed vote and, like many of her pro-impeachment colleagues, is looking for someone—anyone—to blame, including Democrats for trying “to throw us off on the numbers.”

But Greene has plenty of disdain for the Republicans who voted against the bill too. When Kirk asked why Ken Buck of Colorado, Tom McClintock of California, and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin voted against impeachment, Greene seemed flabbergasted—but didn’t rule out the possibility that “they’re being bribed.”

Kirk fed the Georgia congresswoman the utterly baseless idea, asking, “Do you think these people are being blackmailed by the intel agencies? They might have had relations with certain people and pictures and compromised. Do you think that they're currently being blackmailed?”

And Greene took the bait.

“You know, I have no proof of that, but again, I can't understand the vote. So, nothing surprises me in Washington, D.C. anymore, Charlie. Literally, nothing surprises me because—it doesn't make sense to anyone, right? Why would anyone vote no? Why would anyone protect Mayorkas unless they're being bribed, unless there's something going on, unless they're making a deal. You know, because you can't understand it. It makes no sense. And it's completely wrong to vote no on impeachment.

Greene also speculated that Buck, who is retiring, is “trying to get a job working for CNN like Adam Kinzinger.” She insisted that McClintock is clearly not a real “constitutionalist.” And after listing off all of Gallagher’s military intelligence and military bonafides, she concluded, “I can't understand why he made that vote. But he did.”

Greene might not understand it, but that doesn’t mean these Republican congressmen haven’t been clear and open about their reasons for voting against the impeachment stunt.

Gallagher explained his opposition in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Why I Voted Against the Alejandro Mayorkas Impeachment.”

“Creating a new, lower standard for impeachment, one without any clear limiting principle, wouldn’t secure the border or hold Mr. Biden accountable,” he wrote. “It would only pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment.”

McClintock also explained his opposition in a speech on the House floor before Tuesday’s vote.

“Cabinet secretaries can't serve two masters. They can be impeached for committing a crime related to their office but not for carrying out presidential policy,” he said. “I'm afraid that stunts like this don't help."

On Wednesday, McClintock appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to again defend his vote and responded to Greene saying McClintock needs to “read the room.

“I suggest she read the Constitution that she took an oath to support and defend,” he said. “That Constitution very clearly lays out the grounds for impeachment,” he said. “This dumbs down those grounds dramatically and would set a precedent that could be turned against the conservatives on the Supreme Court or a future Republican administration the moment the Democrats take control of the Congress.”

Nevertheless, Greene “can’t understand” why her Republican colleagues weren’t on board with her impeachment aspirations. It must be a conspiracy.

JANUARY 2024 IGNOMINIOUS ABUSRDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley.  Hawley should know better than anyone how dangerous radical right-wing domestic terrorists are, and how corrosive online propaganda can be to democracy and the public order. They’re the reason no one can watch him walk—or run—anywhere these days without getting the “Benny Hill” theme stuck in their heads.

But even though Hawley ran from Donald Trump’s conspiracy-besotted mob on Jan. 6, 2021, much like a stoned ostrich chasing an ice cream truck, he’s faux-outraged that our government would ever do anything to combat the kind of homegrown misinformation that could have got him killed.

Hawley has introduced a bill—titled The Ending DHS Funding for Liberal Propaganda Act—that aims to make the world safe for conservative viewpoints, so long as they’re suitably bonkers.

Here’s the text of the bill:

The Secretary of Homeland Security may not issue any grant funding to any entity that will use the funds for the development of—

(1) any programming that engages in partisan political advocacy or promotes discrimination on the basis of political affiliation; or

(2) any programming relating to countering narratives or views on political topics, including6 COVID-19, vaccination, media bias, immigration, and crime.

Among the evidence justifying the bill, Fox News mentioned a federal grant to the University of Rhode island’s Media Education lab which it alleged was to create “counter-propaganda” against conservative viewpoints. In its words:

The $700,000 grant was used to address “propaganda and misinformation concerning topics including immigration, racial justice, the coronavirus, and vaccination” and “build on top of concerns about so-called ‘fake news’ and ‘cancel culture.’”

Well, Hawley may have a point here. Without propaganda, misinformation, and fake news, all Republicans have left is hours of b-roll of Donald Trump humping flags and praising dictators. Clearly, the effort to stop deadly propaganda is now an existential threat to the GOP.

Hawley, who runs to the right of most of his Senate colleagues—and to the left … and down the stairs … and possibly to the bathroom, where he tucks his feet up onto the toilet lid so his bear spray-wielding MAGA admirers can’t find him—is incensed by the University of Rhode Island grant, and he’s emphatically saying so.

“This is an outrageous use of federal funds and abuse of power,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “All these funds should be clawed back by the federal government immediately, and anyone involved in making this grant should be fired.”

Of course, Hawley, who’s happily endorsed confirmed rapist and proud authoritarian Trump, isn’t concerned about any of Trump’s overtly political proposals—such as vowing to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” No, as far as that goes, Hawley clearly won’t be happy until he’s the senior senator from the Show-Me-Your-Papers State.

But instead of showing appropriate alarm over Trump’s running roughshod over sacrosanct American values and the plain truth, Hawley is targeting immunologists and demonstrably provable facts on topics ranging from immigration to crime.

He might as well introduce a bill preventing NASA from funding woke spherical-Earth radicals and moon-landing-conspiracy debunkers.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: Don’t give him any ideas.