NOVEMBER 2019 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Sevier County Commissioner Warren Hurst. This month, Warren Hurst, County Commissioner of the Tennessee county of Sevier, bashed openly gay Mayor Pete Buttigieg during a public meeting of the county commission. Hurst made the offensive comments during what was scheduled to be a meeting on establishing the county seat of Sevierville as a “gun sanctuary city,” one in which gun laws would not be enforced.  During this meeting, Hurst described 2020 presidential hopeful Buttigieg as a “queer running for president.” He also declared that white men in the United States are losing their rights.

“It’s time we wake up, people, it’s time. It’s past time,” Hurst said. “We got a queer running for president in this country. If that ain’t about as ugly as you can get,” he added. "Look what we got running for president in the Democratic party. We can go over here to Hoss's jail and get better people out of there than those running for Democratic to be President of the United States."

Apparently, the spattering of applause was enough to encourage him to continue, because continue the commissioner did. “I’m not prejudice,” he proclaimed, uttering the words of every not-prejudiced person in the world, “but by golly, a white male in this country has very few rights and they’re getting took more every day.”

In the video, at least one person—also a white man—is seen laughing at the comments.

While you can hear some applause from the public, and someone shouts, “Amen,” at least one woman did walk out of the meeting. She’s heard saying, “This is bullshit.” Hurst later told a reporter from TV station WVLT in Knoxville that he stood by his comments. He also made sure to note that some of his best friends are black.

2. Frequent Fox News Guest Joe diGenova. In a report that gleefully names the alleged Trump-Ukraine whistleblower in its headline, the right-wing Washington Examiner cites loudmouthed Trump ally and frequent Fox News guest lawyer Joe diGenova as calling the whistleblower's report a "political assassination," the "decapitation of a president," "regicide," and comparing the whistleblower to John Wilkes Booth.

He apparently then ate a live gerbil mid-interview. Hard to imagine how you'd top the claim that reporting an apparent crime by a sitting president—one that had much of his White House in a panic due to the obvious, brazen corruption of the act—is akin to the murder of Abraham Lincoln, but if you've ever stumbled upon one of diGenova's Fox News acts you'll know that the man does subtlety like a hippo does ballet.

DiGenova's extreme opinions—and the urgency with which he has been trying to spread the name of the single whistleblower, among all of Trump's officials, toadies, and legal scrubbers, who actually came forward to report an apparent crime rather than just looking bug-eyed at each other while helping to cover it up—may have less to do with his one-sided loyalty to Dear Leader than the fact that diGenova and his also-Fox-News-guest wife have been getting paid, to the tune of a million bucks or so, to defend Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, wanted on conspiracy charges by the U.S. government due to his criminal ways.

And just to make it perfectly clear what his angle is in all this, diGenova and wife Victoria Toensing's work for Firtash consisted of, among other things, helping to “dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden last summer” in an effort to get Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's help in getting the Trump Department of Justice to drop its case against the Ukrainian oligarch.

Got that? DiGenova and Toensing, working for a U.S.-sought Ukrainian criminal, had been trying to dig up Joe Biden dirt in a brazen attempt to quid-pro-quo their way into Rudy Giuliani using his tight Trump connections to get Trump and Attorney General William Barr to quash the U.S. prosecution of their own Ukrainian bigshot client.

So yes, now that someone stepped forward to report on Trump and Giuliani's crackpot scheme to exchange conspiracy-invented Biden "dirt" for the release of held-up Ukrainian military aid, a lawyer for one of the criminals implicated in that very plan is VERY SURE that snitching about it to authorities is worse than assassinating Abraham Lincoln, exclamation point, loud burping noise. And he would absolutely think that even if he hadn't pocketed a fat million bucks and spent the summer implicating himself in the multi-fronted "drug deal" Giuliani was cooking up.

3. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy. The dumbest man in the U.S. Senate—I said Senate, so sit down, Louie Gohmert—on Sunday told incredulous Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that Russia might or might not have hacked Democratic National Committee servers during the 2016 election, burping out that even though the entire United States intelligence community has determined that it did, "It could also be Ukraine."

Kennedy’s intentional disinformation on behalf of Dear Leader, who wishes to exonerate Russia for reasons we can only (richly) speculate on, is precisely the Republican behavior Dr. Fiona Hill warned of in her testimony to Congress: Republicans themselves are parroting Russian-spread, Russian-useful false information in the increasingly grotesque maneuvering to defend Trump via any means necessary.

Now Kennedy, who is both provably dishonest and provably an idiot, has apparently been informed that his Sunday morning bullshit is landing with a weighty thud. So, he's changing his story:

"I was wrong," Kennedy told host Chris Cuomo. "It was Russia who tried to hack the computer. I've seen no indication that Ukraine tried to do it."

Because Kennedy is still, and we cannot emphasize this enough, a dishonest idiot, he claimed to Cuomo that actually, he had misunderstood the question and meant to respond with the non-stupid, non-disinformation-premised, not-pro-Russia version. Let's look at that original Fox exchange.

Wallace: “Who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC and Clinton campaign computers, their emails. Was it Russia or Ukraine?”

Kennedy: “I don't know. Nor do you. Nor do any of us.”

Wallace: “Let me just interrupt to say that the entire intelligence community says it was Russia.”

Kennedy: “Right. But it could also be Ukraine. I'm not saying I know one way or the other.”

There is, even if you are dishonest and an idiot, no part of that exchange that could be misunderstood. Who was responsible for hacking the computers? He doesn't know, he says, parroting Donald Trump's preferred line from three entire years ago. Might be Ukraine, he says, parroting Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre new conspiracy theory, the one that seems to keep bringing Giuliani fat checks for dubiously premised reasons. It could also be magical pixies.

Kennedy is obviously lying about that. He made a purposeful attempt to spread disinformation on what he thought would be a friendly television program. He thought wrong, and spent the next day being publicly mocked, ridiculed, condemned, and called a Russian toady, all of it deserved, after which his political ambitions suddenly decided that he had done the Russian thing by accident and did not mean it. For now.

Mmm-hmm. He, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, and all the others just happen to keep spreading Trump's own claims of possible Russian exoneration by accident. They simply misunderstood the questions. And testimony. And briefings. And classified reports. And unclassified reports. And the What to Know About Russian Election Hacking pop-up book FBI officials commissioned especially for them.

Yet again: Stop treating these people with misguided respect, thinking that their office should shield them from even a fraction of the scorn they so richly deserve. It is precisely because they hold office, and continue to, despite plainly acting against their own nation's interests in service to their own petty ambitions, that they should be treated with steady and unyielding contempt.

4. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. There's no easier way of ending an argument than by declaring that you are right because God Himself said so, and that to oppose your latest farting whim is to oppose God Himself. The effectiveness of this argument is increased tenfold, at least, when accompanied by a loaded gun.) And that is why America has always been ripe ground for authoritarian-minded leaders. There is a contingent of Americans, currently called White Conservative Evangelicals, both gullible enough and ambitious enough to believe that particular bullshit no matter whom it is meant to prop up.

Donald Trump, tax-evader, serial assaulter, bearer of false witness during his every public pronouncement, pardoner of prisoner-torturers and war criminals, compulsive adulterer, and so forth, the nation's One True Leader chosen by and doing the works of God Himself? Sure, why not? Slap a little butter on it and call it a meal: So long as the criminal can be aimed in the direction of harming the movement's enemies rather than its friends, the religious right would declare a snapping turtle the One True Leader Chosen By God.

Here’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry spouting this bullshit to Fox & Friends, which is the lead paint of news. He might actually believe it, because Rick Perry is the sort who would follow Biff Hitler into his bunker and hold his canteen if it would get Rick on Dancing with the Stars; or he might be playing to the Fox News crowd. It's difficult to tell, and in the end, it doesn't make a difference.

"I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago and I shared it with him. I said, Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the Chosen One and I said, ‘You were.’ I said, ‘If you’re a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet and our government.’"

Trump is obviously not a believing Christian, for fluke's sake, but that is beside the point: Rick Perry helping to cement in Dear Leader's head the notion that Dear Leader's every brain-fart notion can be attributed to his Chosen One status and comes from GOD HIMSELF is absolutely assured to nudge Dear Leader to doing, and justifying, ever-crazier things. We are to believe God Himself wants American murderers of civilians not just spared, but feted? We are to believe that it is God, acting through Rudy Giuliani, that wants to sabotage Ukrainian independence and endanger its people for a smattering of thin fortune-cookie claims against a single election opponent that may or not be of the slightest bit of use?

Yes. Yes we are, if you believe the nation's many, many protofascist evangelical frothers, especially the ones with their own television shows and special phone numbers for giving your money to God Himself: God Himself wants whatever Donald Trump, pervert billionaire, says.

Oh, but if He doesn't, then there's an out for that as well. Donald Trump furiously doing manifestly evil things proves even more that he is the Chosen One. He was "sent by God", says Rick Fluking Perry, to "do great things." "God’s used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn’t perfect, Saul wasn’t perfect, Solomon wasn’t perfect."

Whether you hold to any religion or to none, the notion of an American administration or its allies claiming, under any circumstance, that Dear Leader has the backing of the Supreme Being, thus nullifying his incompetence, malevolence, and crimes while putting the stamp of infallibility on his every edict should make you furious. This is a movement that is corrupt in its every detail, and anti-American in its every impulse, and it has its own television program called Fox & Friends.
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And this month's winner is:

I have to go with Rick Perry.  Case closed!