FEBRUARY 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Joni Ernst. One of the problems with electing brick-stupid people as senators, as Republican voters have taken to doing in droves since the election of the first non-white American president broke what was left of their brains, is that those senators tend forever to be saying the quiet parts out loud.

Sen. Joni Ernst, inflicted on us by Iowa for some reason, has been (1) frothingly angry at the impeachment of Donald Trump for merely doing crimes, (2) eagerly leaping to television cameras to (for free) further the very same conspiracy Donald Trump was attempting to get out of the Ukrainian government for a few hundred million dollars, and (3) is now insisting that since Democrats meanly impeached Trump for crime-doing well maybe Republicans will impeach a theoretical President Biden too because screw you, that's why.

“Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him,’” Ernst told Bloomberg News.

For what reason?

“For being assigned to take on Ukrainian corruption yet turning a blind eye to Burisma because his son was on the board making over a million dollars a year.”

Bloomberg News notes, to their small credit, that this is not true. This is a conspiracy theory. In the real world as inhabited by those of us not raised by paint fumes, Biden demanded the removal of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for not prosecuting alleged corruption in companies like Burisma. Biden was acting on behalf of the United States government and State Department to further an official United States policy, one shared by the European Union and by Senate Republicans themselves. Because Shokin, now Rudy Giuliani's best friend after he came up with a host of theories on why everyone in Ukraine but him were the crooked ones, was corrupt.

What Bloomberg News does not point out, however, is that this makes Joni Ernst a liar. Not just a liar, but either a willful propagandist or an unwilling idiot, someone who allegedly is responsible for help writing our laws but who has not, at any point, been able to grasp even the most fundamental of information about the trial that she just fidgeted her way through. She is furthering a lie, and using it as reason why Dear Leader's new enemy must be retaliated against, and justifying both the lie and the retaliation on the indignity of Dear Leader being asked to answer for doing what even her fellow Republican senators agree was a crooked act.

Sen. Ernst may be taking the fascist path on these things, but she is, thank God, not a bright fascist. A smarter Republican would have shut their pie-hole long ago, but she just keeps going, apparently on a mission to show that her home state of Iowa will put literally anyone in a position of Republican power. Liars, white supremacists, you name it.

2. Trump Apologist Kellyanne Conway. Conway continues to be a factory for a mind-boggling combination of ridiculous nonsense and terrifying nonsense. On Fox News Sunday, Donald Trump’s top non-Ivanka woman assailed the media for pointing out that last week she described blatant lies as “alternative facts”—gosh, why would that draw notice, especially when it’s such a perfect statement of how your boss plans to govern?—then launched into a rant about how media figures who criticized Trump should be fired:

Yeah, funny, being critical of a political candidate—even of the president—is not a firing offense in a country with a free press. Which the United States still technically is, though apparently not for long if Conway gets her “way. I mean, she really thinks people should be fired for having insulted the man in the tackily gilded tower.

“Who’s the first editorial -- the first blogger that will be left out that embarrassed his or her outlet? We know all their names. I’m too polite to call them by name. But they know who they are, and they’re all wondering, will I be the first to go?”

There are lots of reasons to fire lots of cable pundits, but pointing out what Donald Trump is? Not one of them. Then maybe, just maybe, Conway realized she’d gone a little too far and tried to sound righteous. All of this, by the way, is part of one epic rant, not responses to a series of different questions:

“And yet we deal with him every single day. We turn the other cheek. If you are part of team Trump, you walk around with these gaping, seeping wounds every single day, and that's fine. I believe in a full and fair press.” 

Notice she doesn’t say she believes in a free press, but a “full and fair” one, whatever that means. Fair to Trump, as Trump sees it? But mostly, here’s a statement that requires more than the world’s tiniest violin. We need the world’s tiniest symphony playing a requiem for poor Kellyanne and her gaping, seeping wounds and lack of sleep.

The amount of whining and weakness here is astonishing. If you are part of team Trump, you are participating in keeping people out of the country on the basis of their religion (and failure to come from a country where Donald Trump does business), you are working to strip health insurance from tens of millions of people, you are pushing white supremacy and misogyny and bigotry … but let’s talk about your gaping, seeping wounds from some cable pundits saying mean things about your boss, in an election in which CNN specifically hired pro-Trump pundits to wax adulatory about everything he said and did.

This is pathetic. Except that the threat to the country that this mindset represents can’t be underestimated.

3. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis). You’ve got to hand it to Republicans for having the audacity to offer nonsensical rationales in defense of President Trump’s various illegal and unconstitutional actions. Republicans excuses boggle the mind. It’s as if they think that if you throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick—at least with their blindly obedient faithful. The latest GOP whopper comes from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner.

Responding to Virginia becoming the 38^th state to ratify the Equal Rights amendment, and the House’s 232-183 vote to bring back the ERA, Sensenbrenner countered that the amendment, if enacted, would bring many harmful consequences to women, among them:

“Girls would no longer pay less for car insurance for having fewer accidents than boys,” he said. “Women who live longer than men, would have to pay higher life insurance rates.” Then he added: “look past what looks nice on a bumper sticker.”

Now, there may be several legal questions about bringing up the 1972 amendment that failed to be ratified by 38 states before the 1977 deadline, but you can rest assured that the Sensenbrenner argument will evoke nothing but laughter. What a moron. What’s he smokin’?

Well, he may not have to worry. Predictably, the Barr Justice Department disagreed with the House action, ruling last month that the only way to ratify the amendment is to start the process over again; in other words, it killed the initiative, which really has little chance of surmounting the McConnell-Senate roadblock or the three-quarter of the states requirement for ratification.

How could anyone be opposed to equal rights for women?

4. Attorney General William Barr. News outlets reported on February 13 that AG Barr rebuked President Trump for publicly commenting on sensitive investigations, specifically the sentencing guideline for Roger Stone. The President’s comments about DOJ cases, Barr said, makes it “impossible to do my job.”

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” Barr said.

Barr claims to be worried that Trump’s public commentary on DOJ criminal cases is feeding a narrative that he is not an independent attorney general. Not independent? I wonder why anyone might think that.

Now, given Trump’s MO, we would expect the impudent Barr to receive a serious tongue-lashing, if not firing for, what many in the media called a “rebuke” of the President. That would be true if Barr was sincere, that this was a clear-cut dressing down of the Trumpster.

But this was not a rebuke, this was pure theater aimed at deflecting responsibility for carrying out Trump’s political wishes. He needed to try to mollify career prosecutors in the DOJ, and a couple thousand who had left the agency, who were in rebellion over Barr’s kowtowing to the President’s interference in a department prosecution.

Trump was not alarmed by the Barr “rebuke.” He didn’t even immediately respond to twitter. The President’s press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said, “The president wasn’t bothered by the comments at all.” The attorney general had let the president know some of what he planned to say and is remaining in his job, a person familiar with the events told The New York Times.

Trump will not only not vent on Barr, he likely will double down on his interference in Justice Department proceedings (Stone, Flynn, Giuliani) and push for more frivolous investigations (the Bidens, Schiff, Hillary (again), the Whistleblower . . .)—anyone who gets under his skin, and Barr’s the best man for the job.

It’s what we’ve come to expect from the President’s personal attorney. For an attorney general to act as the President’s lapdog is not only an affront to our constitution, and a sick departure from centuries of judicial precedent, it is ignominious in the extreme.
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And the winner is:

A bump in the cost of car insurance for women? Now that’s a solid reason for opposing the ERA. My choice this month has to be Rep. Sensenbrenner