APRIL 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Trump Attorney Sidney Powell. It’s been amply established that Sidney Powell bears a large measure of moral responsibility—at the very least—for creating the poisonous environment that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Powell was one of the main legal lowlives behind Trump’s misbegotten legal effort to steal another term.

Powell’s claims to fame were a series of lawsuits that alleged Dominion Voting Systems was in cahoots with Venezuela to steal victory from Trump—the infamous “Kraken” lawsuits. All four of them crashed and burned—but not before her claims led to Dominion and its employees facing vicious harassment and trolling. At least one Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, was driven into hiding.

Partly due to this, Dominion filed a whopping $1.3 billion defamation suit against Powell, her law firm, and her nonprofit organization, Defend the Republic. Well, early in the month, Powell sought to throw out the suit. Her reasoning? Wait for it—she now says “no reasonable person” would believe her claims.

No, this isn’t really snark. She actually said this in an actual legal filing.

In her motion to dismiss, Powell does not argue that the statements were true. She claims they are not actionable because they are protected statements of political opinion.

“Reasonable people understand that the ‘language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes … is often vituperative, abusive and inexact,'” her motion to dismiss argues. “It is likewise a ‘well recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.'”

Powell goes on to say that Dominion called her theories “wild” and “outlandish,” and in so doing support the notion that “no reasonable person” would take them seriously. Rather, she would have us believe her statements were merely “claims that await testing by the courts.”

So, in other words, Powell is tacitly admitting that when she made her much ballyhooed vow to “release the Kraken,” she knew it was based on hokum. And she also knew that when she was filing these statements that they were baloney.

I’m not a lawyer, but even I know that when you make court filings, you’re asserting that your arguments are based on fact. Not, though, if you’re a Trumper.

2. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz. I believe in karma and Rep. Matt Gaetz is finally getting his due. Late last month bombshell news broke that Gaetz was under federal investigation for allegedly having sex with an underage girl. The investigation also includes potential sex trafficking related to him paying the 17-year old girl in question to travel across state lines with him—an inquiry that was initiated last year by Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr. But there's also a series of subplots.

Just before news of the probe surfaced on Tuesday, Axios reported that Gaetz might not seek reelection in 2022 as he eyed a position with the right-wing site Newsmax, which has become a chief competitor of Fox News. After the news of the investigation hit, Gaetz, whose abnormally large head matches his ego, told Axios the allegations were "false" and that he and his family were victims of a $25 million extortion scheme that they had been working with federal officials to expose. Turns out the alleged extortion scheme had nothing to do with the allegations against Gaetz; rather it involved an American who went missing in Iran in 2007.

Gaetz appeared Tuesday night on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight to clear it all up. That didn’t go well. In trying to explain away the allegation, Gaetz connected his own predicament to host Tucker Carlson personally—not once, but twice.

"I'm not the only person on screen right now who has been falsely accused of a terrible sex act," Gaetz said without going into detail.

When Carlson asked Gaetz to explain the allegation against him, Gaetz said he only knew what he had read in the news. Then he offered, “Actually, you and I went to dinner about two years ago, your wife was there, and I brought a friend of mine, you’ll remember her.” Gaetz further claimed the FBI tried to intimidate his friend into verifying his involvement in a "pay-for-play scheme."

Carlson quickly countered, “I don’t remember the woman you are speaking of or the context at all, honestly."

Gaetz later claimed, however, the woman in question was fictional. "The person doesn't exist, " he said, "I have not had a relationship with a 17-year-old."

Oh, but Gaetz also clarified, “Providing for flights and hotel rooms for people that you’re dating who are of legal age is not a crime.”

It’s fair to sum up the appearance by saying there were a lot of moving targets.

At the conclusion of the interview, Carlson told viewers, “That was one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted," adding that he didn't think it "clarified much."

Didn’t think, huh? Well, it clarified things for me. Gaetz is one sick sleezebag. Sex trafficking and pedophilia are probably the least of his nefarious capers. He and his buddy Trump make quite a pair. But there’s more.

Allegations have also surfaced that Gaetz ran a sex game in which points were awarded for sleeping with interns and staffers, with bonus points for virgins. Gaetz allegedly showed nude photos of women while on the floor of the House, while his staffers sent still more videos to their counterparts in other offices. One video showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source. “It was a point of pride.” It’s also alleged that Gaetz was connected with, if not co-owner, of an operation making fake IDs for underage girls. What a man!

If you think this is all fake news fabricated by the liberal media, as Gaetz has claimed, there are emails, tapes, videos and witnesses. Oh yes, there’s the report that Gaetz asked White House officials for a blanket, pre-emptive pardons for himself and other congressional allies of the President. Sure signs of an innocent man.

The Gaetz scandal is probably a good thing for our country. If his head got any bigger, it might rip a hole in space-time. As it is, things appear to be getting worse and worse for the flesh-toned Tootsie Pop. More astonishing to me than Gaetz’ serial prowling, is the apparent fact that many of his Republican colleagues and staffers knew of the sicko’s capers and remained silent. I’ll bet many even fantasized about his boastful conquests. I can picture them pointing and giggling. This, from the same party that exploited Al Frankin’s cheek kissing.

3. Former Florida Official and Matt Gaetz Wingman Joel Greenberg. Greenberg, the former Florida Tax Collector, has been in jail for violating terms of his bail on various criminal charges, which makes it perfectly clear why he would be a close friend of Congress’ #1 sleaze, Matt Gaetz.

Records and interviews detail a litany of accusations against Greenberg: He strutted to work with a pistol on his hip in a state that does not allow guns to be openly displayed. He spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to create no-show jobs for a relative and some of his groomsmen. He once impersonated a police officer, putting a flashing light on his car to pull over a woman and accuse her of speeding. He published an anti-Muslim Facebook post. He spied on critics on the county commission. He used his tax collector credit card to purchase body armor, weapons and a drone.

Stalking a rival candidate got him arrested. Federal agents looking into the matter found at least five fake IDs in his wallet and backpack. Their inquiry culminated into 33 federal charges, including sex trafficking of a minor, bribery, fraud, and stalking—and led to a mushrooming political scandal that has ensnared Gaetz.

Though the sex trafficking charge against Greenberg, and current investigation on whether he and Gaetz had sex with the same 17-year old girl has received most public attention, this is just the tip of Greenberg’s criminal and misogynistic behavior. The latest indictment against Greenberg included charges of defrauding the Small Business Administration out of more than $432,000 in Covid-19 relief loans.

Greenberg was indicted in June and it appears he will plead guilty, suggesting he will cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation of Representative Gaetz, whom Greenberg met through a group of prominent Trump backers in Florida in 2017. They became bosom buddies, traveling together, visiting the White House, and sharing expensive food, wine, and, allegedly, girls and women. Too bad Trump lost the election. Surely, he would have pardoned both these two crooks. Birds of a feather.

4. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. It’s best not to take anything Mitch McConnell says in good faith — on the Supreme Court judges, the filibuster, and just about anything else, the guy is a cynical and power-hungry political operator. That’s why I haven’t paid much attention to his recent complaints about Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, and other corporations coming out against Georgia’s new Jim Crow laws.

Here’s the full quote:

"Republicans drink Coca-Cola too. And we fly, and we like baseball," McConnell said. "I'm not talking about political contributions. I'm talking about taking a position on a highly incendiary issue like this and punishing a community or a state ... I just think it's stupid."

As a sudden defender of fiscal discipline, McConnell also pledged to fight Biden’s infrastructure package “every step of the way.” I say “sudden” because his attachment to it over the past few years, before Biden took office, was as steady as a Slinky.

He was perfectly happy to run up the federal debt to stay in good with President, who wanted tax cuts and more gleaming military hardware. Now? We mustn’t leave crippling bills to our children and grandchildren! How horridly gluttonous! How downright immoral!

How utterly laughable. The truth about most politicians and spending is that they’re for it if the outlays bolster their electoral fortunes and against it if the other side may have more to gain. They’re not in thrall to some fixed economic ideology. They’re bound to partisan rivalries and enamored of ideological fashions of the moment.

McConnell has the power that he does in the GOP because he is the king of corporate money. His re-election campaign was the number one recipient of S&P 500 CEO contributions last year. Meanwhile, Wall Street has lavished his campaign and PAC with unconscionable sums of money, including $35 million from Blackstone Chairman Stephen Schwarzman to McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund.

Mitch McConnell has spent his entire career grubbing for as much corporate money as possible, including when he challenged the McCain-Feingold limits back in 2002. He is a man devoid of principles or spine, motivated only by his need to cultivate donors, control Washington, and lavish money on those donors in return.

His warnings ring hollow. Republicans want to seem like they’re the working class, anti-corporate party — they are tweeting that regularly now — but the reality is that they fully depend on them.

That any Democrat would allow this hack to control the legislation they get passed into law is also mind-blowing. Ending the filibuster is absolutely necessary to make real progress and save democracy, and McConnell’s threats on that are equally as hollow. By eliminating the filibuster, it would not only allow big progressive policies to pass, but it would also strip McConnell of his power — and help at least bust a tire on the big corporate dump truck that fuels his career.

5. Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw. Needless to say, it’s hard to take Republicans seriously as they bash the same corporations whose water they’ve been carrying for years, just because those companies decided—in the wake of a corrosive campaign to steal the 2020 election and a suite of pernicious voter-suppression laws that resulted from that Big Lie—to finally say enough is enough.

Crenshaw joined many other Republicans in whining about U.S. corporations speaking out against the raft of Republican-friendly voter restrictions, despite the fact that the 2020 election went more smoothly than any U.S. election in history and was conspicuously lacking in fraud. He showed his racist and hypocritical self in an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade.

Kilmeade asked Crenshaw what he thought about United Airlines’ promise that 50% of its new hires would be women or people of color, stating that it planned to train 5,000 new pilots in a new pilot training program by 2030, of which at least half will be women and people of color.

CRENSHAW: “I think just about every passenger that gets on a plane thinks to themselves, ‘I hope the pilot is qualified and can take off and land a plane safely.’ Look, if they want to virtue-signal, that’s fine.”

Yes, there’s simply no way women and people of color could ever land a plane safely. Who does Crenshaw think he’s talking to? This signal goes out into space where other civilizations might someday see it. And I don’t want them to think we’re all just a bunch of racist, misogynistic sea pirates. So maybe lay off the grampa-signaling for now, dude.

And then came the pièce de résistance: we progressives are … wait for it … fascists!

CRENSHAW: “What really pissed me off about United was the way they lied about the election integrity reforms that we’re trying to make in places like Georgia or Texas. They lied about it. They insinuated that these were voter-suppression laws [Narrator: they are], and clearly that’s not true. Clearly, they didn’t read it. And again, they’re venturing into territory that they don’t understand, that they know nothing about, and in an attempt to what?

“This is what I call the phenomenon that’s going on; it’s progressive fascism, because what is fascism? Well, it’s the regimentation of the economy, of society, and it’s the forced suppression of your opposition. That’s what’s happening right now. the Democrats have successfully captivated the institutions, you know, pop culture, Hollywood, our education institutions, and now our corporations into their own woke agenda. This is fascism. And they use cancel culture as a tool to impose their fascism on us.”

“So, they’re always using this anti-fascist labeling against the right, but they’re the ones who actually engage in the tactics, and it’s time we expose that. It’s really what’s happening here, and we should see it for what it is. Look, if they want to hire based on quotas and virtue-signal to us and imply that people didn’t have these opportunities to begin with, fine. But don’t lie about other policy. That’s what I really have a problem with.”

Look, we all work the refs. Progressives do it because they want to preserve voting access for all Americans. Conservatives do it because they want oil companies to drive a Brinks truck up to their offices and start cramming cash through their windows like Ted Cruz shoveling quicklime onto his latest tranche of Zodiac victims.

And cancel culture? That’s just am idiotic thing conservatives say when something awful goes away—like Donald Trump.

6. Fox News Host Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson has been building quite the record for peddling white nationalist ideas to his supposedly mainstream audience: whitewashing the effects of far-right terrorism, claiming that white nationalism is a liberal hoax, regurgitating ecofascist themes about immigrants, defending far-right Capitol insurrectionists, even endorsing the idea that conservatives are heading toward an embrace of fascism. On Thursday, he topped all that.

Carlson caused an uproar by promoting the racist, anti-Semitic, patriarchal and conspiratorial “white replacement theory,” which stands on the premise that non-white immigrants are being imported to replace white people and white voters. The theory is also an inherent chastisement of white women for having lower birth rates than nonwhite women. It’s a subset of a larger white nationalist belief in white genocide, a supposed conspiracy by nonwhites, leftists, and Jews to destroy “white Western civilization.” It also has been credited with inspiring multiple acts of mass murder and terrorism: Robert Bowers’ attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; Brenton Tarrant’s attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019; and Patrick Crusius’ attack on Hispanics at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019, among others.

In Carlson’s words:

“I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democrat Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say, that’s true… Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”

Carlson went on:

“Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, White replacement! No. This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they’re importing a brand-new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?

This is not the first time that Carlson has made exactly these claims: He has touted the same theory regarding immigrants “replacing” current voters in various segments in the past couple of years. (It is, naturally, an utterly specious claim: Voting requires citizenship, meaning those new immigrants are not eligible even to apply for five years; the naturalization application process then typically takes 15 months. Moreover, the 700,000 new citizens who take the oath every year—after which they may finally vote—represent only 0.2% of the total U.S. population.)

His attacks on immigrants not only are wildly distorted when it comes to the supposed facts that he spouts—many of which are outright falsehoods—but they are also deeply toxic to democracy and its foundations. Replacement of the white majority in this country by a more multiracial, multicultural majority is inevitable. So is white supremacist panic over it.

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And the April winner is:

April was another tough IGGY month with several worthy candidates. I think, though, that all things considered, Representative Matt Gaetz stands out as the evilest person in the pack of choices. I thus select him as this month’s IGGY winner.