DECEMBER 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. House Oversight Committee Chair, James Comer (R-Ky). The double-talking dirtbag dropped what was supposed to be a big bombshell on Monday. This one may be his worst yet. As he put is, “Hunter Biden's business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden.” Wow, sounds like evidence of corruption to me!” The response he got was: “Uh, that was car payments Hunter was making after his father got him a vehicle at a time when his credit was in the toilet. And it was three monthly payments of $1,380. And Joe Biden was not in office at the time.”

The Washington Post, apparently having lost all patience for Comer’s misleading claims, told readers that as House Republicans move toward a floor vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry against President Biden, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has again mischaracterized evidence of payments from Hunter Biden to his father.

It goes on like that, tying Comer’s claims on this story to his broader pattern: “Comer has consistently oversold or misrepresented the committee’s investigative findings as he has argued to initiate impeachment proceedings.

Even the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal headlined: “GOP Sees Skulduggery in Hunter Biden Paying His Father Back for Truck.”

As House Republicans move toward a floor vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry … this is probably not the kind of coverage they want that effort to be getting. What’s more, as Rep. Jamie Raskin noted, it’s not even new. The Murdoch-owned New York Post reported those car payments in 2022.

Nonetheless, Comer got himself in front of a Newsmax camera Monday evening to try to make fetch happen. He was determined to make those car loan repayments look like evidence of corruption, no matter how extremely foolish it made him look.

“You can loan people money,” Comer said. “If they pay you back, then you benefited directly.” I mean, you benefited in the sense that you did not lose the money, but you did not profit. That would be quite the redefinition of corruption: avoiding losing money on loans to family members.

Comer also said, “when my son needs help, or my daughter who’s in college needs it, I just give her money. Nobody ever pays me back.” And as we all know, if you personally do not expect your children in their teens or early 20's to repay you for a car, then no one could possibly expect their nearly 50-year-old son to repay them for a car loan. This stuff really shows the degree to which Comer is just blurting out nonsense without thinking things through.

The president must be thrilled at this latest evidence of “corruption.” Comer looks like such a lying partisan hack, the media is losing patience, and this is the story Republicans launched to propel themselves into a vote on an impeachment inquiry.

The lingering question remains: are Republicans simply trying to fan the flames of Biden discontent, or are they actually so stupid as to see relevance is such an absurd claim> You be the judge.

2. Arizona Senate Candidate Kari Lake. Media critics and experts have repeatedly warned that the political media's preoccupation with gossip and horse race coverage while ignoring the public issues behind the politics is the "darkness" that democracy dies in, but when your entire industry is built around such a preoccupation it's difficult to do much else.

The Washington Post has a new baffling dispatch from Camp Horse Race, and it's a stumper. It’s usually easy to tell which political figures or groups are pushing the newest national gossip, and on whose behalf, but that’s not the case with this story. This one is premised entirely on mean-spirited and seemingly delusional election denier Kari Lake, the Arizona Republican who ran for governor last year and who to this day believes she, and not Gov. Katie Hobbs, is the legitimate governor of her state. The piece is about national Republicans' supposed efforts to help her court moderates as opposed to, say, driving her out to the Sonoran Desert with two Slim Jims and a can of hard lemonade and leaving her there.

It is very difficult to tell who's bullshitting who on this one, but the immediate suspicion is that everyone is bullshitting everyone, mostly for the sake of bullshitting us.

The outreach, made over the course of several weeks through in-person meetings and phone calls, is a welcome sign to Washington Republicans, who would like to see Lake broaden her MAGA base in the once reliably red state and help them retake the U.S. Senate in 2024.

Is it? Is it really a welcome sign? Do any of them really care if Lake “broadens her MAGA base,” as opposed to “falls down an open manhole and is never seen again?”

The whole premise of the story is that Lake has been calling important national Republicans and old primary enemies alike, looking for their support as she tries to convince Arizona Republicans that she is anything more than The Worst Person In Arizona. But it's not going well!

Lake has contacted her former primary rival, top GOP donors and past supporters, party officials and activists, and even a former senator as she tries to persuade them to coalesce around her. But Lake’s appeals for support have so far contained no actual apologies — and some Republicans say they are not likely to forgive her any time soon, complicating her path to victory in a state home to many moderate Republicans and independents whose support is key to winning.

To refresh everybody's memories, Lake is famous in politics for two things. The first is that she's among the most fervent pushers of election hoaxes, to the point where it doesn't even look like a bit anymore: It looks like Lake has entirely untethered herself from reality and considers herself to be above the world's petty quarrels about what "truth" might be.

The second is that she has been among the nastiest campaigners in the country, even when it comes to campaigning against members of her own party, as well as her constant attacks on the late Sen. John McCain and his many fans. She bragged at one point that she had “driven a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” which was taken exactly as spitefully as it was meant to be.

So now, she's allegedly been calling up some of the very people she has been demonizing to the point of claiming they're not even legitimate Republicans and pressing them for endorsements so she can prove bygones are bygones. Those endorsements will prove she's somebody all of the rotten not-real Republican voters who like not-real Republicans like McCain should shut up and vote for now that she's running for Senate.

But she isn't apologizing, and she isn't giving anyone any real reason to expect she won't conduct this new 2024 race with the exact same pattern of radicalism, lies, delusions, cruelty, insults, violence promotion, , and general dirtbaggery that she's so rightly famous for.

3. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). The war in Gaza, and the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 that instigated it, have provided the political right with what it considers its best opportunity in decades to leverage Israel/Palestine divisions within the Democratic Party and among its constituents. One of Republicans’ perennial targets has always been our system of higher education, which they see as fostering the liberal and enlightened attitudes that pose an existential threat to right-wing conservatism as a whole. 

The heated, often ugly arguments unfolding on college campuses about the war in Gaza, and the rhetoric some students are expounding towards Israel in particular, has given conservatives special solace, because it allows them to distract from the fact that many of their most ardent supporters are in fact established, virulent, and violent antisemites.

The narrative the right has now apparently settled on is that our country’s most prestigious universities are led by folks who would condone the genocide of the Jewish people. This is apparently an equal opportunity consensus: They may be woman, they may be Black, they may even be Jewish, but they’re all allegedly contributing to the same general atmosphere of antisemitism on college campuses. At least that’s what Rep. Stefanik would have us believe.

Stefanik has never given the slightest sign of caring about anything but her own advancement within the Republican Party, she’s suddenly and miraculously developed an acute interest in antisemitism on college campuses. In fact, she seems intent on bringing down the entire edifice of higher education in this country—a favored scapegoat of the pro-Trump political movement—to prove her point.

Stefanik, who’s flipped from a so-called moderate Republican into a devoted Trump acolyte almost overnight, is riding quite high right now, basking in the spotlight she’s created for herself. Inquiries are being made; investigations are being conducted. Donors to universities are screaming for the heads of their presidents. And Democrats are trying to figure the best way to respond to this cynical opportunist as she attacks universities who fail to crack down or prohibit what she characterizes as genocidal speech.

But at least one Democratic Congressman—who possesses more authority on the issue of antisemitism than Stefanik—thinks that this Congresswoman has already forfeited any authority on this subject and is essentially a raging hypocrite.

Elise Stefanik is not Jewish. But Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin is, and he has personally experienced antisemitism. Unsurprisingly, he has several opinions about Stefanik’s motives, or lack thereof. In a conversation with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Raskin dismissed Stefanik’s self-righteous stance as cynical pandering of the worst type.

“Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism, when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time?” Raskin asked. “She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner,” Raskin said. “Nick Fuentes, who doubts whether Oct. 7 even took place because he thinks it was some kind of suspicious propaganda move by the Israelis.

“The Republican Party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that,” Raskin added, “and yet somehow she gets on our high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT.”

On Friday, Fuentes doubled down on his antisemitism, as reported by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone:

Nick Fuentes, the hate leader, called for a genocide of “perfidious Jews” and other non-Christians. “When we take power,” he said a Dec. 8 livestream, “they need to be given the death penalty, straight up.”

No doubt contributing to Rep. Raskin’s ire is the fact that Stefanik has incorporated one the common antisemitic tropes of far right (and neo-Nazis) known as “The Great Replacement” theory into her own campaign ads.

Stefanik and her fellow Republican hypocrites, cognizant that three-fourths of all Jewish Americans are Democrats, will stoop to anything to cause fissures in that traditional Democrat base: lie, misrepresent, and grandstand to exploit the horrific human tragedy unfolding in Gaza. Do you expect less?

4. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. At the end of an interview on CNN with Johnson, host Kaitlan Collins mentioned recent news about Wisconsin’s 10 fake Donald Trump electors cutting a deal in their civil case. Collins wanted the senator to weigh in on calls for one of the fake electors, Robert Spindell Jr., to resign his position on the state elections commission.

Johnson is nothing if not duplicitous and he stayed on brand, citing “all kinds of irregularities in Wisconsin in the 2020 election” and saying that having “an alternate slate of electors” was some kind of common practice, “just like Democrats have done repeatedly in all kinds of different states.” Collins reminded Johnson that these fake electors have admitted that what they did was at the very least “improper,” and Johnson responded by saying all the civil cases against them were “a travesty of justice.” That led to this exchange:

Collins: You think it's fine that someone who tried to overturn a legitimate election is still on a board that helps certify [elections]—

Johnson: –Democrat electors have done that repeatedly. Democrats have done the same thing.

Collins: Which one? In Wisconsin—fake slates of electors?

Johnson: No, it's, it's happened in different states …

Collins: Which ones, sir?

Johnson: I didn’t come prepared to give you the exact states, but it’s happened repeatedly. It has happened repeatedly, just go check the books.

Collins: Which books?

Johnson: There have been alternate slates of electors by Democrat electors in our history. Again, you didn't—this wasn't what this interview is going to be about. I'll come and I'll provide you that information.

Not long after Johnson’s pathetic appearance, the senator went to his X account to post his “examples,” which included Democrat reps objecting to election results in 2017. Of course, this objection did not involve fake electors. Surprisingly, this also didn’t include creating a revolt at the Capitol building, and Donald Trump was certified without anyone being killed or injured.

His other example is the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Nixon had lost the election, but Hawaii was initially called for Nixon by 140 votes. Three Democratic electors chose to sign a slate saying Kennedy won. Of course, at that time there was a recount underway that would eventually reveal Kennedy got more votes.

Johnson’s part in the attempted coup on Jan. 6 has been the subject of much speculation, as the things he’s said in public and his alibi do not square with the evidence. Johnson has been secretly recorded admitting that there was no election fraud, and definitely not the kind of Big Lie-mythologized fraud that might have actually reversed the outcome in Wisconsin.

Throughout the decade history of IGGY scrutiny, I’ve tried to walk the line between utter stupidity and downright evilness. Johnson’s moron status is well documented, but his credentials as a fundamentally evil person are beyond dispute.

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And the December IGGY recipient is:

This month's collection of candidates are distinct in combining gross stupidity with the sinister purposes that is their ignominious stock in  trade.  It's tough to single out a winner, but if I must I'm opting for a tie between Rep. James Comer and Senator Ron Johnson. Both are so accustomed to peddling falsehoods (that stain our democratic institutions) they seem to have completely lost touch with reality. Who else puts such ignorance on public display? Oh, all of the above..