MAY 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Tom Cotton. The abject failure of Republicanism—you cannot call it conservatism at this point, whatever that term once meant is null and void now—can be seen in nearly every detail of this nation's failed pandemic response. Scientists and public health experts ignored, or demeaned; institutional planning efforts shunned in favor of the partisan instincts of a seemingly unending list of designated incompetents; everything from testing to messaging in absolute shambles.

And so, we get travel bans, long after the virus has already travelled. We get attempts to rebrand the virus the "China virus", to give the party's ignorant yahoos something to focus their ire on while Dear Leader upturns actual government response efforts to focus instead on supplying lupus medication somebody somewhere heard good things about or muse about how maybe we should try to get the healing power of sunlight involved here, but put it inside people somehow.

That brings us to Sen. Tom Cotton, one of innumerable poster children for Republican Party decay, a man who would have to go to college for the next ten years to elevate himself anywhere near dumb as a post territory. Posts are useful. You can hang a sign from a post. You can hang a sign warning, for example, to beware the raging idiot lurking just behind the post. You cannot hang a sign from Tom Cotton. He wouldn't stand for it. It's the one goddamn thing in life he might turn out to be good at, and yet he refuses.

On Fox News this morning, actual Republican Senator Tom Cotton was not able to provide many ideas on how to make the Donald Trump Memorial Coronavirus Pandemic Response suck ever so slightly less. He was, however, eager to froth that what we really need to do around here is ban Chinese students who come to America from learning about science.

Because, you see, the "Chinese Communist Party" wants to be "the country that claims credit" for finding an eventual vaccine for the virus, and so are looking to steal that vaccine from us, if we develop it first. That plot includes science-minded Chinese Communist students, who are coming to America to "steal our property" and "design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people."

"So, I think we need to take a very hard look at the visas we give Chinese nationals to come to the U.S. to study, especially at the postgraduate level, in advanced scientific and technological fields," says the still-unsigned Tom Cotton.

"You know, if Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America. They don't need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”

The Federalist Papers? I’ll bet 90% of Republicans don’t know what they are. Maybe the learning should start at home. Tom Cotton? He’s the front-runner to be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. Perfect!

APRIL 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Last prominently seen confessing to Donald Trump’s quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine on national television, with the now infamous "get over it," has done it again. This time he made his confession overseas in a U.K. visit, so maybe he thought nobody would notice. It didn't work. The Washington Post obtained a recording of Mulvaney at the Oxford Union, saying:

"My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House," he said. "The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we're a lot less interested as a party."

Until it comes time to wield the deficit as a weapon to cut the safety net, of course.

He left that part out but made another admission about why Republicans refuse to do anything about climate change, which he implicitly acknowledged as a real thing. "We take the position in my party that asking people to change their lifestyle dramatically, including by paying more taxes, is simply not something we are interested in doing." That answer got laughs in the student audience, The Post reports. One can only assume those laughs were derisive.

They never have a problem with asking poor people, senior citizens, communities of color or anyone who doesn't vote Republican to change their lifestyle dramatically by not having enough to eat, or a roof, or health care but they are absolutely not going to afflict the comfortable. Again, that's not news to anyone who has paid attention to the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, but the self-awareness from even a not-big-thinker like Mulvaney is a little surprising. Not that it will make any difference in the long run.

You know that in a second Trump term the deficit is going be used to cut Social Security and Medicare and deepen the cuts to Medicaid. It will be used to continue decimating food and housing assistance and every other program that helps everyone who doesn't count—a time-honored GOP formula.

TRUMP’S NARCISSISM AND THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS CHALLENGE

Trump’s dreadful handling of the coronavirus crisis cannot be explained as a product of his persistent attempts to shore up his cult-like base, the machinations of his peculiar conservative ideology, or even of his stupidity. It can only be understood as another example of Trump being Trump.  His behavior is a reflection of his personality. He simply cannot help himself.

We've seen it all before: Trump repeatedly lying, spitting out misinformation and disinformation, spouting contradictory messages and answers, attacking perceived enemies, demonstrating ignorance and a complete lack of empathy, and congratulating himself for alleged accomplishments. In the familiar Trump style, he has refused to accept any responsibility for missteps, falsely blaming Obama, Democrats, governors, impeachment, the “deep state,” New York, China, the WHO, and healthcare experts for his failure to ensure that the country was prepared for an infectious disease pandemic, then compounding the problem with inept leadership when faced with a real health emergency.  If there were any lingering doubts about Trump’s mental health, his handling of the Covid-19 crisis has put them to rest: the president is mentally unfit to lead this great nation.  

MARCH 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

Since most of the news this month focused on the coronavirus and its various manifestations, I decided to restrict March IGGY nominations to absurd comments made about the pandemic. There have been many. Because of an overloaded Phronesis switchboard, I have necessarily had to pare down the number of candidates to the following few.

1. Fox News’ Don Luskin and Jesse Watters. Fox News is up in arms over the coronavirus. Not because people are getting infected and some dying. Not because of the dangers it poses to humanity. And, of course, not because of the tepid Trump administration response to the crisis. No, the Fox team is pissed at China for causing the pandemic by eating bat soup and then not apologizing to the world.

Enlightened by internet rumors, Fox News resident “economist” Luskin claimed the pandemic stemmed from the Chinese “selling bats in open market-places and then have business travel and tourist travel between that country and the civilized world.”

China hater, Fox News’ Jesse Watters, went after his favorite target Monday night: Chinese people. As host of The Five, a show on which the cumulative intelligence of the panel adds up to the number 5, Watters used the coronavirus as a jumping-off point to demand an apology from China for causing the COVID-19 disease.

Watters is probably best known for his “Watters World” segments, during which he walks around making fun of people, and more specifically for the wildly racist episode in which he made fun of Chinese people in Chinatown, in a man-on-the-street sort of performance. On Monday night’s show, after the panel brought up Trump’s handling of public health concerns stemming from COVID19, Watters showed off some of his trademark scientific brilliance:

“I’ll tell you why it started in China. Because they have these markets where they eat raw bats and snakes.” He then went on to observe: “They are a very hungry people,” he says. “Their communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate, this food is uncooked, it’s unsafe, and that’s why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.”

As with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, the right wing sphere is full of fact-free stories that can be summed up as someone else doing something in some other country to cause the badness, and if we were all white and living right, none of this would be happening.

TRUMP AND THE CORONAVIRUS: CAN THE PRESIDENT GUIDE US THROUGH THE PANDEMIC?

By Ronald T. Fox

Will the coronavirus bring an end to the Trump presidency? Has the man who somehow survived the Russian and Ukrainian scandals, the inhumanity of separated families at the border, payed out hush money, launched disruptive trade wars, responded belatedly and inadequately to mega weather events, pulled out of the Paris Climate agreement dismantled important environmental protections, and suffered the indignity of impeachment finally met a match he can’t scam?

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.

JANUARY 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. President Donald Trump. I know, I’ve vowed to not include Trump absurdities, but sometimes it can’t be helped. In just his latest ignominious tweet, Trump stated that his list of targets in Iran would include sites of “very high level & importance to Iran & the Iranian culture.”

One would think that the resulting international and domestic uproar to the threat would move a normal person to “qualify” the statement, or at least say he was misunderstood, but Donald Trump is not a normal person. Just hours later, he made it very clear that he thought cultural sites were in fact legitimate targets.

“They’re allowed to kill our people,” he told the reporters on Air Force One as he flew back to Washington from his winter holiday in Florida. “They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”

The furor was a classic controversy of the narcissistic Mr. Trump’s creation, the apparent result of an impulsive threat and his habit of refusing to back down in the face of criticism. On the contrary, his impulse is to double down.

Administration and Pentagon officials moved quickly to walk back Trump’s assertion, which if carried out would amount to a war crime. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper sought to douse the international outcry by ruling out attacks on cultural sites in Iran if the conflict with Tehran escalates further.

Mr. Esper acknowledged that striking cultural sites with no military value would be a war crime, putting him at odds with the president, who insisted such places would be legitimate targets. Mr. Trump’s threat generated condemnation at home and abroad while deeply discomfiting American military leaders who understand the importance of complying with the rules of war (at least professing to).

“We will follow the laws of armed conflict,” Mr. Esper said at a news briefing at the Pentagon when asked if cultural sites would be targeted as the president had suggested over the weekend. When asked if that meant “no” because the laws of war prohibit targeting cultural sites, Mr. Esper agreed. “That’s the laws of armed conflict.”

Trump’s threat was not just a slip of the tongue spewing from a man who is grossly ignorant of history and propriety. It comes from a man who has no respect for laws, particularly those codified internationally. He truly believes he is above the law. He is not only oblivious to the consequences of his assertions and actions; he doesn’t seem to care what happens. After all, his enablers will cover for him.