JANUARY 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Ferris State University Professor Thomas Brennan. Although Brennan does not fit the “celebrity” criteria necessary for nomination for an IGGY, I’m making an exception in this professor’s case. The St. John university student newspaper, The Torch, covered comments Brennan made on a Twitter account under his full name about the novel coronavirus pandemic, as well as a number of slurs that allegedly appeared on the same account. According to screenshots, Professor Brennan allegedly tweeted that COVID-19 was a “stunt” to form “a leftist new world order.” According to MLive, during a virtual meeting for Ferris State University’s College of Arts, Sciences, and Education department in August, Brennan reportedly commented that “COVID-19 death rates in the United States were exaggerated, and the pandemic and rioting were leftist stunts.”

According to The Torch, the Twitter account also allegedly tweeted bizarre and horrifying remarks like “Covid19 is another jewish revolution” as well as homophobic and racial slurs. An anonymous student in a class of Brennan’s spoke to The Torch and reportedly told the outlet that the professor talks about conspiracy theories related to cellphones during class time.

In terms of racial slurs, Brennan wrote that he is “not racist against black people,” added that he loves and respects them, and argued, “the ’n-word’ is a mind-control spell designed to make us hate each other.” He went on to say that he used the word in order to “neutralize” its power. Yikes!

In speaking to local outlet wzzm 13, Brennan explained that he didn’t use the N-word “lightly,” and suggested that we’re “heading towards such a crescendo of madness where we're about to all be enslaved because of this COVID crisis." He added to the outlet that he said “some hyperbolic things to draw attention to what it is I wanted to say.”

In response to the controversy evoked by Brennan, FSU President, David Eisler, said: “We strongly reject these statements, condemn them and will not tolerate them. We have worked diligently to become a more diverse university, and these statements demonstrate vividly how one person can set back the work of many.” Brennan has been on administrative leave since Nov. 19, though it’s unclear whether the leave is specific to the alleged Twitter remarks, the COVID-19 remarks during the August meeting, both, or neither.

Brennan is clearly the kind of scientist Republicans can get behind.

DECEMBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABUSRDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Trump Lawyer Joe DiGenova. During a call-in to the syndicated Howie Carr show simulcast at the ultra-rightwing Newsmax, lame duck Donald Trump’s lawyer Joe DiGenova called for executing Chris Krebs, the cybersecurity chief at the Department of Homeland Security that Trump fired by tweet.

“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.

This is not just a random Parler troll trying to get attention. This is an attorney speaking on behalf of the President of the United States’ re-election campaign. And while it may read like a macabre joke, the direct nature of diGenova’s comments make it impossible to interpret as anything other than a real wish/threat against a public servant for offering truthful testimony. [...]

In addition to threatening Krebs, over the course of the interview diGenova made ominous and false suggestions about “circuit breakers” shutting down on election night in multiple states, which allowed for vote fraud; millions of votes showing up in dump trucks, tow trucks, and vans without detection; and he called on state legislatures to have the “cojones” to overturn the results of the election.

No doubt there will be an attempt by some to downplay this episode as just a joke rather than an incitement for someone among our nation’s heavily armed white supremacist loons to carry out.

A BRITISH WORD ON DONALD TRUMP

A Raging President

I’ve ranted a great deal over the last four years about Donald Trump’s disdain for democracy, his incompetence, racism, misogyny, crudeness, and fundamental indecency. He is the standard bearer for ignominious—a downright evil person. My biggest worry is that the legacy of his wholesale attack on our democracy will endure long past the orangutan’s ultimate departure from the political scene.

Trump epitomizes what our Founding Fathers feared most: an authoritarian figure who would violate the most sacred principles of democratic rule. Intolerant of anyone who opposed him, Trump intimidated and even called for the arrest of his political opponents (and even some allies who had the audacity to disagree with him). He has attacked the free press and threatened journalists. Disdainful of the rule of law, he has run a criminal fiefdom and obstructed justice when his actions came under scrutiny. He implemented nepotism and appointed people to key administrative posts whose only qualifications were to be loyal ass-kissers. The Donald claimed unbridled executive power and ran the White House as his own private duchy, making a mockery of the emolument clause. He has emboldened far right extremists to acts of violence and encouraged white supremacists to act out their hate. Abroad, he insulted some of out closest allies while embracing autocrats and despots, and, abandoned time-honored multilateral institutions the U.S. was instrumental in constructing.  His most dangerous anti-democratic legacy may be his attacks on the right to vote and the legitimacy of our elections.

Looking back on my years of venting on Trump, I realize I may have been guilty of overkill, much like the so-called liberal press which never missed an opportunity for an anti-Trump diatribe. What is left to say that hasn’t been said? What good is there is whipping a dead horse? Well, maybe one more time is permissible, not from me, but from Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England. White gives you a good feel for how Donald Trump is viewed from a European lens. I include his comments below:

NOVEMBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Elect Tommy Tuberville. Alabama has done one good thing in the past few decades: vote for Democratic candidate Doug Jones in 2017 over Roy Moore. Unfortunately, that respite from idiocy was not long-lived as Jones was defeated by a sizable majority by former Auburn University football coach, Republican Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville’s popularity in a state that worships football isn’t shocking. Alabama has been very conservative for some time and Tuberville did defeat former senator-turned Trump-footrest Jeff Sessions.

But being a good football coach doesn’t make you a good senator. In fact, it seems that not knowing virtually anything about laws or voting or the basic layout of our government is now the Republican brand. A few weeks before the election, a recording of Tuberville speaking with the Birmingham, Alabama, Sunrise Rotary Club was reported on. It showed that Tuberville’s grasp of what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was is tenuous at best. Now, in a new interview with the Alabama Daily News, whether or not Tuberville knows what the branches of our government are is in question.

Asked for his thoughts on whether Republicans and Democrats could work more harmoniously this coming 2021, Senator-elect Tuberville explained that government, voting, elections, and stuff is totally gonna happen.

TUBERVILLE: Yeah and that’s how our government was set up. You know, our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three of branches of government. It wasn’t set up that way, our three branches, the House, the Senate and executive.

I guess someone forgot to tell Tuberville about the judicial branch or that the House and Senate are not separate branches. My three-year-old grandson knows that.

Since winning the election, the “X”s and “O”s guy has repeatedly informed the public that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about outside of football. On Thursday, during an acceptance speech in Montgomery, he told that crowd that his father, a WW2 veteran, helped to liberate “Paris from socialism and communism.” 

Yup. Good job, Alabama. Let’s hope you can muster up the sensibility to liberate Alabama from Tuberville in 2026.

OCTOBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Fox News’ Erin Perrine. I thought I’d seen everything from this campaign, but “Donald Trump has firsthand experience with COVID-19 and Joe Biden doesn’t” has to be the wackiest political spin ever. Trump campaign aid Erin Perrine was on Fox News this month and, man, these are some mental gymnastics. We’re not talking Simone Biles here. More like the Dude’s landlord.

The real cray-cray starts at around 4:35:

PERRINE: “And listen, he has experience as commander in chief, he has experience as a businessman, he has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual. Those firsthand experiences — Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those. He doesn’t know what it’s like to create a job other than Hunter’s. Joe Biden doesn’t know what it’s like to have to stand up and serve as commander in chief of this country. Joe Biden’s been more worried about China than he has been about the United States. Those firsthand experiences are what are going to get President Trump four more years.”

To sum up: Joe Biden doesn’t have the experience of declaring bankruptcies, stiffing students a pay-for-degree private college, losing more money in a decade that probably anyone else in the U.S., illegally shaking down other countries to try to convince them to interfere in our election, paying women for silence, or stupidly contracting a virus because he refused to take even the simplest preventive measures.

So, because Donald Trump has been a fuckup his entire life, you have to VOTE TRUMP!

Makes total sense, right?

SEPTEMBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

With revelations about his disregarding the seriousness of the COVID-19 virus, pressuring the CDC to release updates that fit his administration’s “all-is-well” virus narrative, heavy indebtedness and failure to pay taxes, and his horrific behavior at the first presidential debate, among other things, the September news cycle was, not surprisingly, dominated by President Trump. This forces me to include some Trump selections among the September IGGY nominations.

1. Michael Caputo, Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Since he was installed at the 80,000-employee department last April by the White House, Mr. Caputo, a media-savvy former Trump campaign aide, has worked aggressively to control the media strategy on pandemic issues. But over the weekend, he was engulfed in two major controversies of his own making.

First Politico, then The New York Times and other media outlets, published accounts of how Mr. Caputo and a top aide, Paul Alexander, had routinely worked to revise, delay or even scuttle the core health bulletins of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an effort to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light. The C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports had previously been so thoroughly shielded from political interference that political appointees only saw them just before they were published.

Then on Monday, The Times reported that a Facebook presentation by Mr. Caputo the previous night was filled with bizarre and incendiary comments. He had attacked C.D.C. scientists as anti-Trumpers who had formed a “resistance unit,” engaged in “rotten science” and “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants” except for coffee shop meetings to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.” Mr. Caputo said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.” He urged his gun-owning followers to buy ammunition because “it’s going to be hard to get” and warned that left-wing hit squads across the nation were training for violent attacks. He also referred to physical health concerns and said his mental health “had definitely failed.”

To a certain extent, Mr. Caputo’s comments were simply an amplified version of remarks that the president himself has made. Both men have singled out government scientists and health officials as disloyal, suggested that the election will not be fairly decided, and insinuated that left-wing groups are secretly plotting to incite violence across the United States. But Mr. Caputo’s attacks were more direct, and they came from one of the officials most responsible for shaping communications around the coronavirus.

Caputo’s 26-minute broadside on Facebook against scientists, the news media and Democrats was also another example of a senior administration official stoking public anxiety about the election and conspiracy theories about the “deep state” — the label Mr. Trump often attaches to the federal Civil Service bureaucracy.

Caputo predicted that the president would win re-election in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

Why would Caputo make such outrageous claims? Not because he is a health expert, heaven forbid (he has no background in health care), or an astute visionary. No, it’s because he’d Trump’s kind of guy: a diehard loyalist equipped with a deep antipathy and suspicion of scientific expertise who knows how to toe a political line favorable to the Trumpster.

Will these inflammatory words get Caputo fired? Of course not; he’s a Trump man. Why would the president, who on his visit to the fire-ravaged West challenged the established science of climate change, declaring “It will start getting cooler…. Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually,” fire a chip off his ol’ bloc?

AUGUST 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham “Expert” Guest Rebecca Friedrich. Fox News’ push right now is to have schools reopen, children go to school, teachers return to classrooms, and the world to pretend that the COVID-19 pandemic is just a bad case of the flu. That’s the angle being taken (and proven wrong time and again over the past few months), but the propaganda wing of the Republican Party has its marching orders and those orders are to drive their viewers off a cliff.

Right-wing wraith Laura Ingraham used the first part of her show to attack “the media” for questioning the safety of the country’s top officials’ push to reopen schools. Ingraham, relying on her audience’s inability to connect basic math and logic together, pointed out that 166 children reportedly died in 2019-2020 due to the flu, but only 30 children have died so far from COVID-19. She forgot to mention that schools began closing across the country in March and if they had not, and had children not been by and large quarantined along with their families, maybe that number doesn’t match up—and maybe it’s only July.

From there Ingraham, in her “The War Against Kids” segment, explained that “leftist teachers unions” were punishing children in service of some commie political agenda. Ingraham connected the dots to Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, Medicare for All, stimulus checks for undocumented immigrants, a tax on the rich, and a ban on charter schools. But there was more to come as Ingraham had an expert who could dig even deeper to far more nefarious conspiracies.

Wearing a gold cross around her neck, Ingraham, probably imagining she is fighting off the never-ending stream of vampires she brings onto her show masquerading as “experts,” had former Los Angeles Unified school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs on. If Friedrichs’ name sounds familiar, it might be for her participation in a union-busting case that was brought to the Supreme Court in 2015. The case ended up in a split decision affirming the lower court after Judge Anton Scalia died and the Republican Party refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. This is the expert Ingraham brought on to explain why our children needed to go back to school amidst a pandemic.

After saying how warmed she was by Ingraham’s support of her anti-union verve, Friedrichs explained that the pushback by unions over reopening classrooms is a “smokescreen” for a far more wicked agenda: The unions, and specifically teachers’ unions, “are actually using our schools to sexualize our children and to train them in anti-American ideology.”

Did you read that right? Yes, you did. But how powerful are teachers’ unions? Super-duper powerful, it turns out. According to Friedrichs, this massive indoctrination plan is coordinated with “over 180 organizations” including “the CDC, Planned Parenthood, and Black Lives Matter incorporated.”

Yes. You heard that right. (As an aside, Friedrichs explained that she has been “shouting about this for decades.”) I’m excited to hear about how powerful the teachers’ unions are and hope that this will mean that starting salaries for schoolteachers will soon be six-figure affairs! Unfortunately, these teachers’ unions are less interested in lining their pockets like the Trump administration and more interested in sex! Sexy sexy sexy sex! Let’s not get so hot and bothered that we cannot hear how this conspiracy is connected to not reopening schools.

It turns out, the conspiracy is to force children to only learn online. Because learning online is how they do the sexualization-of-our-children thing.

REBECCA FRIEDRICHS: It is shocking what they're teaching our children online through virtual learning. They are teaching our children to sext, to view pornography. They are hooking them up with online sex experts. So, what they are doing is grooming our children for sexual predators to use them. This is child abuse.

Friedrichs explains that many of these teachers don’t even realize that this is what the unions are doing. Not sure how that works, but there you have it.