OCTOBER 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC). In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Sen Tim Scott (R-SC) says “Abortion is not the way to help single Black mothers.” First, can he get any more patronizing? Some guy, who has never had to worry about an unwanted pregnancy, swans into the room and tells women he knows what’s best for them. Second, how does removing a constitutional right benefit the person who loses it? Let’s look at his reasoning.

Scott starts with a hagiography of his mother, saying she worked 64 hours a week to raise Scott and his brother and to “keep food on the table and the lights on”. It makes you wonder where he stands on the minimum wage — spoiler alert, he is against raising it.

I am glad for Scott that he was able to benefit from the American dream — elevating himself from poverty to the US Senate in one generation. But anecdotes are not evidence. And children are not the best judges of the trials and tribulations of their parents, who usually put the best spin on difficult circumstances for their kids.

Next, Scott reports on remarks made by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen. According to him, she said,

“I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy.” She went on to say how abortion affects “particularly low-income and often Black” mothers and how a lack of access to abortion “deprives them of the ability often to continue their education to later participate in the workforce.”

Scott was horrified. He asked,

“Was Yellen making the case for how abortion is good for America’s labor force?”

No, she was not. She clearly said that lack of choice hurts women because it could deny them educational and professional opportunities. But Scott chose not to hear Yellen’s respect for individual rights. Instead, he created a strawman argument — misrepresenting what Yellen said to criticize an argument she did not make.

Next, Scott goes on to write.

If abortion is our first and “best” answer to ensure that women and low-income families can thrive economically, the United States has reached one of its darkest times in our history.

Where is anyone saying that abortion is the “first and best answer”? Yellen was talking about choice because it is on everyone’s mind due to Alito’s rights-stripping, Roe-overturning opinion. Ask a liberal what will help “women and low-income families thrive economically” and they will talk about childcare, universal pre-K, parental leave, affordable higher education, and increasing the minimum wage. Scott supports none of that.

The hard truth is that the Supreme Court’s Roe-overturning decision takes away a right that American women of all backgrounds have been entitled to for 49 years. And they do not need a man, of any background, explaining how that is good for them. 

SEPTEMBER 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC). Have you heard of RepublicanMD? It’s just like WebMD, except it’s based on GOP talking points instead of science. So, for instance, if your kid has rickets, WebMD might tell you to give her vitamin D supplements tout de suite, whereas, at RepublicanMD, the prescription for every affliction is always more upper-class tax cuts. Hey, it’s just common sense.

Of course, RepublicanMD is even more misleading when it comes to reproductive health care. Conservatives tend to be against sex education in schools, and, hoo-boy, does it ever show. It’s like they all learned about sex by watching dogs in their neighborhood give elliptical TED Talks about “late-term abortions” and “legitimate rape.”

The latest Republican womb-bat to stick his foot in his mouth is South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who recently sent out a fundraising email insisting that “if we don’t take back the Senate, Dems will pack the courts, give DC statehood, grant abortions up to 52 weeks, and Republicans will never win again.”

52 weeks? What on God’s green globule is this man talking about? I thought full-term pregnancy was 40 weeks. While a woman can’t be pregnant for 52 weeks, Scott’s idiocy seems terminal. For the good of the country, he should have his brain (if he has one) terminated immediately.

It would be nice, however, if the rest of Scott’s dystopian hellscape rambling would come to pass. Court packing, DC statehood? Why not? You can toss in Puerto Rico statehood in the mix.

This kind of doofus doctoring is all to common within the GOP. For instance, in 2019, when asked if incest victims could still procure abortions under a bill he was proposing, Alabama state Sen. Clyde Chambliss said, “Yes, until she knows she’s pregnant.”

Nuff said!

AUGUST 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Carl Paladino, Former New York Gubernatorial Candidate.  Every foray into Paladino's campaign history reveals a racist, sexist, piece of work. He is currently running for a congressional seat in the Empire State and is endorsed by none other than the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, Elise Stefanik. The Buffalo businessman has been making some headlines lately for a slew of hot takes he’s had over the past month.

About a week after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered, Paladino posted (and subsequently deleted) a Facebook conspiracy screed implying that the mass shootings like those in Buffalo and Uvalde were not real or orchestrated by deep state operatives.  Before admitting that he did make the post, Paladino initially denied having shared the pathetic conspiracy theory, saying: "I don't even know how ti post of Facebook." 

After more pressure was put on him to “cowboy up,” as the gun enthusiasts love to say, like a true coward, Paladino offered up this backward-crawling explanation: "I just didn't remember the fact that I published it; I couldn't remember. It was written by Jeff Briggs, a good friend from Rochester. I published it because he is a friend."

Blame his “good friend?” In fact, Paladino has a new offensive set of remarks and ideas, first uncovered by Media Matters. Bottom of Form

According to the report, Paladino appeared last year on a weekly Buffalo radio show, called The r-House Radio Show, hosted by real estate executive Peter Hunt. Hunt was asking Paladino about how conservatives could get “roused” up in a state that votes predominantly blue. “How do you get people thinking about the possibility of change here in New York state and what that might mean ... for everyone here?”

Paladino begins by telling Hunt he was just thinking about this very topic “the other day.” Well, not exactly. See, according to Paladino, he was hanging out with some other good friends, and “somebody had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler, and how he aroused the crowds.”

Okaaaaaaay. Weird soundtrack for a group hangout, but let’s see where this is going.

Paladino sort of laughs with this worn-out white supremacist trope of a talking point. “And he would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational.”

Someone inspirational. Like Hitler.

Paladino then makes a vague and somewhat rambling attack on “RINO-ism,” and Hunt quickly changes the subject to “deficit spending” in New York State.

It isn’t shocking that people like Paladino, and Trump before him, look up to Hitler and his supposed charisma. Decades ago, Ivana Trump did an interview with Vanity Fair and let the antisemitic cat out of the bag when she revealed that a book of Hitler’s speeches was the only book on Trump’s nightstand.

JULY 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate Nominee in Georgia. When Walker began his campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Walker campaign's main task was to play down Walker's history of domestic violence. As the campaign progresses, his handlers have a lot more cleaning up to do, which is not something Republicans are very good at—or, interested in.

Take the following: Walker’s involvement with a company that scammed American veterans (he falsely claimed he founded Patriot Support), his promotion of a scammy-sounding anti-coronavirus spray, his public lies about graduating from the University of Georgia (he even claimed he was in the top 1% of his class), his lying about working in law enforcement (he was an honorary Cobb County deputy, which is like being a junior ranger), his false claim about owning a lucrative chicken processing business, and, after “family man” Walker repeatedly criticized absent fathers in black households, his forced public acknowledged of having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact. Add to this his suspiciously opaque supposed financial disclosures and his recent denial that former President Trump ever said the 2020 election was stolen, one can only conclude that Walker doesn't know anything about anything.

All right, so Herschel Walker is a liar and a hypocrite, a possible scammer, a political buffoon with a history of domestic abuse and a string of children he has so little involvement with that even his own campaign didn't know they existed. Fine. I think we could have all left it with "if you put a gun to your wife's head, you probably should forever be excluded from the United States Senate" but we're dealing with Republicans who don't blink at plots by a sitting Republican president to get his own vice president assassinated, they're not going to blink at any of this.

The depth of Walker’s ignorance never ceases to amaze. On Sunday, Walker spoke in front of the Hall County Republican Party. The group was small, and the speech revolved mainly around the enemy: China. That’s the country he claims created the COVID-19 virus and is to blame for climate change and a tax increase used to clean up the air.

Straying from his usual stump script, Walker started talking about the environment and climate change and how “[President Joe] Biden” began “getting rid of pipelines,” and “getting rid of our energy.” Then Walker explained climate change and the “Green New Deal” by saying that “We, in America, have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world.” He then pivoted to describe how the U.S. is going to “pull from the ‘Green New Deal’… millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up,” and added that, “China and India aren’t putting anything into cleaning that situation up.”

“So all that bad air is still there. But, since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China bad air. So when China get our good air, their bad air gotta move. So, it moves over to our good air space. And now, we gotta clean that back up. While they’re messing ours up. So, what we’re doing is just spending money. But we’re not just spending money, we’re spending your money,” Walker says. And that is why Biden is raising taxes, he reasons.”

Enlightening!

Earlier in a monthly IGGY, I mentioned that Walker, if elected (the race against Warnock is virtually a dead heat), would be a shoe-in to join Louie Gohmert and Tommy Tuberville as one of the Three Stooge dumbest Congressmen. I’ll bet you could probably get Walker to play quietly in his office for at least an hour by giving him a copy of The Last Supper and telling him to find Waldo.

And now, he may be trying to earn the distinction of not only being a moron, but the Congress’ biggest fabricator, perhaps one of the greatest of all time, only one step behind the Trumpster..

SWEDEN ENDS TWO CENTURIES OF NONALIGNMENT

Sweden has not been involved in foreign wars since 1814. This long, successful record, maintained without the aid of foreign alliances, was instrumental in developing a tradition of neutrality and a general aloofness from active involvement in international affairs. This tradition of aloofness gradually diminished in the years after World War II as Sweden responded to the centripetal pull of European integration and its political, economic and security foreign orientations became increasingly internationalist in both their nature and purposes. Swedes liked to refer to this policy as "active neutrality."  Still, throughout the post-War years Sweden stood steadfast in avoiding military alliances with the aim of remaining neutral in any war.

JUNE 2002 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

Shakespeare wrote something like “It’s an ill day that brings forth the adder.” Well, you can count on a horrific Uvalde mass shooting to bring out Republican Adders, and they didn’t disappoint. Given the proliferation of many idiotic comments about guns and mass shootings, I will limit this month’s IGGY comments on the gun question.

1. Heather Ann Sprague, Republican Candidate for Maine’s House of Repersentatives. Evil deeds seem to always bring out IGGY-worthy absurdities. Thus, we get tortured explanations like the following, from Republicans who need to continually trot out fresh bugaboos to keep their base from questioning the wisdom of putting assault rifles in the hands of teenagers. You see, it’s liberal teachers who did it—at least according to Republican hopeful Heather Ann Sprague, who helpfully posted some of her transphobic thoughts on Facebook in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

According to Sprague, “Liberal teachers” are responsible for the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 children and two teachers.

In an apparent reference to a rumor on social media that has been debunked, Sprague claimed there were pictures online of the shooter dressed in women’s clothing, obviously a “confused” transgender kid.

“All I have to say is this is the result of what happens when kids are pushed past their limits. It’s obvious he was brainwashed in school by liberal teachers to think he shouldn’t be a male. If this crap doesn’t stop we will have more shootings because there are alot more confused, fed up and now mentally ill kids out there thanks to the #publicschoolsystem. THIS is why I have been TRYING to get the truth out about what the schools are doing to our youth because it’s DANGEROUS,” Sprague said in her post.

NBC news reported that a transgender woman’s photo was used to spread the baseless theory about the Texas shooter. The thread began on forum website 4chan and was spread by right-wing Facebook pages. Its falsity, of course, didn’t stop conservatives—including Republican Rep. Paul Gosar--from spreading it far and wide.

So, Sprague took unconfirmed information that felt comforting to her, and instead of researching it thoroughly, she immediately weaponized it in order to smear liberals and deflect responsibility from her own party’s shameful lack of action?

In another Facebook post, Sprague wrote, “I’ll go a step further and say the teachers that molded this kid into a #killer should be arrested for multiple MURDERS.” But not the person who sold the gunman two assault rifles with multiple rounds on his 18th birthday. Okay.

She also wrote, “more and more I cant help but think these shootings are on purpose to push gun control with the lives of babes. If they’re not getting shot they’re getting aborted. It’s disgusting and EVIL. If elected I will push to have armed guards at ALL our schools here in Maine.”

Of course, this is the same kind of muck conservatives stir up whenever there’s a mass shooting. They mix all that roiling sediment with our own righteous indignation in order to muddy what should be a pretty clear picture, and then they wait for the whole mess to settle down again—which it inevitably will, no doubt before Congress is spurred to take anything even resembling meaningful action.

By the way, Sprague is the only Republican running in her district, and will face incumbent Democrat Ann Matlack in the general election. So, voters, it seems, will have a pretty stark choice in this election between bullshit and reality. Let’s hope they choose wisely.

MAY 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Rep. Matt Gaetz. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is currently under investigation for having sex with a 17-year-old girl, and is the only member of Congress to vote against a law boosting the government’s human trafficking investigatory powers, has big thoughts on women who are upset about Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court.

“How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved Millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?”

The only way to make sense of the sicko Gaetz is to assume he’s using his soapbox to promote himself for a future media gig, except he’s so extreme Fox doesn’t even want him. That’s saying something. He’ll probably have to settle for a gig as a resident Trump flatterer at Mira Logo.