JANUARY 2024 IGNOMINIOUS ABUSRDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley.  Hawley should know better than anyone how dangerous radical right-wing domestic terrorists are, and how corrosive online propaganda can be to democracy and the public order. They’re the reason no one can watch him walk—or run—anywhere these days without getting the “Benny Hill” theme stuck in their heads.

But even though Hawley ran from Donald Trump’s conspiracy-besotted mob on Jan. 6, 2021, much like a stoned ostrich chasing an ice cream truck, he’s faux-outraged that our government would ever do anything to combat the kind of homegrown misinformation that could have got him killed.

Hawley has introduced a bill—titled The Ending DHS Funding for Liberal Propaganda Act—that aims to make the world safe for conservative viewpoints, so long as they’re suitably bonkers.

Here’s the text of the bill:

The Secretary of Homeland Security may not issue any grant funding to any entity that will use the funds for the development of—

(1) any programming that engages in partisan political advocacy or promotes discrimination on the basis of political affiliation; or

(2) any programming relating to countering narratives or views on political topics, including6 COVID-19, vaccination, media bias, immigration, and crime.

Among the evidence justifying the bill, Fox News mentioned a federal grant to the University of Rhode island’s Media Education lab which it alleged was to create “counter-propaganda” against conservative viewpoints. In its words:

The $700,000 grant was used to address “propaganda and misinformation concerning topics including immigration, racial justice, the coronavirus, and vaccination” and “build on top of concerns about so-called ‘fake news’ and ‘cancel culture.’”

Well, Hawley may have a point here. Without propaganda, misinformation, and fake news, all Republicans have left is hours of b-roll of Donald Trump humping flags and praising dictators. Clearly, the effort to stop deadly propaganda is now an existential threat to the GOP.

Hawley, who runs to the right of most of his Senate colleagues—and to the left … and down the stairs … and possibly to the bathroom, where he tucks his feet up onto the toilet lid so his bear spray-wielding MAGA admirers can’t find him—is incensed by the University of Rhode Island grant, and he’s emphatically saying so.

“This is an outrageous use of federal funds and abuse of power,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “All these funds should be clawed back by the federal government immediately, and anyone involved in making this grant should be fired.”

Of course, Hawley, who’s happily endorsed confirmed rapist and proud authoritarian Trump, isn’t concerned about any of Trump’s overtly political proposals—such as vowing to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” No, as far as that goes, Hawley clearly won’t be happy until he’s the senior senator from the Show-Me-Your-Papers State.

But instead of showing appropriate alarm over Trump’s running roughshod over sacrosanct American values and the plain truth, Hawley is targeting immunologists and demonstrably provable facts on topics ranging from immigration to crime.

He might as well introduce a bill preventing NASA from funding woke spherical-Earth radicals and moon-landing-conspiracy debunkers.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: Don’t give him any ideas.

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.

NOVEMBER 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Ohio Republicans.  Ohio voted 56% to 43.4% to put the right to abortion in its state constitution. The very next day, Republicans were vowing to overturn that election. Overturning elections is a growing Republican Party trend, but it’s possible that even Donald Trump would hesitate to try it with a 13 percentage point margin of victory where the top election official was a Republican.

Ohio Republicans are in the “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” phase of trying to undo what their state’s voters did, as a press release from the Ohio House of Representatives Republican newsroom clearly shows.

There’s the “ignore the margin, the election was stolen anyway” argument, which state Rep. Jennifer Gross made. “Foreign billionaires don't get to make Ohio laws,” she said, adding, “This is foreign election interference, and it will not stand.” She’s talking about money from the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center. Soros was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1961, the expenditures were made according to U.S. law, and if a few million dollars could reliably swing elections toward progressive issues or candidates in Ohio, it’s safe to say the past few elections would have gone very differently. Ohio voters made this Ohio law. They’re adults who made up their own minds.

Then there are some Republicans gearing up to pretend that this amendment doesn’t mean what it says and that it needs the legislature to step in and say what it really means. “Issue 1 doesn't repeal a single Ohio law, in fact, it doesn't even mention one,” according to state Rep. Bill Dean. And that’s the opening he hopes to exploit, or, as he put it, “The amendment’s language is dangerously vague and unconstrained, and can be weaponized to attack parental rights or defend rapists, pedophiles, and human traffickers.”

While there are significant issues left to litigate, with the courts needing to decide which current abortion restrictions are allowed following the Issue 1 vote and which ones to strike down, state House Republicans are clearly very nervous about how that will go in the courts. According to their press release:

To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative. The Ohio legislature alone will consider what, if any, modifications to make to existing laws based on public hearings and input from legal experts on both sides.

How’s that for an announcement of a planned power grab? They lost big in August on the vote attempting to make it more difficult to pass abortion rights. They lost big in November. Now, they’re looking ahead to losing in the courts—so they’re laying the groundwork to steal this election by stealing power from the courts.

OCTOBER 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Sen. Tommy Tuberville. The Tub strikes again. He’s now accusing Air Force general and former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden of “calling for a politically motivated assassination.” Tuberville seemed to insinuate that certain GOP senators would be targeted. While the CIA has a rich history of assassinations as well as some laughable attempts against foreign leaders out of American favor (see Church Committee report), senators have not been in the cross hairs--- at least not until now according to Tommy T.

As Tuberville continues his blockade on military promotions, Hayden responded to a tweet asking if Tuberville should be removed from his committee assignments with a suggestion of his own: “How about the human race?”

Tuberville did not take this as the glib statement about his own worthiness to be considered human as Hayden obviously intended. No, the Alabama Republican decided to read it as an assassination threat and reported it to the Capitol Police, saying, in a statement, “If we still have a nonpolitical justice system in this country, then General Hayden will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Gosh, what a sneaky setup for insisting it was politically motivated when Hayden does not get prosecuted.

"This morning, my office was made aware of a statement made by General Michael Hayden calling for a politically motivated assassination. This statement is disgusting, and it is repugnant to everything we believe in as Americans," Tuberville said in the statement. "Given General Hayden’s long career in Washington, he must have known that, by making such a statement, he was committing a serious crime. His own efforts today to reinterpret what he said are only a tacit admission of guilt.”

Here’s Hayden’s alleged effort to “reinterpret” what he said:

Hayden spent four years as a vocal critic of Donald Trump, with Trump threatening to revoke his security clearance. Tuberville and his followers are extremely small potatoes by contrast, and Hayden is doubtless fully aware of what actual death threats look like and what constitutes protected speech.

This isn’t the first time Hayden has publicly criticized Tuberville for his military promotion blockade, which Tuberville is waging in a temper tantrum over Defense Department policy covering travel for service members or their families to obtain reproductive health care, including abortion. And the previous time, he did have to explain his meaning: Hayden initially answered “Absolutely” to the question “Is it wrong to call Sen. Tommy Tuberville a racist?” He then clarified: “I have aphasia. Sometimes my meaning isn’t clear. What I meant to say is Tuberville absolutely is a racist. Or, in other words, it is not wrong to say he is a racist.” By contrast, saying “I stand by” the “suggestion that ‘Coach’ Tuberville not be considered a member of the human race” is repeating the insult, which was never a threat.

The humorless Tuberville sure is working hard to make himself a victim in a week when he’s under increased pressure to allow military promotions to pass amid the war in Israel.

SEPTEMBER 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Arizona Rep. Paul Goaar. Gosar continues to spew hate-filled, misinformed invective out into the public sphere. On his official government website, Gosar unspooled a conspiracy theory in which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen.Mark Milley knew there would be trouble at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and teamed up against Donald Trump to let it happen. Then he added, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”

According to Gosar, “General Milley, the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs,” is a “traitor” who has been “also secretly coordinating and sharing intelligence with the Chinese military.” It’s a lot of hooey to take in at once. Much of this is predicated on long debunked claims made by Donald Trump Jr. that Pelosi was the person who rejected the National Guard’s presence at the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6.

Gosar’s statements come shortly after disgraced former President Trump screamed a similar attack by way of his failing Truth social platform. He claimed that a purported call Milley had with Chinese officials on Jan. 6—in which the general reportedly reassured the Chinese government that the United States wasn’t being thrown into chaos—was ”an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling told CNN that Gosar’s and Trump’s statements concerning Milley were “disgusting,” and it showed how “deeply disturbed” the two men are. At the same time, Gosar being a disgusting and disturbed person is not new information. In fact, his own family has campaigned against him. Calling him a “trairor” and publicly demanded he be investigated for his part in facilitating the attempted coup on Jan. 6.

In contrast to traditional GOP support for the military, today’s party extremists with their racist slurs and seeming indifference to how a government shutdown (not to mention Tuberville’s bigoted war on military readiness) would harm our troops, demonstrates how much they’ve abandoned long-standing conservative principles. They’ve become the party of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, hate, intolerance, autocracy and. revenge. I shutter at where this might lead. Gosar for President in 2028?

AUGUST 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. The Florida Board of Education. The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards,, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6). This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And, in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people. Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black AND white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order, especially for a small part of the overall curriculum.

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

JULY 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Leave it to right wing media and fellow travelers to scream about what they see as a flaunting of American patriotism. This time they took issue when the U.S. women’s national soccer team stood silently when the national anthem was played at the World Cup in Auckland, New Zealand. They didn’t take a knee, they didn’t raise a fist in protest, they didn’t grimace, and they didn’t shout. They stood silently and what you might call respectfully, if you weren’t dedicated to being outraged. “The most shameful conduct.” “An insult to every American.” “An attack on our country, our flag, and those who fought and died for our nation.”

Nikki Haley, looking for traction in the Republican presidential primary, tweeted reproachfully about it. Many commentators took Haley’s approach, lecturing these women at the pinnacle of their sport, women who waged and won a years-long fight for equal pay, as if they were insufficiently grateful children.

But many who’ve served in the military noted that in that setting, they were taught to stand silently—just like the soccer players did. “I guess Marines are unpatriotic when we don’t sing the anthem,” Ron Filipkowski tweeted. Nobody calls out the marines.

The degree to which this outrage is completely fake cannot possibly be overemphasized. This is a lesson that the goalposts will always move if Fox News is determined to attack you. The mere presence of Megan Rapinoe on that team means there must be an offense to be found and yelled about, because Rapinoe did kneel, starting in 2016. Rapinoe wrote about that decision:

“I can understand if you think that I’m disrespecting the flag by kneeling, but it is because of my utmost respect for the flag and the promise it represents that I have chosen to demonstrate in this way. When I take a knee, I am facing the flag with my full body, staring straight into the heart of our country’s ultimate symbol of freedom — because I believe it is my responsibility, just as it is yours, to ensure that freedom is afforded to everyone in this country.”

That kind of nuance can never be allowed, and even years later, with Rapinoe standing during the anthem, right-wing media were determined to find something to be angry about. Because the right-wing media always needs something to be angry about.

It’s exhausting living in a country and a time when a huge sector of media and politicians and would-be influencers are always trying to build power and keep their base mobilized by pushing rage.

From Fox News to Donald Trump to Ted Cruz to Marjorie Taylor Greene to Ben Shapiro to Dinesh D’Souza, the business model is to find reasons for the Republican base to be angry and scared at all times. And we know how scary successful women are—especially when they’re LGBTQ+ and/or outspoken. So, the members of the USWNT should go about their business (winning soccer games), and ignore this so-called scandal completely. Because if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else.