Send in the Clowns

Item: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently accused House leader Nancy Pelosi of employing “gazpacho police” to spy on members of Congress.

Is it surprising that the easily confused Greene mixed up cold soup with the Nazi secret police? Not really. It’s no exaggeration to say that Greene is probably the single dumbest person to ever sit in the US Congress. For proof, just google her name and the word “stupid” and see what comes up. She apparently thinks cancer is contagious, that the Las Vegas massacre was a staged hoax and that wildfires are caused by “Jewish space lasers.” This idiocy is coming out of the mouth of a person who was elected to Congress with 57 percent of the vote in her district, and she’s a virtual lock to win again this November.

In days gone by, a person this dumb and deranged would be laughed out of a major party and forced to run as an independent crank who gets a few hundred votes. But in a debased democracy, she becomes a congresswoman with nearly half a million Twitter followers. And Greene is far from the only one – the GOP has a significant contingent of people just like her. This is the payoff for decades of conservatives relentlessly bashing government, elites and higher education. We now have politicians who are popular precisely because they are supremely stupid and ignorant. It will probably get worse before it gets better.

Item: A Ryerson philosophy professor is still very upset by people wearing masks.

Of course, a lot of education is no guarantee of smarts or sanity. As such, allow me to introduce Professor Julien Beillard. According to Beillard, masks are dehumanizing, evil and a part of a “system designed to stamp out even the faintest hint of human decency.” Yes, a little face mask can do all that. The professor, who because he is unvaccinated was only recently allowed to return to the university, was so wounded by all the masked people on campus he had to retreat to the safe space of his parked car to take a nap. (Do you get to take a nap while you’re at work?) When I first read Beillard's melodramatic and overwrought post I actually thought it might be an attempt at comedy. But sadly, no.

Do we need to recap the mask thing all over again? I won’t, other than to say that whatever benefit masks provide in curbing the pandemic is clearly worth the minor inconvenience of having to wear one in public. If this small act is entirely too much for the fragile, self-pitying professor, I can only wonder how he would ever cope with real hardship. And if you thought a potential world war and daily atrocities committed in Ukraine would shut the Covid denialists up for even a second, you'd be wrong. Apparently nothing, absolutely nothing, is as tragic as having to wear a mask.

Item: A Fox News performer ping pongs between siding with Putin and then pretending he doesn’t.

The person in question is Tucker Carlson, a eunuch who has taken over the title of the Biggest Liar on Fox News. This title is always hotly contested, as winning it guarantees high ratings and a large salary. At the beginning of the Ukraine war, Carlson said that he didn’t hate Putin because Putin didn’t “call me a racist… try to get me fired…“(doesn't) eat dogs.” Seriously, here’s the clip. When Carlson realized that he was getting replayed on Russian TV, he backtracked and said that Putin was in fact to blame for the war. But at the same time he continued to insult Ukraine, calling it a “Western puppet” and “not a democracy at all.”

As I’ve said before, there is a simple reason Carlson, Trump, et al support Putin, and that is because they want to be like him and they think we should be governed by someone like him. In the far-right insane asylum, the blame for this war is on Joe Biden, environmentalists, immigrants, gays, atheists, etc., because the real enemy is liberal democracy. The far-right is Rootin for Putin because he validates their worldview. They couldn’t care less how many civilians die or what happens to Ukraine.

I once did subject myself to a few episodes of Carlson’s show and what is astounding is how many times he flip-flops and changes his tune, only to revert back to his original statements a few minutes later. His whole performance is a word salad of provocations designed to trigger fear and anger in his listeners, all while playing a game of Three-card Monte with the facts and his own statements in an attempt to retain plausible deniability. His favourite trope is to claim he’s just asking questions, which allows him to deny that he said what he said. It's nothing more than gaslighting, and every week he claims more hapless victims (if you know one of his regular viewers, you know how completely confused and cracked they are; how could they not be?) while pocketing a reported six million dollar annual salary. What a country.

Item: The former POTUS praises murderous dictators and riffs about starting World War III.

On March 5, in front of 250 rich people who willingly paid some obscene amount of money to listen to him, Donald Trump gave a rambling 84 minute speech. Among the lowlights were his gushing praise of Kim Jong-un’s ability to terrorize his entire country; calling climate change a hoax and ‘joking’ that rising sea levels would just make more waterfront property (even as a joke, this claim fails basic logic); praising Putin’s smarts for invading Ukraine while at the same time magically claiming that Putin would never have done so if Trump was still president.

So what would Trump do to Russia that Biden hasn’t done? How would he be “tougher on Putin than anyone”? The answer was truly incredible and it’s worth quoting directly:

“We should put the Chinese flag on F-22 jets and bomb the shit out of Russia. And then we say we didn’t do it, China did it. And then they start fighting with each other while we sit back and watch.”

From the accounts of people in the room, it didn't seem like he was joking, but of course that’s the way he and the right-wing media are spinning it now. Because really, who could take such an infantile ‘plan’ seriously? This is the standard response from the Right whenever Trump says something outrageously stupid, which is pretty much all the time. He was joking when he said people should ingest bleach, he was joking when he said "the second amendment people could stop Hillary", he was joking when he said we should nuke hurricanes...

Trump can’t bring himself to say anything negative about Putin, a mass murderer and war criminal. He can’t even muster up fake outrage at the events in Ukraine because he simply doesn’t care about anyone or anything that doesn’t directly impact himself and because for him, might always makes right. Trump is a weak man who desperately wants to be seen as tough and strong. Putin, thug that he is, is everything Trump wishes he could be.

The good news is that many Republicans are breaking with Trump over the war in Ukraine. The condemnation of the invasion and the desire to stop Putin has created a moment of actual bipartisanship. Polls show the public doesn’t back Trump’s view of Putin, either. It might be a sign that his hold over the GOP is loosening, if not ending. It would mean something very positive has come out of this atrocity if the war ruined Trump's prospects for 2024, but I’m dubious that it will. Until he's removed from the scene, we should all be very nervous. There is no way this megalomaniac should be allowed anywhere near the nuclear codes ever again.