With the plethora of bad news these days—global warming accelerating and whole portions of the globe on fire; the Covid-19 Delta variant running rampant through the population of anti-vax states and overwhelming hospitals; Afghanistan being overrun by the Taliban, and threatening to become another Vietnam-evacuation fiasco (today’s news confirms this); Congress mostly in gridlock and unable to address most of the crises besetting the nation, including the rampant inequality keeping whole sectors of the public in poverty (to mention only the major calamities besetting us)—it is easy to sink into despair and outrage. But it’s also easy, and far more preferable for one’s health, to see the humor in all this; not that tragedy is laughable, but that the idiocy emanating from politicians making these tragedies worse, is nothing if not hilarious. We have major figures who might qualify as standup comics if they weren’t so serious, so oblivious of the absurd nature of what they’re saying—which only makes their pronouncements that much funnier. So let’s just start listing some of the commentary by these buffoons; or perhaps begin by listing the buffoons themselves. Beginning, of course, with the Buffoon-in-Chief, ex-President Donald Trump. Then the governor of Florida, Ron De Santis. Then the women who have come to the fore in numbers in recent years: Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. And other idiots too numerous to name, but including stars like Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, and Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, and even the minority leader in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. But enough of the lists. Let’s get to the humor.
Pride of place must go to Gohmert, who recently tried to warn about Democrats’ attempts to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which, he said, would fund “dangerous” solar power plants. And wherefore dangerous? Because, said Gohmert in an interview on One America News, “when the birds fly through, if they survive the windmills, then they hit that magnified sun, explode in flame, and down they go, bird guts all over the mirrors.” An epidemic of exploding birds! Proving, vowed Gohmert, that this “green stuff is out of control” (rawstory.com, Aug. 12). The mind reels.
Next up must be MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an avid Trump supporter, who famously predicted that Donald Trump would soon be reinstated as President, because Americans would realize that he did win the 2020 election. Lindell actually predicted the glorious date of this ‘second coming’: (“By the morning of August 13, it will be the talk of the world”), though he tried to hedge his bets when August 13 came and went with Biden still President. Still, Lindell happily urged supporters not to despair, Reinstatement Day would surely happen sometime in September, once he finally submitted his (nonexistent) proof that the 2020 election was rigged to the U. S. Supreme Court! The people would thereupon be ecstatic, urging the government to “Hurry up! Let’s get this election pulled down, let’s right the right. Let’s get these communists out.” One has to ask: Who are these people? Who opened the Nut House?
It appears that someone with connections to the Republican Party did it, because a recent survey reveals that nearly half (49%) of all Republican voters believe, bizarrely and dangerously, that: “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” The same poll found that an even bigger group of Republicans (55%) say that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast we may have to use force to save it.” And the same poll (by George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs) found that Republicans don’t trust elections, 82% of whom said it's “hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.” In other words, those damn people of color! Such results are nothing but ominous in any polity, but in a so-called “democracy,” they seem near-fatal. As does, by the by, the apparent determination of Republican state legislatures to pass laws limiting the opportunities and rights of Americans, people of color mainly, to vote. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of this republic—to abide by the will of the people, which requires as many as possible to actually vote? Gee, I guess not.
But I digress. Let’s get back to the idiot parade. I particularly like the humor, macabre though it may be, of official responses to Covid-19 and the mask mandates and vaccines associated with it. Masks (along with social distancing) have proved to be remarkably effective at limiting the spread of this killer virus. So have vaccines, the best of which have been tested rigorously to be 90% to 95% effective at either protecting the vaccinated from getting the virus at all, or rendering its seriousness and lethality minimal. And yet, the response to attempts to mandate mask-wearing in enclosed places like school classrooms has been absolutely mind-boggling. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is probably the type case. In a NY Times Magazine article on Aug. 10, Gov. DeSantis’ rulings on mask wearing were summarized—to wit, that any school administrator or even school board that orders mask-wearing in his/their school, stands in violation of the Gov’s Executive Order of July 30, 2021 banning any such rules, and can and will have his/her salary withheld. While there are multiple lawsuits challenging the Gov’s order, he remained defiant, saying, “We can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state…And I can tell you, Florida, we’re a free state.” A ‘biomedical security state,’ and worse, one that seeks to save lives? Hilarious. His Executive Order is equally hilarious (and dangerous, especially in view of the fact that Florida is experiencing a surge in Covid cases, particularly from the lethally-transmissible Delta variant), insisting that masks have not been proven effective, and that they can cause serious breathing problems in children, not to mention “violating Floridians’ constitutional freedoms,” and “parents right under Florida law to make health care decisions of their minor children.” The stupidity and arrogance of this order is breathtaking, particularly in view of the Delta surge causing, in Florida, upwards of 20,000 cases a day and record numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, including among children. In short, this is hilarious but definitely not funny, constituting as it does a death sentence for many.
Now let’s look at that champion of morons, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (whom I call Mrs. Pruneface, of Dick Tracy fame). On July 19, she tweeted this:
“The controversial #COVID19 vaccines should not be forced on our military for a virus that is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65. With 6,000 vax related deaths and many concerning side effects reported, the vax should be a choice not a mandate for everyone.”
Controversial vaccines? A virus that is not dangerous? 6,000 vax-related deaths? Where do these people come from? Twitter apparently wondered the same thing, and promptly banned Greene from its platform for 12 hours for “misleading statements.” Not long afterwards, in an August interview on the right-wing “Real America’s Voice,” as reported in Rolling Stone on August 13, Greene went full-on wackadoo. She predicted that “Once the vaccines are approved by the FDA, we’re going to see the mandates for vaccines ramp up far more than they are right now,” and, “I fear they’ll become law in some cities and some states. Biden would love to make it the law of the land.” Not content with this paranoid idiocy, she went on to claim that if hospital waiting rooms were full, it was not because of Covid but also because the waiting rooms are full of all kinds of other things like “car accidents” and “cancer,” as if somehow the government had an interest in hyping up fear of this harmless virus (over 600,00 deaths in the U.S. alone). And anyway, she ended, “we all have to die sometime.” Ah such wisdom.
One could go on citing Greene’s moron-isms—In May, she claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to maintain the mask mandate on the House floor was “exactly the type of abuse” that Nazis inflicted on Jews; exactly, saith the prophet. And she later compared the President’s campaign to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated to “brownshirts.” Our Mrs. Pruneface seems to have a liking for Hitlerian imagery. Her attack on Nancy Pelosi started much earlier, as well, when she ‘liked’ a Facebook post that suggested taking out Pelosi with a “bullet to her head.” And finally (the mind wearies of this madness), in arguing against what she called “the Anti-Police bill” she tweeted in January that “The FBI won’t be able to tweet pics like this or of teenagers they are pursuing, who walked through the Capitol on 1/6.” Oh, so that’s all it was: the January 6 invasion was really just a bunch of teenagers walking through the Capitol. On a school tour, no doubt.
Does anyone actually take such ridiculous statements seriously? Are there real people who actually vote for such a moron? Apparently, in Georgia, there are. Again, the mind reels.
I will end this tour with that great Representative from Colorado, Lauren Boebert, she of the gun-lovers lobby (who has tried several times to enter Congress with her pistol; pistol-packin’ mama indeed.) In that regard, Newsweek on August 15 reported that Boebert, on Twitter, had written—just hours before a shooting in Orange County, CA that resulted in four people dead, including a child—that Gun control was ‘anti-woman.’ She wrote, among other things: “The only way I'm safe to walk around any dangerous liberal city is with an equalizer. Gun control is anti-woman.” Oh, those gun-toting, woman-hating liberals! And Boebert, who mouths off every chance she gets, started supporting gun-toters even before she formally entered Congress this year. The Congresswoman-elect actually led a tour of the Congress Building (she said it was to show her family where she worked), which some believe was a reconnaissance tour in preparation for the Jan. 6 invasion. The tour actually happened (as videotape proves) on December 12, 2020, in conjunction with a “Stop the Steal” rally in DC which Boebert attended. She is also seen with her mother in another video taken the morning of Jan. 6, beforethe invasion. According to Zachary Petrizzo of salon.com, January 6 organizer Ali Alexander can be “seen directly behind Boebert in the clip.” Moreover, at about 8:30 a.m. on that fateful day, Boebert went on Twitter to announce: “Today is 1776.” Did she actually think, and does she still think, that the January 6 invasion was some sort of Independence Day? i.e. the day to re-impose on America, by force of the arms she so loves, its rightful president, Donald Trump? And I keep having to ask: where do these people come from? And who in their right mind votes for them?
The un-funny fact is that these sample cases (which by no means exhausts a very large list) indicate something very serious going on, something as serious as death. Which brings me to just one more example. CNN reported on August 13, that the very week before school opens, three educators “have died within about 24 hours of each other from Covid-19 complications.” Not surprisingly, all three were unvaccinated. All three were teachers in elementary schools, where large numbers of parents and teachers are still unvaccinated. This in a district where the school board, trying to prevent exactly this (to no avail it seems), had voted to maintain its mask mandate, approved last month. School board chair Rosalind Osgood said, about the Board’s reasons for defying Gov. DeSantis’ executive order banning such mandates, that “the eight of us on our board are adamant that we cannot have people in school without masks, because we are living a backlash of people dying of Covid.” She added, “We strongly feel that the lives of our students and staff are invaluable, and we’re not willing to play Russian roulette with their lives.”
That a governor could see this stance as violating some bizarre concept of freedom is laughable, on one level, but ultimately deadly serious. Because this is actually about elected officials in this nation playing “Russian roulette” with the lives of children. As Greta Thunberg is fond of asking, “How dare they?”
Lawrence DiStasi
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