The Curse of Idiocy in America

It was a banner week in stupid in these (very tenuously) united states, even by our current depressingly low standards.

There was the mass-murder-and-manhunt in Maine, in which a psychopathic National Guard reservist killed eighteen people at a bowling alley, injured 23 more, and then was found dead two days later. Gun sales in the state immediately soared.

It wasn’t as if his actions were exactly surprising, given that he had been confined to a psychiatric hospital for observation a few weeks before— for threatening to kill fellow soldiers training with him at West Point.

But apparently the shrinks concluded he was okay and released him. There followed a series of fiascos — that likely no on will ever face responsibility for, which resulted in the brutal massacre of some unsuspecting folks just trying to live like it was a normal country, instead of a sanctuary for violent, deadly-weapon fetishists and their fanboys in Congress. And of course, there was never any serious effort to take away the gun the man already owned, or to prevent him from purchasing more. It wasn’t even the first time his family had tried to warn authorities about his instability.

“A bulletin sent to police across the country shortly after the attack said Card had been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks this past summer after ‘hearing voices and threats to shoot up’ a military base.”

This was a guy with voices in his head crying out for help in four-part harmony, broadcasting his intent to kill on all frequencies — and the system failed him. Big time, as it usually does, because it is purpose-built to be weak and toothless. As a country, we are far more invested in protecting all the extra special rights that gun owners — and nobody else — enjoy, than in saving the lives of innocent citizens.

Because pure, unadulterated idiocy abounds in America… look around you, it’s everywhere.

And in politics — of course — there was a new Speaker of the US House of Representatives elected by the Republican Party, these days reduced to a fifth-rate fascist/racist criminal organization supported by millions of deranged, dimwitted cultists who worship a rapist lizard god-king, created in their own slavering image.

The new Speaker, Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson, praises “18th-century values” and told the audience of a conservative event that Americans should live by them when it came to morality and religion. Values, one supposes, like executing women as witches. Just like Supreme Court Justice Alito, self-imposed guardian of public morality, who fancies himself in the mold of Puritan jurist Matthew Hale.

As an attorney for the Dobson-linked conservative Christian advocacy group the Alliance Defense Fund (known today as Alliance Defending Freedom) through the early 2000s, Johnson was an especially zealous advocate on the issues of changing sexual attitudes that dominated the religious right’s first generation.

Johnson not only opposed same-sex marriage, but also supported the criminalizing of gay and lesbian sexual relationships, writing at one point that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse,” as CNN’s KFile recently reported. Even by the standards of that era, Johnson was especially vitriolic in his denunciations, calling same-sex relations “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle,” and describing gay people as “a deviant group,” as KFile found.

In the aftermath of the Maine massacre, Johnson blamed mass shootings on 20th-century American reforms. Listing “no fault divorce laws”, “the sexual revolution”, “radical feminism” and “government-sanctioned killing of the unborn”, he said that liberals had created “a completely amoral society” in which young Americans were “taught there is no right and wrong”.

Because, you know, guns don’t kill, sex does.

Johnson’s predictions of American decline have been widely noted in rightwing bizarro world. He has called same-sex marriage a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic”. His crusade to stamp out LGBTQ+ and abortion rights is a point of particular pride.

As one example of his profound unsuitability, he brags that he doesn’t believe that human beings cause the climate crisis, though his home state has been ravaged by it.

Perhaps most notable is Johnson’s leading role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Which means, btw, that the official second in line to the presidency “violated his oath to the constitution and tried to disenfranchise four states,” as the writer Marcy Wheeler put it.

Johnson certainly has his Trumpian bona fides in order: he was the leader of the legal effort to reverse the results of the election in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and he hawked — and continues to do so — Trump’s lies that the election had been rigged.

But whatever his shortcomings, we know that Johnson does excels at one thing: kissing the butt of Donald Trump, who, like ‘the apple of his eye’ Vlad Putin, loves nothing more than a slavish sock puppet.

And then there is Donald Trump himself, because you really can’t talk about idiocy without mentioning the most flagrant practitioner of the art in the known universe. What is even more astonishing than the depths of his idiocy, is the speed and degree with which he is deteriorating to lower levels than have been previously imagined.

Trump’s simian antics and incoherent blithering have been on full display in several drama-queen outbursts recently in the courtrooms of his various legal travails, and posts to his white supremacist-cuddling social media site.

Political scientist Brian Klaas has coined his outbursts as "the banality of crazy," arguing that the press has wrongfully elevated concerns about President Biden's age and frequent gaffes while downplaying Trump's extremism.

Much of the public may not be aware of Trump's darkening rhetoric, Klaas writes, but "the people most likely to be radicalized by him or to act on his incitement already hear him, loud and clear."

Just in the last couple of weeks, he has:

• Said former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley committed "treason" and suggested he be executed.

• Called for Judge Engoron to be disbarred, thrown out of office and criminally prosecuted, in addition to attacking the judge's clerk.

• Labeled New York Attorney General Letitia James — who's suing Trump for fraudulently inflating his wealth and assets on financial records — a "racist" and "a monster."

• Said special counsel Jack Smith — who's prosecuting Trump in the Jan. 6 and classified documents cases — is "deranged" and a "psycho" who "looks like a crackhead."

• Posted online, "IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU!" — one day after swearing in federal court that he would not intimidate witnesses in the election interference case.

• Mocked Paul Pelosi after he was brutally assaulted by a home intruder who was searching for Pelosi's wife, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)

• Called for police to shoot shoplifters on sight.

• Said migrants illegally crossing into the U.S. are "poisoning the blood of our country."

Of course, the vile eliminationist rhetoric he routinely spews is always sprinkled with bizarre random synapse misfires and drooling gibberish: Trump on the southern border: "We have a lot of young strong men coming in from China"

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. --Voltaire

Liz Cheney has described some House Republican Trump loyalists as not only glad to break the government but “frankly, some of whom are white supremacists, some of whom are Anti-Semitic.” 

“I think Donald Trump is the single most dangerous threat we face,” Cheney concluded.

I’m a lifelong Democrat — since the Vietnam War, in fact, and frankly I never thought I’d be in full agreement with anyone named Cheney. But folks, on this she is 100% correct.

Trump is enabling and empowering the looniest loose screws in America — and the entire Republican party/rightwing propaganda apparatus is helping him get away with it.