Welcome to the first annual Right Wing Nut Job Awards. The Righties, as we call these prestigious honors, recognize the extremists whose performances lately dramatize just how far the starboard side of our politics is listing these days.
Without further ado, let’s open up those envelopes and start passing out those little gold statuettes of a squirrel holding a walnut. We’ll begin in our own backyard, with …
• Best New “Handmaid’s Tale” Villain: Missouri state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman.
The Arnold Republican isn’t content with merely preventing women in Missouri from controlling their own bodies. She’s pushing legislation to make sure the heavy hand of the state follows Missouri women even when they leave Missouri to exercise abortion rights in other states.
Coleman’s legislation would empower any Missourian to sue anyone, anywhere, who aids in what Missouri considers an illegal abortion for any Missouri resident — even if those providing the aid reside in a different state, with different laws regarding abortion rights. So hotline workers and doctors at abortion clinics in neighboring Illinois, for example, could theoretically come under the thumb of this proposed Missouri law.
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You can’t get away, women of Missouri! Mary Elizabeth Coleman will pursue you to the ends of the Earth to make sure that, because you happen to be a Missouri resident, you will never have any say over your own body, no matter where you go. Bwah-hah-hah-hah!
• Father-of-the-Year Award: Michigan House candidate Robert Regan.
The Republican frontrunner to represent Michigan’s 74th House District was apparently trying to spin some kind of analogy in support of Donald Trump’s lies regarding the 2020 election when he said this:
“I tell my daughters, ‘Well, if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.’ ”
And how has Regan’s “Father Knows Best” advice been received at home? One of Regan’s daughters has implored her Twitter followers: “If you’re in Michigan and 18+ pls for the love of god do not vote for my dad for state rep.”
• Best Crystal Ball: “The Five” on Fox News
The panel of right-wing pundits last month hit upon an interesting theory as the Biden administration was frantically warning the world that Russia was about to invade Ukraine: The threat was being exaggerated by the White House to distract people from (wait for it!) the Durham investigation.
If you don’t know what that is, think of it as the next installment of But her emails! — the latest mountain-from-a-molehill out of right-wing conspiracy-land.
As the network’s own exasperated national security correspondent, Jennifer Griffin, tried to explain that the Russian military was in fact massed on Ukraine’s border and that this was for real, “The Five” host Greg Gutfeld blithely opined that it all “feels very, very manufactured.” Co-host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery suggested that the administration was “in deep yogurt in the Durham probe,” then declared, Nostradamus-like: “I don’t think Putin is going to invade.”
Russia invaded Ukraine six days later.
• Special Humanitarian Commendation: retired Col. Douglas Macgregor
This former Trump administration adviser and Fox News regular called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “puppet,” suggested Ukraine should concede to Russia’s demands, disparaged the international effort to sanction Russia for its invasion — and said Russian forces were “too gentle” in the first days of the attack, but that “they’ve now corrected that.”
Indeed. They’ve “corrected” it so much that there is serious talk of leveling war-crimes charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• Best Performance by a Treasonous Imbecile: Marjorie Taylor Greene
Some politicians get into trouble because they insist on embracing evil supporters. Others are just too stupid to see that the people they are embracing will hurt them politically. The congresswoman from Georgia has managed a twofer: She agreed to speak to a white nationalist group run by a known white supremacist. (Evil.) And then she went on stage even after her host asked for a round of applause for Russia, and the crowd broke into a chant of “Putin! Putin! Putin!” (Stupid. And evil.)
Obviously, GOP leadership punished her for it.
Ha! ha! Just kidding!
Which brings us to the coveted …
• RWNJ Profile-in-Courage Award: Kevin McCarthy
No one personifies the yin-and-yang of cynicism and cowardice endemic in today’s GOP quite like the House minority leader from California. In his quest to become House speaker next year, McCarthy has excised from his party any elements that might be described by the Lincolnian phrase “better angels” — Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, for example, excommunicated for the high crime of defending electoral democracy against the Trumpian campaign to undermine it — while he cravenly makes deals with devils like Greene.
There was some controversy among the judges about giving McCarthy a Rightie because, unlike the other winners, he isn’t actually nuts. Instead, like so many formerly mainstream GOP leaders today, he has simply made a calculation that catering to the crazy is the only way to survive in the Republican Party today.
But, as the judges ultimately decided, that may be the nuttiest act of all.