Deplorables of the Year, Part II
The worst of the year's worst.
Happy Friday.
Yesterday, we gave you the undercard of awfulness. Today we give you the Pantheon of Deplorables. (Quick reminder that the list doesn’t include Lifetime Deplorables like DJT and MTG, who would otherwise dominate.)
Like Dante’s Inferno, we work our way down to the worst of the worst.
George Santos
And, finally, expelled.
**
Stephen Miller
Trump’s dark homunculus has a lifetime status as a deplorable, but he makes the year-end list because: “Top Trump Adviser Pushed for Drone Strikes on Migrants, New Book Claims.”
Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s top immigration advisers, advocated using U.S. predator drones in 2018 to blow up migrant boats full of unarmed civilians, according to an upcoming book by a former administration official.
In a passage reviewed by Rolling Stone, former Trump Department of Homeland Security appointee Miles Taylor writes about an April 2018 conversation in which Miller allegedly advocated an attack on a migrant ship headed for the United States. Miller, Taylor writes, argued for the potential mass killing of civilians by suggesting they were not protected under the U.S. Constitution because they were in international waters.
**
RFK, Jr.
Mona Charen wrote in the Bulwark:
RFK Jr., like Trump, has swum for decades in the cesspool of conspiracies, lies, baseless accusations, and ginned-up outrage. We hardly pause to note it, because Trump has committed so many other outrages, but he cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives thanks to minimizing the seriousness of COVID.
RFK Jr. too belongs in the select company of major figures who have used their power for harm. Perhaps he isn’t quite right in the head. Who knows? But the fact that he appeals to significant numbers of Americans, and particularly to those who have always been on the other side of the aisle, suggests that he is far from alone in that.
**
Rudy
Things went from bad to worse for the former NYC mayor. He faces criminal charges in Georgia, a messy sex abuse lawsuit from a former aide, disbarment proceedings, and “Rudy Giuliani Is Found Liable for Defaming Georgia Poll Workers.”
How bad it is? On Thursday, his lawyer compared Rudy to flat-earthers who will never stop believing election lies.
“Amazing and pathetic.”
**
My Kevin
Has anyone ever sold their manhood so cheaply? And for what?
**
The Pro-Hamas Left
Noah Smith’s post “Western leftists have lost the plot,” included this image from a rally by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in support of the Palestinian cause.
[Many] of the American leftists holding pro-Palestinian rallies gleefully celebrated the targeting of civilians as an act of liberation, even joking about the murders. For example, you can watch a video where one of the speakers at the NYC rally says:
And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.
The audience cheers his description of the atrocities, whooping with delight. Meanwhile, posters for other rallies were decorated with heroic images of the paragliders that the Hamas attackers used to attack the festival. Some chapters explicitly praised the attacks.
**
Steve Bannon
It is worth remembering that at bottom, the fiery, sloppy, self-proclaimed Leninist is just a cheap grifter. “Steve Bannon’s trial in ‘We Build the Wall’ scheme set for May 2024.”
NEW YORK — Steve Bannon, the conservative strategist and longtime ally of Donald Trump, will stand trial next May on charges that he duped donors who gave money to build a wall along the U.S. southern border, a judge said Thursday.
Bannon’s trial in the “We Build the Wall” case will start May 27, 2024, right after the former president is scheduled to stand trial in the same Manhattan courtroom in an unrelated criminal case.
**
Mike Johnson
The new speaker got his gavel largely because he has a coup on his resume. But it turns out that he is also an author of some note. “Speaker Johnson wrote foreword for book filled with conspiracy theories and homophobic insults” | CNN Politics
Written by Scott McKay, a local Louisiana politics blogger, the book, “The Revivalist Manifesto,” gives credence to unfounded conspiracy theories often embraced by the far-right – including the “Pizzagate” hoax, which falsely claimed top Democratic officials were involved in a pedophile ring, among other conspiracies.
The book also propagates baseless and inaccurate claims, implying that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was subjected to blackmail and connected to the disgraced underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Honorable mention: The GOP Majority. Dana Milbank sums it up:
The year began with chaos and incompetence. It ended with chaos and incompetence. In between were self-created crises and shocking moments of fratricide — interspersed with more chaos and incompetence.
**
Vivek
His moment of post-debate hotness long gone, Vivek went from pratfall, to blunder, to humiliation, to epic assholery.
Via the WSJ: “Vivek Ramaswamy Dives Into Swamp Land.” Asked whether the 9/11 attack was an “inside job or exactly how the government tells us?” Ramaswamy said:
“I don’t believe the government has told us the truth. Again, I’m driven by evidence and data. What I’ve seen in the last several years is we have to be skeptical of what the government does tell us. I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary, but do I believe everything the government told us about it? Absolutely not. Do I believe the 9/11 commission? Absolutely not.”
That was too much even for the Wall Street Journal editorial board:
Oh, man. What “evidence and data” is he talking about? An Alex Jones broadcast?..
More such flights into political exotica will encourage many voters to conclude that Mr. Ramaswamy isn’t ready for his close up, much less the demands of the Presidency.
Chris Christie spoke for All Americans when he told Ramaswamy:
“You debate. You go out on the stump and you say something, all of us see it on video. We confront you on the debate stage,” he said. “You say you didn't say it, and then you back away and I want to say I'm not done yet.”
“This is the fourth debate. The fourth debate that you would be voted in the first 20 minutes as the most obnoxious blowhard in America.”
**
Oversight Chair James Comer
Comer has been promising and promising yuuuuge bombshells about the Biden Crime family, but the guy was all hat, no cattle.
Via Politico: “Comer releases Biden family probe update without showing link to president.” How bad was it? Comer even got dragged by… Fox News: “'You don't actually have any facts': Fox News host stomps on James Comer's Biden investigation.”
None of that stopped the House from voting to open a formal inquiry this week.
**
Lindsey Graham
Comments Will Saletan: “Any conviction in DC against Donald Trump is not legitimate." It's the next logical step:
1) Delegitimize any election Trump loses
2) Delegitimize any law enforcement agency that investigates him
3) Delegitimize any jury verdict against him.
Destroy any institution in his way.
**
Greg Abbott
More mass shootings, as the death toll mounted in Texas: Allen (8); Uvalde (21); El Paso (23); Sutherland Springs (26); Santa Fe (10); Midland (7); Dallas (5).
This guy:
**
The Worst of the Worst
Matt Gaetz
He’s the most hated man in the House for a reason. But, as I wrote in October:
“If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention,” — Matt Gaetz to Steve Bannon Wednesday morning.
And of course, he was right.
Matt Gaetz may be loathed and detested by his colleagues, but in the end, it was Gaetz and his fellow members of the Crazed Slavering Jackal Caucus who feasted on the carcass of the GOP normies.
Gaetz and his confederates blew up the House, destroyed Kevin McCarthy, torpedoed Steve Scalise, and watched Trump shiv Tom Emmer. They bullied. harassed, and exhausted the majority, and on Wednesday they got a full-throated election denier and coup-plotter as speaker.
**
J.D. Vance
Ohio’s new senator started badly. Ended worse.
**
Ken Paxton
How odious is the Texas AG? We simply don’t have the space to list all of the charges against him, but David French takes a crack at it here: “The Contagious Corruption of Ken Paxton.”
Paxton faces impeachment in large part because seven of his top deputies blew the whistle on him in 2020, claiming that he had engaged in bribery and abuse of office. The charges against Paxton, to which he pleads not guilty, center primarily on his relationship with an investor named Nate Paul. Paxton is accused of providing favors to Paul, including using the power of his office in an attempt to stop foreclosure sales of Paul’s properties, ordering employees not to assist law enforcement investigating Paul and even providing Paul with “highly sensitive information” about an F.B.I. raid on his home…
But that’s hardly the complete list of Paxton’s misdeeds. He’s still facing criminal charges — which I’ve long considered questionable — stemming from a 2015 state indictment for securities fraud, and his treatment of the whistle-blowers is also under public scrutiny. Soon after coming forward, every whistle-blower either resigned, was fired or was placed on leave. When they sued for retaliation and improper firing, Paxton attempted to use $3.3 million in taxpayer funds to settle the lawsuit.
And all of that was before his handling of the latest abortion case in Texas.
**
Fox, Tucker, and Rupert (Oh my)
A $789 million settlement for a torrent of election lies was just the cherry on the cake of Fox’s deplorable year. From COVID disinformation, to the great replacement theory, to pro-Putin propaganda, Fox was a vector of awfulness.
And Tucker?
“Since leaving Fox, Tucker retreated to the woods like some sort of red-pilled transcendentalist and began giving dispatches from a haunted cabin attempting to outflank Alex Jones with content like this," wrote Berny Belvedere.
**
Tommy Tuberville
The Senate’s dumbest member took the pole position in this year’s competition, when he weighed in on the jury verdict that found Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
“It makes me want to vote for him twice,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told HuffPost when asked about the verdict. “They’re going to do anything they can to keep him from winning. It ain’t gonna work ... people are gonna see through the lies; a New York jury, he had no chance.”
He boosted his ranking by rushing to the defense of white nationalists in the military. In an interview published with Birmingham-based radio station WBHM, Tuberville criticized the state of the military and said Democrats were to blame.
Asked whether he believed white nationalists should be allowed in the military, Tuberville said: “They call them that. I call them Americans.”1
But … secured his position with his attack on… poetry.
America’s dumbest senator (and we acknowledge the stiff competition) took to the airwaves to justify his hold on promotions in the military by singling out the dangers of “wokeism” in the Armed Forces.
His evidence? There are “people doing poems on aircraft carriers”.
Poems.
Because nothing makes us more vulnerable to the Chinese and Russians than an outbreak of literature in the ranks. More reading can follow and who knows where that could lead? Tuberville shudders at the thought.
We hesitate to venture too deeply into the vast empty spaces of the senator’s mind but, apparently, he seized on the menace of poetry as a short-hand for pointy-headed elitism, or effeminacy, or something. ‘There is no second place in war,” he explained and, I suspect would argue that we can’t defeat the Chinese Navy with the works of Maya Angelou. Or at least that’s what he would argue if he had ever heard of Angelou or, for that matter, had ever read a book.
But he seems certain that there is absolutely no place for poetry in war.
Except of course for the Mahabharata. The Iliad. The Odyssey. The Aeneid.
It also seems safe to assume that he has never heard of Henry V’s speech:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Or In Flander’s Fields.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Or Wilford Owen, or Rupert Brooke, or Philip Larkin. Or General George Patton.
**
The Deplorable of the Year
Of course, it should be the former president, who reminded us that he is, by far, the most fascist-y and deplorable figure in American politics. But since he’s not eligible for the annual competition, the winner is:
Elon Musk
Where do we start? The erratic narcissism that has destroyed Xitter? The vertiginous descent into conspiracism? How about this? “Elon Musk: The Bigot in Full.”
In mid-November, a Xitter user posted:
Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.
You want truth said to your face, there it is.
Musk’s response, sent to his alleged 63 million “followers”:
This does not require 20,000 words of tortured exegesis. It’s not a critique of Israeli government policy; it shares no deep thoughts about a two-state solution; it is raw, undiluted antisemitism.
Musk sealed his position atop our annual list with this:
“Nothing to see here,” noted David Primack, “just the owner of this site and a presidential candidate chatting it up with a man indicted for rape/human trafficking and another who lied about dead kids to harass their grieving parents.”
Happy New Year.
On the "law and order" count, I've got:
Steve Bannon: "out on appeal" apparently permanently. thanks Maginot line courts!
Ken Paxton: officially above the law thanks to Texas
Steve Miller: above international human rights laws, hey those are probably just guidelines
George Santos: at this point, I almost want him to run for the Senate. He's not less honest than Matt Gaetz or Mike Johnson or JD Vance, and he's slightly less harmful. I think he has a shot. He just needs to move to a state with more leeway for these things than New York. Maybe that state where Brett Farve builds custom volleyball courts with money for the poor.
You want my strongest argument for the absolute societal necessity for raising marginal tax rates on billionaires? What's remarkable about it is that it requires but a mere two words. And those two words are Elon. Musk.