All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[InformationGeek]

Errol Webber

Welcome to what is the 999th profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling Errol Webber, a rare African-American immigrant Republican (from Jamaica) who was a 2020 candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in California’s 37th Congressional District, hoping to knock off much-beloved Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass.

In June of 2020, Webber posted twice in two days on Twitter, first baselessly accusing Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (who was not his opponent) of committing “immigration fraud” without any proof, or explanation of what he was talking about. He then went on to complain about CNN hosting Sesame Street characters in interviews to help children understand the dangers of Covid-19, saying they were “brainwashing our kids ”.

Well, of course, with Rep. Karen Bass being well-liked and all, and her district being pretty liberal, she won re-election easily and Errol Webber only got 14% of the vote. Much like his political idol, Donald Trump, he refused to concede after getting obliterated at the polls, claiming that “Every LEGAL vote needs to be counted!”

Anyway, he was very briefly a candidate for Governor of California in 2022 before withdrawing, and is still active on social media, trolling sane people by posting things like how Donald Trump deserves credit for Juneteenth becoming a holiday because he hosted a tone-deaf rally in Tulsa on the holiday, or conspiracy theories about Joe Biden being debilitated from dementia, or that the entire Covid-19 pandemic is a “fraud”.

Webber has the look of being on of those “perennial candidates” that people should back away from slowly. Or, full on run away from.

999th Profile... one more to go.

I assume we got somebody big for 1000th, right? This is a special number and deserves a special kind of crazy, corrupt, horrible, ya know?

[worstblogever]

999th Profile... one more to go.

I assume we got somebody big for 1000th, right? This is a special number and deserves a special kind of crazy, corrupt, horrible, ya know?

Self-righteous sociopathy, I reckon.

[Kirby101]

Self-righteous sociopathy, I reckon.

That describes most of the Republicans in the House and Senate.

[Tami]

That describes most of the Republicans in the House and Senate.

I wouldn't describe them as 'Self-righteous', atr least not all of them. Those that aren't are more 'Self-serving' and 'Self-centered' and just plain selfish.

[Kirby101]

I wouldn't describe them as 'Self-righteous', atr least not all of them. Those that aren't are more 'Self-serving' and 'Self-centered' and just plain selfish.

Not all, but Graham, Cruz, Paul, Hawley, Cotton....

[worstblogever]

Not all, but Graham, Cruz, Paul, Hawley, Cotton....

Already profiled everyone on that list except Hawley... he's been new to the mix, and I was oddly holding off because I was hoping he'd get the boot for being a seditious little s*** a couple months ago...

I... I think the GQP will fight tooth and nail to keep him in place until he's up for re-election, if not rabidly try and keep the traitorous f***weasel in place to "own the libs".

[The Cool Thatguy]

Self-righteous sociopathy, I reckon.

That's like saying 'super hero with dead parent'.

Doesn't narrow it down AT ALL.

[InformationGeek]

And now he's running for Texas Governor. This ought to be stupid.

Allen West, who recently stepped down as the chair of the Texas Republican Party, announced Sunday he is running for governor of the state https://t.co/VtmRaldqgo

[Jack Dracula]

I wouldn't describe them as 'Self-righteous', atr least not all of them. Those that aren't are more 'Self-serving' and 'Self-centered' and just plain selfish.

Combined with a notable lack of empathy for other people and you have a recipe for psychopathy.

[worstblogever]

And now he's running for Texas Governor. This ought to be stupid.

Allen West is... running against Greg Abbott?

[Tami]

US Park Police in DC: 38 y/o New Jersey man arrested after he allegedly drove his vehicle towards a crowd of pedestrians walking on the sidewalk near the Washington Monument Saturday. Assault with a dangerous weapon charge. Thankfully no pedestrians were injured

Twitter Link

[Tami]

'We are in a race’: GOP governors implore residents to overcome vaccine hesitancy as delta variant rises

GOP governors implored their residents on Sunday to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, as polling shows that vaccine hesitancy has been driven by Republicans and as the virus’s new, more contagious delta variant has caused recent upticks in covid-19 cases in areas with low vaccination rates.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Sunday expressed concern about possible “trouble” ahead for Arkansans if the state did not accelerate its vaccination rate. In Arkansas, about 53 percent of adults have at least one dose of the vaccine, compared with about two-thirds of adults nationally. The state has seen a recent spike in covid cases and hospitalizations, driven mostly by the delta variant.

“The solution is the vaccinations,” Hutchinson said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that while many of the state’s senior citizens have gotten vaccinated, the delta variant was now hitting Arkansas’ younger, unvaccinated adults. “It is a great concern.”

Hutchinson avoided saying whether he would reimpose mask mandates if the state’s numbers did not improve and also stopped short of saying Arkansas was about to experience a third wave of covid cases and deaths.

However, he did emphasize that the state would continue to make vaccines accessible — including, for example, offering free shots at the state’s July Fourth “Pops on the River” celebration on Sunday.

“We are in a race,” Hutchinson said. “And if we stopped right here, and we didn’t get greater percent of our population vaccinated, then we’re going to have trouble in the next school year and over the winter. So, we want to get ahead of that curve. Working very hard to do that.”

They created this mess and now they don't know how to deal with it.

[worstblogever]

1,000TH CSGOPOTD Profile incoming!

In both 2015, as well as 2016, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Brian Kurcaba, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates who weeks into his first term in office, made headlines for arguing against exceptions for rape and incest on a proposed 20-week abortion ban in a less than brilliant way when he said, "For somebody to take advantage of somebody else in such a horrible and terrifying and brutal way is absolutely disgusting. But what is beautiful is the child that could come as a production of this." Well, finding anything about that situation as “beautiful” caused a stir, and Kurcaba forced reporters to reset the calendars of “number of days since Republicans talked about rape” to zero. That incident was a sign Kurcaba was an anti-abortion fanatic, and he further demonstrated it by voting for West Virginia's SB 10, to prevent "dismemberment" abortions. He also had supported removing the requirement for both licensing people to use concealed carry of firearms so that everyone could just do so, and his support of repealing the public school requirement that children be vaccinated before being put into classes (y’know, so they don’t all get each other sick and die of things like whooping cough). So he’s a pro-life guy who doesn’t care if there’s an increased risk of children getting shot or dying of a preventable disease, because that makes sense. Kurcaba opted to not try for a second term in office, probably because of his more… uncomfortable thoughts about rape.

In both 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Cindy Frich, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates for District 51 who served in office originally from 2003-2007, and then after a three-year hiatus from the state legislature, failed in a bid for a West Virginia State Senate seat in 2010, then returned to office in 2012. Frich became noteworthy not long after an entire community’s drinking water became contaminated in her district, and after years of opposing the sorts of regulations that would have prevented the tragedy… once the community were all hopping made about it, Frich suddenly supposedly reversed course and became more open to the idea of regulations on the chemical industry, which made Jordan Klepper of the Daily Show notice her and head out to interview her. Which… Klepper’s job was way too easy. Frich related how she drank water that made her “feel lightheaded” and “burned her throat”, but she continued to repeatedly ingest the water from the tap in spite of every taste being clearly abnormal. And she didn’t just tell a story that made her look that dumb… she actually starred in her own re-enactment where she wore a mask and tutu that also featured her stubborn sips, glass after glass after glass, before she opted to get a drink of not bottled water… but soup. Klepper asked her, in response, ”As a child, did you ever put your hand in fire, realize it hurt, and then think to myself, I’m going to do this two more times and then put my hand in soup fire?” Of course, Klepper also ended the interview by pointing out that while Frich was supporting a bill to limit the one chemical contaminant from the water in this instance... she was still voting to loosen restrictions on keeping selenium levels in the water down. At that point, Frich, in her infinite wisdom, finally caught on and realized that she was going to look like an idiot on TV… too late. As much as we’d like to just let her Daily Show appearance and her failed attempts to claim she was selectively edited to look like a boob (seriously, you put on masks and danced around pretending to be addled in the brain by chemicals in the drinking water, Cindy), her voting record is hardly indicative of a fully functioning brain, from a policy standpoint. She’s voted against raising the minimum wage during the greatest period of income inequality our nation has seen in almost a century, voted to try and repeal to the hourly wage laws for workers on public improvement projects, voted for West Virginia Republicans’ attempt to pass a “religious freedom” bill, and voted for the West Virginia GOP’s attempt to place a ban on “dismemberment” abortions, as if that’s a thing. As much as West Virginia is supposedly “Trump Country” these days, where Republicans are considered relatively unstoppable at the polls… Cindy Frich was sent packing in 2018 after her whole district got flipped.

On this date in 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Derrick Grayson, who has been an unsuccessful candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia in 2014, 2016, and 2020. We should also mention that he refers to himself as the “Minister of Truth”, and was nearly the Libertarian Party’s 2016 Vice Presidential candidate, but ended up losing out to Bill Weld even though there were large, bearded men campaigning for him stripping on stage at the Libertarian Party’s convention. That last sentence probably caused our readers to go, “WAIT, WTF?” and from here, everyone should be aware of what they’re in for on this entry. One of the more unique things about Grayson is that he has a background as a convicted felon, and served time in prison 25 years ago. Back during his 2014 Senate campaign, Derrick Grayson came out in support of deadbeat tax scofflaw and incompetent racist rancher Cliven Bundy, even after Bundy felt the need to tell reporters “something about the negro”, and stated his desire to try and impeach President Barack Obama. He also claimed both parties were acting like “royals” in the Georgia State Assembly, called his own party “a bunch of damn bigots” (okay, maybe that’s not so bad), styled himself as a “Ron Paul Republican” (he wants to legalize ALL drugs), and said he didn’t celebrate Black History Month because “it was created to pacify black people”. In 2016, Derrick Grayson got pretty cutthroat in his campaign strategy, actively attacking Sen. Johnny Isakson’s health as a means of fundraising. The Isakson campaign responded by pointing out Grayson’s criminal past, and just moved on without any real threat from him. His 2020 campaign saw him using Twitter to delegitimize protests against police violence by claiming they’re using racial discrimination as a front to attack Donald Trump, and argue in favor of Republican Governors not issuing “stay at home” orders during the Covid-19 pandemic and attacking Democratic governors like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his efforts, claiming that Democrats are “pro-slavery”. Needless to say, we’re not expecting Derrick Grayson to ever break the 3% threshold of the vote he frequently gets and note he is unlikely to ever reach office as a Republican or a Libertarian. We’ll set aside his profile to take a look at another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1000-50, since this was established in July 2014.

[worstblogever]

Sarah Huckabee-Sanders

Welcome to what is the 1000th profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, the political legacy that sprung from the Fundamentalist-kooky loins of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and whom is seeking the office of Governor of Arkansas in the 2022 elections. While we had more than one person contact the blog to “nominate” Trump Administration Press Secretaries from about the point Sean Spicer wanted the American people to believe the Trump Inauguration was an attendance-shattering event, normally, we don’t profile appointees, only folks who are in elected office or seeking it. With Huckabee-Sanders trying to follow in her daddy’s Fundie footsteps as the latest GOP nepotism project, we’re obligated to do a deep-dive into her now, in the hopes we can have the equivalent of an intervention with Arkansas voters before they go and guarantee themselves a world of misery during her prospective tenure.

Let’s go back a bit farther, though… Sarah Huckabee-Sanders got her start working on political campaigns, and her only real successes were in Arkansas. Her father’s 2002 gubernatorial campagin? Win. As a field director for the Bush re-election campaign in ’04? Well, that was a win. In 2010, she worked on the re-election campaign for Senator John Boozman, and with the Tea Party Wave making that an easy win in any state, let alone one as red as Arkansas. Boozman didn’t even campaign at home at the time, he let Hucakbee-Sanders do it for him and defend the move by saying he was trying to stop the ACA from getting passed in Washington (and he won re-election, easily, despite mailing it in).

Now, let’s talk presidential campaign work… in 2008, Huckabee-Sanders helped lead her father to a 34% victory in the GOP’s Iowa Caucus, proving what bulls*** it is yet again (the winner of it since this year has not won the party’s nomination). Her dad’s campaign eventually fell to John McCain’s when he dropped out in March 2008, because, well, we’ve profiled Mike Huckabee and how truly bats*** he is. In 2012, her father wasn’t running, so Huckabee-Sanders hitched her caboose onto the Tim Pawlenty campaign, and he bailed after their “all in on Iowa” strategy still only netted a third place finish in that year’s Ames Straw Poll, and he bailed, leaving her on the sidelines faster than in any year prior. How about in 2016? Was she on the Trump train? No, not at first, she was back working for her paw, and when Mike Huckabee dropped out after the Iowa Caucuses in February 2016 after getting only 1.8% of the vote.

About three weeks later and looking for a paycheck, the Trump 2016 campaign scooped her up to try and troubleshoot a problem they knew they were going to have going forward… how would a man so utterly immoral as Donald Trump ever win over Evangelical voters? Wouldn’t they rally around Ted Cruz, who flogs that horse like it owes him money? Well, using most of her father’s connections and friendships with Evangelical leaders, they twisted themselves in knots to justify why Trump was somehow not the devil incarnate, and with a little help from Vladimir Putin and social media not stopping lies in their tracks, Trump won the election and helped get Sarah Huckabee Sanders a job in the White House as Deputy Press Secretary.

Let us review a timeline of her most egregious lies and disturbing moments from a near two-year fascist propaganda spree:

• January 20th, 2017: The Trump Administration begins, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders begins it in the role of Deputy White House Secretary.
• May 5th, 2017: Deputy Press Secretary Huckabee-Sanders fills in for the first time at the White House Press Briefing for Press Secretary Sean Spicer for the first time.
• May 10th, 2017: A day after Trump fires James Comey, the Director of the FBI, under sudden and dubious circumstances. Huckabee-Sanders struggles against the press in the daily briefing, considering the historical precedent is compared to the actions of Richard Nixon that got him impeached. Desperately, she lies and claims that he had “lost the confidence from rank-and-file members of the FBI”, and that the White House "received numerous e-mails from FBI staffers thanking them” for firing Comey. The opposite, of course, is true, and internal e-mails show the organization was appalled by it. Years of Freedom of Information Act requests about internal FBI e-mails proved her a liar, and she admitted as much as she left her post.
• June 16th, 2017: Without irony, while defending Donald Trump for the Comey firing, Huckabee-Sanders says, “No, I can definitively say the president is not a liar.” Which would require the public to ignore what’s been obvious for decades of him being a pathological liar.
• June 27th, 2017: In the same White House Press Briefing, Huckabee-Sanders calls the assembled media “fake news” and then starts promoting a video created by James O’Keefe, a right-wing propagandist notorious for selectively editing videos to change the context deliberately.
• June 29th, 2017: In another White House Press Hearing, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders claims Donald Trump “has in no way, form, or fashion ever promoted violence.” This ignores, of course, the times he offered to pay for legal fees for his followers if they attack his opponents, or the various number of ways he called for attacks on them should they even dare to speak out against him at his hate rallies on the campaign trail.
• July 21st, 2017: Sarah Huckabee Sanders is officially named White House Press Secretary.
• August 1st, 2017: Huckabee-Sanders, facing questions about Donald Trump Jr.’s statements to explain his meeting with Russians in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign, and whether his father dictated his statement, says, “He certainly didn’t dictate, but he – like I said, he weighed in, offered suggestion like any father would do.” (Skip ahead to June 4th, 2018, where she is proven to have been lying.)
• October 27th, 2017: Huckabee-Sanders is asked about the, at the time, count of 16 women who had accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, and she backs the president in accusing all of them of lying.
• November 30th, 2017: After Donald Trump uses his Twitter account to promote Anti-Muslim videos from the British nationalist group “Britain First” that had obviously questionable and misleading content, and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders defends it by claiming Donald Trump was looking out for “national security” by sharing hatemongers’ Islamophobic message.
• February 13th, 2018: Huckabee-Sanders is evasive in another White House Press Briefing when asked about Rob Porter’s resignation after it is discovered he had a criminal background with domestic violence and should never have been in the White House because the crime would have disqualified him on any background check. She and her Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah release conflicting statements if Porter resigned or was terminated from his job, and she said Porter’s background check was "ongoing, and the White House had not received any specific papers regarding the completion of that background check", but later had FBI Director Christopher Wray confirm that the background check had been completed.

[worstblogever]

• March 7th, 2018: Huckabee-Sanders is placed out in front of the White House Press Corps to lie to them again, this time about the scandal where Trump has been caught paying for hush money towards buying the silence of women accusing him of cheating on his wife, and claims Trump “had no knowledge” of such a hush money scheme. As we would later learn, Trump knew, because his name is literally on the check.
• April 28th, 2018: While attending her first White House Correspondents’ Dinner, during a comedy set by Michelle Wolf, the comedian roasts Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, a tradition of the event where someone from the world of comedy is invited to make jokes at the expense of Washington’s media and politicians for those present, but wouldn’t you know it, Huckabee-Sanders cannot ever be the target of a joke and plays the victim, falsely claiming Wolf “attacked her appearance” by telling a joke about how she “burns facts to create the perfect smoky eye”, which if anything is a compliment about her appearance and a diss about her being a lie factory.
• June 4th, 2018: Sarah Huckabee-Sanders refuses to answer the media when they point out to her that she had told them months earlier that Donald Trump did not dictate to Donald Trump Jr. how to make his statement about speaking to Russians in Trump Tower during the 2020 presidential campaign. Among her terse, rambling responses were, "I’m not going to respond to a letter from the president’s outside counsel ... We’ve purposefully walled off, and I would refer you to them for comment", and, "I'm an honest person." Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night like a proper sociopath.
• June 14th, 2018: Sarah Huckabee-Sanders is in the midst of one of many press briefings where she is trying to square the Trump administration’s disastrous and cruel “family separation” policy, and she tries spinning it that it’s “biblical” to pull screaming migrant children away from their parents to be locked in cages. Because, well, she’s a self-righteous monster. As CNN’s Jim Acosta pushed back against her statement, she cut him off to insult him and say, “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences I guess.” Her argument that “it’s biblical to follow the law” is also bulls***, because family separation was NOT in any way codified into law as the punishment for traveling illegally into the United States from another country. Finally sick of her s***, Brian Karem, a reporter from Playboy magazine, ends up taking the moral high ground to yell at the Press Secretary, “Come on Sarah, you’re a parent. Don’t you have any empathy for what these people are going through?” For a second, she appears visibly shaken.
• June 22nd, 2018: Disgusted with her lies about children being locked in cages by the Trump Administration, while Sarah Huckabee-Sanders heads out to dinner in Lexington, Virginia, she is refused service by the Red Hen restaurant. She proceeds to, and stop me if this gets shocking, get on Twitter to use her profile to try and play the victim and shame The Red Hen for refusing her. Donald Trump follows suit on Twitter the next day. Former Director of U.S. Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub weighed in that Huckabee-Sanders had violated federal law.
• September 27th, 2018: From the White House Press Secretary’s podium, Huckabee-Sanders attacks the credibility of the multiple accusers coming forward to talk about being sexually assaulted or harassed by Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The lie in this instance that the other accusers who weren’t Christine Blasey Ford “refused” to speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Kavanaugh, but the truth is, the Senate did not allow them to testify.
• October 17th, 2018: Huckabee-Sanders tries lying about the family separation policy again, and claims that “75% of the kids actually self-separated”, which is some next-level gaslighting of the American people.
• January 30th, 2019: Huckabee-Sanders proclaims her belief, without irony, that God “wanted Donald Trump to be president”, which unless it’s in the context that he’s being inflicted upon someone evil like one of the plagues of Egypt, we don’t want to give any credence to.
• March 11th, 2019: Asked to square comments from Donald Trump that “Democrats hate Jewish people” (which, no, they don’t, and last time we checked, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at the time would be a big piece of evidence against that fact), Sarah Huckabee Sanders is harangued at a press briefing about his past comments on Charlottesville and his failure to condemn white nationalists, so she finds a new level of dead inside to say, “The president has been incredibly clear and consistently and repeatedly condemned hatred, bigotry, racism in all of its forms, whether it's in America or anywhere else, and to say otherwise is simply untrue."
• April 19th, 2019: E-mails are released to the public regarding the firing of former FBI Director James Comey that prove Sarah Huckabee-Sanders lied to the American people regarding the incident.
• June 13th, 2019: After a 23 months of gaslighting the American people, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders resigns as White House Press Secretary. She was being paid a taxpayer salary for her last 94 days on the job where she refused to hold even a single press conference. She only held four press briefings within her final 200 days on the job, and eight in the last 300.
• August 22nd, 2019: Where else can a seasoned liar with a victim complex like Huckabee-Sanders get a career opportunity, but taking a job at Fox News. Where her daddy used to work.

And so we summarize all of the above by pointing out how hypocritically cruel Sarah Huckabee-Sanders is. She can straight-up lie to the American people about the Mueller Investigation, lie about James Comey’s firing, lie about Stormy Daniel’s payoff, and lie about Brett Kavanaugh, but when Michelle Wolf jokes about her trying to make lying somehow glamorous, she bleats about being the victim and tries to get a rising star’s career killed. She can be a part of an administration that’s tearing children away from their families, preventing them from having proper legal representation, shoving them in cages and to live in cramped, diseased conditions… but if someone denies her a chicken sandwich, she wants their business shuttered. She insists she’s honest, and wanted to put her best foot forward as Press Secretary when she spent her entire tenure berating any reporter who wasn’t from Fox, OANN, or Newsmax for daring to ask her a question… and then would run to her “safe space” on Fox News rather than even face journalists who might actually ask her a question she didn’t like.

She has already demonstrated a pathological will to lie, a willingness to defend the worst people and policies that are unnecessarily cruel and inhumane, even twisting her own religion to use as a cudgel and hit others with. A religion whose own martyr was a refugee, and she’ll dig in to demonize and explain away why it’s great to lock up a child until the guy from PLAYBOY MAGAZINE WAS THE TRUE MORAL COMPASS IN THE ROOM.

Should she be elected Governor of Arkansas, expect her to grant the Walton family all the tax breaks, to cut every part of the state social security net to help the poor while raising their taxes instead, and then deciding that somehow the Bible says “hunger is a great incentive to work”. Expect her to sign all the anti-transgender and anti-gay bills the legislature sends to her, if she isn’t bold enough to write an executive order to do it. Expect her to go full Aunt Lydia from Handmaid’s Tale and try to overturn Roe v. Wade to win the approval of her father she’ll never probably truly have, because he’s too enamored with his sons even if they murder dogs.

We’re crossing our fingers and hoping that maybe the voters of Arkansas pick up on the fact that the Huckabee family has been conning them for almost a quarter century now, and that it might be a good idea to not let them keep doing it for another four to eight years.