It was one year ago we shared our original "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profile of former Montana House of Representatives member Jerry O’Neil, a man who prior to entering politics, was being investigated for practicing law without a license, but soldiered on by outspending the entire $2000 budget of the Montana Supreme Court’s Commission on the Unauthorized Practice of Law. Eventually, though, O’Neil would (What else?) begin a political career is a Montana state legislator, where he stood out by trying to draft bills that would allow for people sentenced to prison to commute their sentences by instead agreeing to corporal punishment, such as large quantities of canings or spankings (really) and his demand that his legislative salary should be paid in gold, like the Constitution intended (there’s no mention of state legislators being paid in gold). O’Neil ended up being beaten in the 2014 elections by Democrat Zac Perry, and has apparently decided to call it a career, at least for now.
On this date in
2016, as well as
2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the current U.S. House Representative for Wisconsin’s 7th District,
Sean Duffy, a former contestant on MTV’s reality show “The Real World” (
shown here gyrating in his underwear for his housemates). Duffy was yet another beneficiary of the Tea Party Wave, storming into office to replace twenty-one term Congressman Dave Obey back in 2010, and if you ask Sean Duffy, it’s a real struggle to survive on the measly $174,000 salary he gets as a member of Congress, to which some might advise him that he should have stopped having kids sometime before his eighth. Hypocritically, while refusing a pay cut on his own six figure salary, Duffy advises other public workers should accept pay cuts. Of course, with 8 children, it comes as little surprise that Sean Duffy is also a die-hard pro-life supporter. In January of 2016, however, he caused an uproar on the floor of the U.S. House after he decided to express that anti-abortion fervor during a discussion about the BlackLivesMatter Movement by presenting inaccurate statistics to chastise the Congressional Black Caucus for not supporting black lives because they allow higher abortion rates racially than whites. That’s not only stastistically incorrect but totally racist. Congresswoman Gwen Moore perhaps responded best that, “
It’s painfully obvious that Representative Duffy’s concern for life ends as soon as the umbilical cord is cut.” But Duffy doesn’t always act like he knows it all, like the time he was asked at a town hall about his position on transvaginal ultrasounds, and he dodged the question by saying, “
Well, I haven’t had one.” Of course, either quote could have been a worse statement… like
the time Sean Duffy’s wife, and fellow “Real World” alumni Rachel Campos-Duffy compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust, as Republicans are frequently in the habit of doing.
The more bizarre thing is that
Wisconsin’s 7th District has only a +2 Republican lean according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, yet Duffy won a fourth term in office IN 2016 with 62% of the vote in spite of repeatedly changing his endorsements as candidates dropped out of the race before settling on Donald Trump, saying that the racist billionaire demagogue “fit the template of the conservative movement” with his border wall and financial background. After the election, Duffy embraced authoritarian fascism in full,
encouraging Donald Trump use his Twitter account to “push back against the media” regarding negative stories about his transition team (which considering they were all talking to Russians, it’s a good thing it didn’t work).
Within two weeks, Duffy was on CNN, where in an interview with CNN he was being asked why Donald Trump took WEEKS to condemn Neo-Nazis who began a spree of hate crime assaults, vandalism, and threats against minorities to “celebrate” Trump’s election, Duffy tried changing the topic by
claiming that the Neo-Nazis were similar to the Black Lives Matter movement. Host Jim Sciutto was having none of that s*** on his network, and shut Duffy down, and fast. Only a few weeks after that in December of 2016, Duffy was being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, when
he claimed that the city of Madison, Wisconsin, one of the few liberal bastions in the state what with the University of Wisconsin there, was “communist”.
After he was widely criticized for this stupid, stupid remark, Duffy played the victim by getting on Twitter to post:
Ah yes. The sensible political strategy of embracing your inner ***hole. It’s no wonder Rep. Duffy was on the Trump transition team (no word on if they trusted him to talk to Russians, yet. YET.) But the real shock from Sean Duffy came in February of 2017, when
he began arguing that the media was deliberately not reporting Islamic terror attacks (ones that they actually HAD reported on),
Duffy started trying to claim that white terrorism didn’t exist, and even if it does, it wasn’t the same thing as Islamic terrorism because it has a “bright side”. He did this while arguing in defense of Donald Trump’s attempted Muslim ban in a CNN interview with Alisyn Camerota:
We can’t even begin with how ignorant that whole conversation is regarding the differences between White Nationalist terrorism and Muslim terrorism, but we’ll add that the man who shot Gabby Giffords was also not a Marxist. But hey, Duffy is an idiot, so what do facts matter?