Apr.12

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This Week in Schadenfreude: Dumb and Dumber

Today in this space, we have a round-up of stupid behavior by Republicans. None of these stories was quite enough to carry the feature by themselves, but as a group they work. So:

• Pay Up: There are many political dirty tricksters out there. But there may be no political dirty tricksters who are as moronic as Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman. There's no question they are True Believers in MAGA and they're willing to do anything to help the cause. But their schemes are so transparent and so easily foiled that they really ought to appear as the villains-of-the-week on an episode of Scooby-Doo. For example, they set up an operation that made robocalls to Black voters in New York City pushing a bunch of false information meant to keep those voters from casting ballots. Among other things, the calls claimed that anyone who votes via mail gets put into a database of people who must receive mandatory vaccines.
  
  Because Wohl and Burkman are dopes, they apparently don't realize that targeting Black voters is extra problematic from a legal standpoint. They also are not tech savvy enough to know that their role in the scheme would be easily uncovered. So, AG Letitia James brought charges, and this week the two men were hit with a fine of as much as $1.25 million. Since they don't actually have that kind of money, James has offered a payment plan that would allow them to discharge the debt by making about half a million dollars in payments over the next 5 years. Either way, it's gonna hurt.
  
  
• Out of Africa: Newsmax host Rob Finnerty was conducting an interview yesterday with Rep. James Comer (R-KY). And the host was searching for examples of how Joe Biden is stupid and mentally infirm. One of the examples he came up with? According to the Hur Report, Biden doesn't even know Africa is a country.
  
  We must concede, this is true. Biden does not know Africa is a country. Neither do we, for that matter. And note that the only time "Africa" appears in the report, it's in reference to Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina. So not only was Finnerty's remark dumb, it was also a baldfaced lie.
  
  
• There Is More than One Rosenberg in New York? Really?: In preparation for next week's hush-money trial, Donald Trump's lawyers want some documents from Jeremy Rosenberg, who was a supervising investigator in the Manhattan district attorney's office. So, they looked up Jeremy Rosenberg's name in the city directory, and sent him a subpoena. It apparently did not occur to them that, in New York, there might just be more than one Jeremy Rosenberg. And not only did the wrong Jeremy Rosenberg not have the documents, he says he's not giving back the $15 that was included for postage and copying costs.
  
  
• Unite the White... Er, Right: Enid, OK, City Council Commissioner Judd Blevins has a habit of saying racist things online (under an easily deciphered pseudonym). He also attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, back in 2017. Oh, and he was also a recruiter for the white supremacist group Evropa. Blevins insists that his words and actions have nothing to do with racism, and that he's not a racist. He also says he has a First Amendment right to say and do such things, if indeed he just so happened to be a racist. That may be true, but he does not have a First Amendment right to keep his job if he is recalled by the voters of Enid. Which he was this week.

Note that, realizing that our sights are set entirely on Republicans here, we wondered if we might have overlooked some really stupid behavior by Democrats. All we could find was a story from Fox about Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), who was speaking to schoolkids on the day of the eclipse, and who garbled her astronomical knowledge, claiming that the moon is a planet and that it's made of gas. Neither is true, of course.

However, this underscores the fundamental problem in making this feature less skewed. We are happy to be equal-opportunity critics, but for schadenfreude to be called for, there has to be an underlying element of bad behavior. Wohl and Burkman did harm to innocent people, Finnerty lied, Trump's lawyers are working for a sleazy client and Blevins is clearly a bigot. What Lee said was embarrassing, but it didn't come from a bad place. She was just trying to engage some schoolkids. Democrats often do stupid or embarrassing things, but those things rarely (these days) have an undercurrent of venality. And we can only squeeze so many schadenfreudes out of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). (Z)