Dem
47
GOP
53
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is certainly the biggest mouth-breather among the current members of the Senate. Indeed, there's a good chance that he's the dumbest U.S. Senator of all time, which is really saying something for a body that has included among its members William L. Scott (R-VA), Dan Quayle (R-IN) and Robert R. Reynolds (D-NC).
Meanwhile, in a development that is very much related to his stupidity, and is not at all surprising, Tuberville is also a huge bigot. Sure, he's indulged in a few dog whistles before, but now he's not even bothering with that pretense. Appearing on one of the many Fox channels, Tuberville got himself worked up into a lather when the subject of Zohran Mamdani was raised by Fox entertainer Larry Kudlow. And so, the Senator uncorked this assessment of the would-be mayor:
I think we oughta pack him up and send him home. My God, we do not need that anywhere in this country, especially New York. You know, it's—what a great city that was. But he's gonna manage to bring it all the way down. Right now, it's headed that direction with, you know, no law enforcement and all those crazy things that the Democrats are coming up with.
But, you know, we've got a huge problem in this country, Larry, with Sharia law and the Muslims trying to take over all the areas in our country. And so, I hope we wake up and smell the roses.
Uhhhh... all right, then.
To start with, we absolutely refuse to believe there has ever been a time in Tuberville's life that he looked at New York and said "What a great city!" Undoubtedly, he's been carping about crime, or brown people, or Black people, or some other issue there since he was a wee bigot. Meanwhile, note that he is openly declaring that a legal U.S. citizen should be deported because that citizen is Muslim and has presumed to run for political office. Tuberville also indulges in the stereotype that anyone who is Muslim has it, as their goal, to impose Sharia law on their city/state/nation. Is that claim meaningfully different than asserting that, say, the only thing Black men want is to have sex with all the white women? Or decreeing that the only thing the Jews want is to control the banks? Or the only thing Mexicans want is to collect welfare checks so they don't have to work? They are all vile generalizations with no basis in reality.
We're not sure exactly why Tuberville has gotten so much more comfortable letting his chauvinistic flag fly these days. Is it because he's running for governor of Alabama, and no longer has to be concerned, even a little, about Republican voters elsewhere? Is it because he has stopped giving a damn? Is it because he's further and further removed from his coaching days, and so further removed from daily reminders that people not like him are still people too?
Now, we probably wouldn't normally write this story up because everyone already knows what kind of man Tuberville is. However, you pair this with the story above, and the Young Republican text messages from last week, and it really makes clear that the GOP (at least, the MAGA division of the GOP) has been transported back to the 1950s when it comes to limits (or lack thereof) on expressing these kinds of ideas. Donald Trump has said that was the decade he had in mind, the decade that America was last "great." And so, at least in this one way, he has indeed made America "great" again. (Z)